Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
let's be honest
everyone working as a software engineer at facebook is perfectly capable of finding employment elsewhere
working there is a deliberate decision to prioritise comp over the stability of the world
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
Yeah, completely missing the point then.
But anyways, glad you got to optimize tight code, tune for performance and liked the experience. Hope you have a nice day and take care.
Or do you think all analytics are evil? What did you think the platform was actually doing when you decided to join?