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Comment by michelb | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.

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I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here...

I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.

Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.

Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?

It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.

Generally it is a bad idea to punnish defectors.

What's the end goal of that? Do you think Meta will run out of good engineers to hire ?

With that attitude, how long does it take to justify going after the next Meta?

Don't threaten me with a good time

My litmus test is, do you think that the person managing Meta’s coffee supply is ethically questionable? If you met them, would you tell them that they need to quit, and would you consider them a bad person if they don’t? There are organizations that meet that bar, but I really don’t think Meta is one of them.

Surely there are employees at Meta who are not making the world a worse place. There may even be people in technical roles who are not. I can imagine Meta probably has some kind of ethics or privacy department (what a demoralizing place to do that kind of work!) who are even trying against the tide to do good! You can't just use "worked at Meta" as the filter. I'd want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.

>I’d want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.

Now I’m imagining I meet someone who is on the other side of the interview table having these thoughts. Are my capabilities ignored because they are already prejudiced to a decision I made years prior? What if my answer, trying to improve issues from within, is not good enough?

This new world is scary..

I guess this is just a risk that you have to accept when you decide to work somewhere like Meta. I wouldn't accept a job at Philip Morris for the same reason.

Karma will catch up to you

It's a risk you have to accept when you work anywhere, I suppose. There are plenty of people across the industry who will judge you based on stereotypes of where you've worked in the past and what they think that implies about you.

Personally, I think that's a bad hiring practice, deterministically leading to worse employees and a more toxic culture. But I know that people who engage in it generally have some argument for why they can't or shouldn't impartially evaluate every interview.

> What if my answer, trying to improve issues from within, is not good enough?

lol, did you?

What about Meta AI? For reasons I cannot comprehend they have been releasing quality research for free for years like PyTorch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models.

I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.

At FAANG, open source is de rigeur for things you can’t make money off of, either because it’s an ecosystem play or someone asked their boss.

You’d be surprised how little drama there is around this.

I’d note that the department that made open LLMs hasn’t produced any work since they produced a Gemini 2.5 Flash equivalent with much better tool calling, because the God King threw a fit. Without reasoning. And they had a reasoning model on deck that was cancelled too.

i agree, but why limit this to Meta?

add the three-letter agencies, Surveillance firms, Palantir, military industrial complex and many more to the list. blacklisting people who worked for Meta seems so performative...

What about Google? Microsoft?

But hey, at least the money is good..

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