What makes you still work for Meta, when it's clear how toxic the company is? | Hacker News Reader

What makes you still work for Meta, when it's clear how toxic the company is?

85 pointscamillomiller70 comments

The more I read about Zuckerberg's thoughts on the future of AI, and the more it's unveiled about the shady practices the company has been engaging in for more than a decade, the more I can't find an answer to a simple question: how can so many brilliant, probably ethically sound people, still work for such a company?

I'm focusing on Meta, but the same goes for Palantir and such ilk of companies whose clear and only output is a net negative for society.

Is it really just money? Or do you actually believe these companies are not the societal wrecking balls they are? Would you argue that their toxicity itself is not as evident as I claim? You just don't give a damn?

I understand this is a provocative question, but bear with me and possibly change my mind. I'm genuinely curious.

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I know someone (not an engineer) who was applying to jobs for a long time and got a 100% pay increase from moving to Meta, about $60k -> $120k. In such circumstances, it is difficult to turn down such a job. You are only one small part of the machine and it is such a quality of life increase (in USA), I cannot imagine many people saying no.

Some other common reasons that I disagree with, but are quite defensible:

"Well-targeted advertising is a net positive, or at least not hugely negative, for the world. Better targeting has helped many small businesses succeed where they would otherwise not been able to get customers"

"I am working on account security/React/ML/etc which is a good thing. I don't endorse all the bad things"

"It is more complicated than it seems, and most people at Meta try to do the right thing"

"I might as well work at the company and try to make it better from the inside" (while making lots of money)

I think people know they are making the world a worse place. But the salaries are insanely high. It wont change until society frowns upon the job. Also it makes the world worse through second order effects so its easy to not think about it.

At this point meta’s reputation is bad enough that, just by supply and demand, they must be paying a premium for worse performers

What makes you buy conventional dairy farmed products? It's clear how harmful it's for a well being of cows/calves.

What makes you buy chocolate from giant corps that have slave/child labour in their supply chain?

Everything anyone does is harmful for someone else. No matter of you eat meat or be a vegan.

But there are different kinds of harm.

> Everything anyone does is harmful for someone else.

That's wildly false.

Prove me wrong.

Reductive, equivocation that can rationalize any travesty because other people are doing it too. That's the shittiest take possible.

You have read my last sentence?

Yeah, have noticed the commenters on Hackernews lately have really been reactive and to be honest, they're not really thinking. It's like if they see anything at all that could be offensive, they strike. And, this may sound harsh, but it reminds me of the tactics of the far right, over focusing on details, taking things out of context, or just being closed minded. People of Hackernews, you used to be better than this!

When or who tells the end of it? To what extent. Don't sanitize just where you live. You will need to keep the entire world clean. It's not fair when it is ok just for you.

Read Croes entire comment. He said, "But there are different kinds of harm."

Interesting topics for another thread.

Fallacies : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

I appreciate you linking the fallacies, but I don't think they're relevant here because answer to both questions (mine's and author's) is the same and I don't try to discredit the author, just offering to examine their own experience to better relate to people earning $500k/y at facebook.

You’re bringing up the topic of spending money mindfully while the question is about earning it.

You do save (= earn) when buying cheaper products without asking questions why it's so cheap.

It's still called whataboutism.

Funnily enough, I’m vegan and I avoid Nestlé products at all costs.

They get this thing called money which allows them to acquire the goods and services needed to remain alive. In the US, they also get the health insurance needed for the decent medical care to remain. Throw in supporting one or dependents needing those things as well, and it’s pretty easy to see why any one individual would remain employed there.

I’ll relay what i’ve been told years ago when moving similar arguments myself:

“If I don’t take that job (and that fat paycheque) then someone else will. Whatever Meta is set to accomplish, irrespective of whether it’s actually evil or not, will most likely be achieved. So might as well take the job and the money. As a bonus, you get to work on interesting stuff rather than the usual CRUD webapp.”

And the sad truth is, they were right.

Not only that, marketing yourself as an ex-FAANG afterwards (whether the faang is meta or whatever) will likely yield better positions or salary anyway. And the experience you get working on larger scale systems (along with much higher quality standards) improves you a lot as an engineer.

So long story short, it’s mostly upsides.

There are many places at Meta that seem to be quite interesting for researchers. You get to play with a lot of hardware, with other talented people, and you can open-source some of your work.

It's all a slippery slope anyway. If you were to work for yourself and publish your research, people might do bad things with it anyway. Consider YOLO [1] as an example of where things might have gone wrong. Another fine example is Fritz Haber [2], who intended some of his inventions for good, some for bad, but eventually society found a way to reverse his intentions.

Given that most computer scientists are pretty good at putting things in perspective, they might come to the conclusion that working for Meta isn't so bad in the grander scheme of things. Slaving away in academia and having your work ignored isn't a very tempting alternative.

Instead of considering how we can make smart people stop working for idiots, it might be more fruitful to spread the idea that we should stop worshipping idiots altogether. If there is one thing I miss from the days when religion was still a thing, it is this suggestion [3].

[1] https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/code-no-evil/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

[3] Exodus 20:3-5

It seems like the argument is that doing science/tech-development for an organization which both has and adheres to benevolent intents and goals, or even just going on your own is the same as working for a company that is intending from the onset to use the work malevolently. Because, all tech gets abused eventually.

This is a terrible argument and is defeatist in the same was as 'what does anything matter at all if the sun is going to explode'.

If you choose to do work for bad leaders, you are going bad in the same way that 'just following orders' for bad things is also bad. You are responsible for the outcomes in those cases. If you are ok with the resulting bad outcomes because the science was interesting and the pay is good, that's your decision. But there is no absolution just because you can suppose that someone else would have done it so it might as well have been you.

> what does anything matter at all if the sun is going to explode

It would not surprise me if this is the exact reasoning that underpins decisions made by leaders of these big companies.

It's terribly hard to convince some people that this is not a sound argument.

In fact, I think it's mostly an evolutionary trait that most of us have, but looking at other species, I don't think it's universal to help others.

> If you were to work for yourself and publish your research, people might do bad things with it anyway.

There's a whole world of difference between someone using your work in a way that you find objectionable and volunteering to accept a paycheck doing work for a company that you know will be using the work they're paying for in a way that you find objectionable.

This is why I have to assume that anybody working for a company is fine with what that company does.

"Playing" misses the forest for the trees when the result is dystopian drain on society at best to enabling genocides in Myanmar at worst. Choices have consequences and culpability.

Those who worked for IBM voluntarily and serviced the Third Reich if they suspected what was happening and did nothing were collaborators in mass murder. Engineering and all professional disciplines must be restrained by honesty and ethics.

One of their recruiters, a fellow named Josh, hounded me for months to join Meta, and we went back and forth about the merits, the chance to work on something huge, but when he boiled all down.. it was the money. Meta pays a lot for the people they want, and that just wasn't enough for me.

It's wonderful to imagine all the world's employers embodying "Don't Be Evil". And any exceptions being driven out of business by their employees quitting.

At times and in places, many of the young and optimistic have been able to believe that. Or at least to proclaim such beliefs - without immediately being called on it.

But similar to "Santa Clause won't bring presents to naughty boys and girls" - that ain't how the real world actually works. And the usual social convention for those "in the know" to allow young optimists to figure things out for themselves. "Don't spoil their youthful joy, the world is shitty enough as it is." );

They’re $connecting $the $world and $making $it a $better $place!

Curious, is there a minimum salary for migrant workers in the US? Here in Shanghai if you are a foreigner you can only get a 1 year work-residence permit unless you make x times amount the local minimum wage. Then there are also categories, for A tier talent the minimum is now 800.000 RMB per year iirc (recently adjusted from 880.000, which does not add up, because I got a A tier permit with 650.000 a year two years ago..)

Not working for any of them but given everything else equal, I'd pick Meta over Palantir under any circumstance, if I were to work for one of them.

That's the most American comment. Inventing a 2 party idea when there is none and justify their positions based on that.

False binary choice in one sense, but also living America invariably becomes a Hobson's choice or a Catch-22 between survival and morality. Where I grew up in the SF Bay Area, the income required is $390k/yr to afford a home mortgage.. and there are very few ethical and legal / productive ways to make that much money working as an employee. It's basically not possible without starting a business, becoming a criminal, and/or serving immoral businesses in war, financial trickery, or megacorps.

I'm not American but... That's why I explicitly stated if I were to work for one of them.

As in a hypothetical scenario where someone pointed a gun at me and told me to pick one of them to work for.

Otherwise there many better and worse options.

I take it your answer then is, "There are worse places you could be working."

Sure there are worse and there are better options than both.

I just relatively compared the two companies in context in my opinion.

I'm curious, why Palantir as worse? As I understand it they are basically well very built data pipelines + dashboards + marketing. See here for example: https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/

Not try to defending them, but I do believe Meta is doing much more harm, purely based on Instagram for children.

Palantir's entire purpose for existence is to implement the Total Information Awareness program that US citizens rejected. They're domestic spies.

Are they worse than Meta? I don't know, a strong argument can be made that both organizations are very harmful and there's no point in trying to rank which is worse.

Not much worse. I would wager that governments around the world buy data from data brokers and from Meta to be processed with Palantir to target journalists, protesters, political opponents, and random innocent people inadvertently between deliberate intention and sketchy AI correlation without real evidence.

why are people down voting this? this person is asking a question. Man, hackernews is become so judgemental lately.

Sure. Between Meta and DOGE or the ICE, Meta seems the lesser evil. OTOH, why work for someone evil at all? Aren’t enough jobs out there with ethical organisations that prioritise, or otherwise favour, common good?

It's a false and unnecessary choice. Work somewhere else. There are always options.

That’s true. I’m facing exactly this issue - I have some less than nice orgs trying to hire me, but I politely turn down the recruiters without disclosing my reasons. They are just doing their jobs as best as they can and I won’t judge them for that.

I can say, however, that’s not the best decision from a financial standpoint, but what is the value of morality if you are not willing to sacrifice something for it?

That was just a thought experiment for comparison.

Of course there are much more ethical places to work at.

"... how can so many brilliant, probably ethically sound people..."

Check your assumptions

(NB. There are two assumptions about Meta employees in the quoted excerpt, not one)

There are thousands of Meta employees on HN and none answered this post.

Why not? Look at the kinds of discussion that happened in their absence.

I worked at Meta for a few years. Facsimiles aside, it's no different than any other corporate machine.

If you are truly genuinely curious about your question then you apparently neither realize nor accept the amount of justification the average person will give for money or other personal benefit.

quotation from Bertolt Brecht: "Food comes first, then ethics.“

Dump truck loads of cash?

You must be incredibly naive or idealistic, or possibly both.

I feel two quotes from the notebook are particularly relevant:

“…it’s not about following your heart. It’s about security” - Noah, the notebook

“Money! He’s got a lot of money” - Noah, the notebook

Back when Meta was still called Facebook, I was in a spot where I had a few offers (including Meta) and the reason why I picked it was the following:

- cool project that is somewhat not related to shady stuff (Oculus)

- cool people I knew there

- I got down-leveled, so money was just a small % bump to my previous salary

I ended up quitting after less than a year due to said toxic culture and a bunch of other reasons.

Meta employees had (has?) this little stat on your profile page that gives you a title based on how long you were there. Staying 4 years gave you the title of "Mercenary". I think it speaks by itself :-)

Honestly speaking, some people actually thrive in the Meta culture and end up making bank with repeated promotions, but they are also clearly able to abstract the ethical side of things to focus on maximizing impact at all cost.

People still work at facebook? Figured they had fired all the humans and zuck just screams into an AI echo chamber.

Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Btw, have to say, didn't think Meta would be so singled out for being toxic. To me at least, compared to some of the other tech companies, it doesn't seem that much worse. For instance, Microsoft. The culture there is in many ways stems from Bill Gates' personality of bluntness, aggressiveness, and competitiveness. Especially in the past, he was king of crushing his competitors. Amazon, which often places less of a focus on the quality of its engineers and often where you feel more of a cog in a machine, where growth and expansion into as many industries as possible paramount...

Yes, Zuckerberg is known for being competitive and facebook gets a lot of flak for creating addictive tech products (and yes, I agree, it's excessively addictive), but to me at least, it's not that much worse than MS, which is more of this business machine whose goal is often just to win.

Yeah, to be honest, your question kind of took me a bit by surprise. But maybe there is something I'm not seeing? Thanks!

It's the money.

I don't but I would if they had remote anymore.

I am unwilling to bear the burdens of fixing a society that doesn't give a shit and asks me to pay the price while they continue not to care.

Meta doesn't do remote?

Quite a good pay, maybe an environment individuals like and "I am not working on the bad stuff!"

money. money will make almost anyone blind to what they're doing.

Cognitive dissonance.

If we're still at Facebook before this you've been brainwashed into so many other bullshit ideas that this AI thing doesn't seem as out of the place.

Their whole idea of the metaverse was purely toxic, so is their idea about social media.

I've worked at Meta for over 5 years now. Pardon me with the burner account, I realize there is a lot of hate for Meta (and before that for Microsoft when I worked there) and I don't need the grief that comes with personal attacks.

When I was given an offer to join Meta, I was very much conflicted. This was not long after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I worried about what type of company I was joining. After going through a string of startups that ran out of runway, I needed something more stable for my family. I had interviewed at Amazon and would have been happy to go back to Microsoft - but Meta made me an offer and I decided to try it.

I worked in a product team and in part dealt with ensuring we wouldn't have issues like with CA again. Later I dealt with ensuring we complied with the FTC order.

I've worked with multiple VPs, numerous directors and managers across the company. My particular role literally had me working across the company.

Despite my initial fears, I never saw anyone do anything but take seriously protecting user data and complying with all the policy, laws and regulations that were required. We often went above and beyond.

I honestly have a hard time understanding this compared to some of the stories I read in the press. Can I say for sure Meta never did anything that was described? No I can't. Every company has great, good, ok and bad people. But from all the leaders I worked with I never saw anything but people being moral and respecting privacy. I'm sure I'll be flamed for this, but it's what I saw and I believe.

One example is - when I joined Meta I received a work phone and they paid for my mobile service. Initially I carried two phones, a work and personal phone out of paranoia that Meta might be snooping on my work phone. Shortly after I started and saw things first hand -- I gave up my personal phone. I trusted my employer would act responsibly. But I've seen many meta employees choose to carry two phones, some for control, some to manage work/life balance... I don't understand it but everyone makes up their own mind.

I was at Microsoft and in Windows in the old days when everyone in the industry was afraid of Microsoft. This was before chrome and the early days of the internet. We'd read press stories about how Microsoft had this grand strategy that was evident in how multiple products were strategizing towards an outcome. We joked amonst the employees we WISH we were that organized. If we were the borg, it was pure chaos.

If you've worked at a large tech company, I expect you can understand that even if there was an evil leader (and I don't believe Zuck is at all evil) he still couldn't make the entire company act in the way they do. Meta's culture is absolutely about moving fast, building compelling features and connecting the world. I honestly believe Zuck cares about what he says.

I've seen Zuck at company Q&As stand up and take on the hardest questions -- employees standing up and vigorously arguing against certain people having their accounts not banned or reinstated. And Zuck doesn't dodge. He speaks from his values and perspective. I may not always agree with him but I respect his position and that he's willing to be so transparent.

Sorry if I don't respond to follow ups, I'm on a cellular tethered connection and my password manager failed to save the password on this account so once this incognito browser is closed I'll lose access to this account.

Anyway flame away. I'm not a shill, I'm just yet another tech worker and I do have morals and I see a different version of the stories that you see.

One last thing. While I have tremendous respect for the press and I worry about this moment in history where the fourth estate is under attack... I've also seen plenty of press stories about things at Microsoft and Meta which I've known the true story inside. I'd never talk to the press, but I've seen them get it very wrong or attribute motives to the company which we absolutely don't have. Most of the time we just fucked up, not intentionally but someone didn't catch something. I actually believe more things in the world can be explained not to necessarily incompetence but the challenges of large companies... And I understand the media is motivated to write stories that people will be outraged at and read. But I'll give them a pass because just like my time at Meta and Microsoft, I think they are just doing their best with what they can do...

1. Money 2. Most people couldn’t care less

There's money elsewhere. The presumption is that "you" are a talented engineer and employable at any number of FAANG companies (or whatever the anagram is these days).

Aaaand despite the replies and support, the post was flagged. Dang, could you explain?

You may have better luck emailing hn@ycombinator.com to ask. But in general, articles are flagged by users and not moderators, and they tend to trust those user flags.

The obvious followup question is why the users that flagged this did so. If any of you flagged this, it would be interesting to hear your reasons.

I mean, people in this thread said they flagged it because it is "Virtue Signaling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912879

Perhaps this will give you some perspective, perhaps not, decide for yourself :)

Most comments I’ve read seem to come from folks who are NOT working for Meta. Guess it makes sense, few people are. It’s much easier to answer and judge from that position. While these comments are interesting reads, not sure if they are adding the insights the question wants.

While I am not with Meta, I do work for an HFT, which arguably have even worse reputation than Meta. FYI - I’m in tech and make $1-2mm, depending on the year. Some random observations from past years:

- you can rationalize pretty much anything. I do think that vast majority of the people in the firm think of themselves as good people. I like to think that this holds true even for the absolutely most abysmal pages of human history. E.g. I find it hard to believe that the average Nazi thought of themselves as bad.

- your co-workers are really smart and friendly. We encourage collaboration and some work-life balance, so that people rarely burn out. People are super dedicated and in general love coming to work. I know tens of really high net worth individuals who keep coming each day and staying voluntarily long hours since they just enjoy what they are doing.

- the firm does a lot of charity work, tens of millions each year. People are incentivized to give back, via various matching programs and volunteer opportunities. E.g. Some go for weeks just to do volunteering and it’s partially offset in your PTO. Some spend six figures+ on their favorite charities. Whether it makes them a better or worse person than you dear reader, it is not for me so say. I personally do less of this, but still try to chime in a couple $k / help a few times in a year. Regardless of what you do, you could try it, it tends to make you feel better.

- I am yet to meet an asshole who lasted more than 1-2 years. The firm eradicates this kind of behavior religiously.

- there is a strong belief among the workers that there is value in what we do and that we are one of the ‘good’ HFTs. I did not think that when I joined, but now I do. Again, you can rationalize a lot and the firm has subtle messaging to shape people with time.

- I guess it goes without saying, but the pay package allows you to lead a very different kind of life.

- I have been hiring the absolutely top of the class of top of the universities for a while now (HFTs get the absolutely first pick, way ahead of the big tech). None of the students seemed to have any problem with the firms mission, or lack of thereof. All of them dreamed of landing the gig. I’ve rejected really smart people who failed the behavioral (I.e assholes) regularly.

- finally, I’ve rejected offers of $3mm+ from firms I believe to be evil (you are virtually bombarded with offers each week if you make in the HFT world. Think of the AI hype, just 24/7 and since 2000s :) ). But I can easily imagine taking these from places which I consider only slightly more evil.

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