Meta employees protest against mouse tracking tech at US offices
reuters.com
reuters.com
The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
This is a political issue. Your rights as a worker only make sense within a countries political apparatus.
The local company union/workers council (Betriebsraat) si also equally toothless and didn't do much at the mass layoffs.
Unions are only as powerful as their impact to the comfort of the citizens and to the votes of the politicians.
Are there mitigation policies in place in your org in case your union decides to take a sabbatical? What would happen if you all called in sick? It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions. Spirit Airlines in the states just shut down, but everyone just yawned, "oh, so sorry too bad". If your employer does have that plan B, then why are you still employed? Won't they want your union to strike and off with your heads?
I never got my head around the unions. They start idealistic but end up as corrupt as the source of their angst as they mature and it's a constant push/pull and the civilians' bank accounts suffer regardless. I am not saying "give in". So, close the borders, physical or digital?
Just musing, apologies for the ramble.
Probably a government lawsuit on the employees to investigate the suspicious mass sick leave, and on the doctors who issues the sick leave notices.
And during discovery they would uncover the written paper trail employees used to organize the mass sick leave and then they'd get sued for sabotage and have to pay damages to the employer.
>It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions
That wouldn't fly over here, since that would be considered intentional sabotage which is not legally allowed by law here, and heavily punished with fines or jail time. The only legal outlet for labor protests is conversations and negotiations through unions, which are toothless and more for show, to give the workers the impression that their opinion matters and they're not under the boot of government and corporations.
Austria isn't as friendly to labor uprising as modern US due to the very strict laws and legal system that restrict what workers are allowed to do against their employers, there's no "jury of your peers" to let you off the hook if you damage your employer's business in protest. Everything is done for "stability" including defanging labor powers.
Unfortunately too many tech workers think they're special little snowflakes and deserve the highest pay possible and think that unions will interfere with that. Because if you aren't getting the highest pay or the highest job title, you just aren't good enough and why should I be associated with those that aren't good enough? You will never get tech workers to come together for the common good. It's always about only what's best for me. The amount of greedy self-centeredness and backstabbing I've seen in this industry across multiple companies is unreal.
And this just keeps happening over and over? Interesting.
There’s a reason they keep us fighting each other over race, culture wars, and other bs, because they know united our country would look so much different and they wouldn’t be able to make as much money
Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
This woukd be like saying the person scanning your ticket at the concert condones Ticketmaster as a monopoly. No, they’re just trying to feed their family.
Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors.
You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster.
"I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about.
I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff.
And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person".
Do you think people in Bowling Green, OH are flooded with employment options? They can just walk down the street to go work at Google or Apple right?
If I’m in Huntsville, Alabama and I’m a mechanic should I turn down this job because Meta isn’t ethical?
https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/194948159589...
And where should I go work instead in Alabama? For the super duper ethical local car dealership?
I would also point out that many of Meta’s departments like hardware engineering have a much smaller US job pool than software engineering. If you’re in the US and your profession is electrical engineering you you can’t just work remote anywhere or find a bank or insurance company in practically any city in the US to get a job with.
A lot of your job prospects as a hardware engineer are also with the military and defense contractors.
Meta is also one of the few companies that has job postings for PhD researcher type folks that only otherwise employable as professors at universities at relatively low salaries. If you’re a scientist in certain fields it’s a similar situation: try to become a professor, work for the government, or find the rare company like Meta that performs cutting edge research.
Working at Facebook means you optimized ruthlessly for $$$$$ only, absolutely nothing else.
Working at Facebook means you are a leetcode monkey and could as well pass other interviews somewhere else and get paid 10% less. But to you, destroying democracy and killing teenager was worth those extra 10%
Working at Facebook means you became a millionaire, even if you joined mid-career a couple years ago because of the stock inflation.
No they are not just trying to feed their family. 99% of them are ruthlessly optimizing to make the most money possible to live in the top 1%, while completely dismissing all the bad Facebook, Meta and Instagram do in the world. No sympathy.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster for minimum wage. At those income levels, who you work for DOES matter.
I found one for a diesel technician in Huntsville, Alabama.
How many options for ethical employment does a diesel technician in Alabama have? Do you think your local franchised truck dealership is more ethical than Meta?
You are very obviously nitpicking the lowest paid employees you could find.
Furthermore the guy scanning the tickets doesn’t work for Ticketmaster, Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta. Big difference.
That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated.
Also, it’s not like you have a wildly great choice of ethical companies to work for as an employee. What percentage of corporations are truly ethical? What companies that compete with Meta are highly ethical? If I quit Meta who am I working for that has no ethical issues?
With very few exceptions, Meta employees are generally making more money within their domain as compared to what they would make working at other companies, which is always an option.
> Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated
It’s a false dichotomy: work for meta or be unemployed. Millions of white collar workers are doing fine not working for Meta.
And questioning if any corporation is free from ethical problems does not absolve you from the responsibility of the outcomes of what you build. Some corporations are objectively worse than others. A corporation building systems to pay gig workers less than the minimum wage is going to be probably worse than a corporation that builds a design collaboration tool when it comes to ethics. You can choose to work for either and be well compensated for your work, but let’s not pretend you’re some poor soul trapped in a job that you can’t escape.
Many of these towns are not near major employment centers.
If I am a diesel technician in Huntsville, Alabama are you saying I should not apply for that job and keep working at the truck dealership? Is a franchised dealership even more of an ethical business than Meta?
It’s very ignorant of us to assume that everyone working for Meta is flooded with options in their life and isn’t feeding a family and supporting people on a basis of needs. Meta employees aren’t just singles in their 20s, they are dads and moms and people supporting their parents and people sending money back home. Being paid higher other options is a very compelling reason to work at a company, and I can understand someone who feels like it’s a lesser evil than being broke.
The software industry is facing some of the worst job market in years.
If you’re like me and consider most corporations to be fundamentally detached from the concepts of morality, as they are a financial and legal structure and not a person, what difference does it make? If I don’t work at Meta I have to work for someone else who operates under the exact same legal framework and essentially plays by the same rules.
What you’re not free to do is to call others ignorant for not agreeing with your world view. Famously, “I was just following the orders” or “I had no other options” is not a great excuse. Own your decisions and take responsibility for your actions.
I wasn’t specifically trying to do that in such a strongly worded way, I’m not saying you should agree with my world view. But I think it’s ignorant to assume that everyone who works at Meta is super privileged and can just get some other job instantly.
Again, I listed off job postings in areas of the country that are not as economically strong as California and NYC. If I can choose between working for the local truck mechanic shop for $60k or work for Meta as a diesel technician for a data center for $120k you gotta ask yourself if my kids getting a college fund or not is worth working for a company I have moral issues about.
Not everyone working at Meta is making SWE money.
I also think the whole concept of “don’t like it? You can just choose somewhere else” is incredibly naive of the current corporate landscape. Corporations have very few checks on their power. I can be a data center technician at Meta and engage in surveillance capitalism or I can be a cashier at Target who is doing surveillance capitalism or I can work for a local mom and pop shop that primarily uses Instagram and TikTok to advertise and is engaging in surveillance capitalism. This idea that I can choose to escape this system is a false choice. The only escape is to work to enact laws that properly regulate these companies to conduct ethical business.
My whole entire point is that we can’t blame individual contributors for working at Meta and we can’t assume that they are upper upper middle class people with tons of other options.
Even for the upper upper middle class software engineers bringing back big paychecks I’m not going to blame them for literally getting years of their life and financial freedom back just because Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole.
Again you are ignoring the very important point to this discussion that other companies aren’t more moral than Meta. Find me a software company to work for that doesn’t collect the kind of user info Meta does. Hell, find me a software company that doesn’t use Meta platforms to advertise and track their users.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game, essentially. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, not a broken “free market” of non-union employees making false choices.
You’ve claimed to empathize with workers, but then you’ve lumped them into the same category as an aggregate, in a company with over 70,000 employees. There’s no company with 70,000 employees where every single employee is highly privileged and working there entirely by choice. It’s just not probabilistically possible to be true.
To you, the developers of a Batman game for VR doing the same societal harm as an engagement psychologist just because they happen to work for the same company.
To you, NFL players are responsible for the negative impacts of their employer (e.g., covering up CTE, sports gambling promotion, etc) despite having extremely short careers, highly restricting work requirements like sudden relocation, and nowhere else to work within the same profession for anywhere near the same salary. “Highly paid compared to the average person” isn’t the whole story; it’s quite obvious why professional sports are unionized. And by your logic, everyone down to the lowliest support staff in the organization is complicit.
Under your logic, all doctors in America should quit their job because they’re participating in a dirty game of overpriced healthcare and benefiting from it. To me, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Not even close. Doctors are doing work that benefits society, despite all the system’s flaws. Meta employees are destroying the world while collecting a paycheck. Don’t pretend you don’t see the difference. Working at Meta in 2026 is the same as working at a sarin gas factory.
Meta's business model is to treat people as a resource to be exploited. It's fundamentally how the business works.
Meta regards its users as cattle, as livestock. It's why Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are "dumb fucks":
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
No sympathies for anyone doing SW engineering or similar. Anyone working there can definitely get a different programming gig. It likely doesn't pay as much but that's how it goes when you sell your soul.
No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.
Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?
I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.
https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/795179610064...
Another Ohio job that pays barely over $100k:
https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/831663409504...
South Carolina job that barely pays over $100k:
https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/606551888496...
Another of the same:
https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/120167957873...
Are we going to blame those people for “enabling the oil industry” as well? Or are we going to accept that they are working a pretty serious high pressure job for top pay to set themselves up financially? It’s not like being an engineer at Meta is easy. I couldn’t even pass the screening interview. They aren’t paying for candidates to drop their morals, they’re paying for top talent.
And I would also ask you, which lower paying companies can I work for if I’m a software or hardware engineer that:
1. Don’t collect user data in similar ways to Meta (no tracking cookies, no use of Meta analytics or advertising platforms, no Google analytics, etc.
2. Voluntarily follow more strict privacy rules than mandated by the United States or CCPA.
3. Have zero employee behavior tracking
4. Don’t use any AI for HR issues like hiring or performance.
5. They also have to have enough headcount to replace all the people who are going to quit working at Meta for moral reasons (e.g., if you tell me that Craigslist is a great place to work that’s cool and all but they have like 50 employees).
This idea that Meta is far more moral than anyone else and I can sacrifice pay to work for a more ethical company is a false choice.
This is an industry with almost no unionization or worker protections. IT workers are specifically exempted from overtime. Yes, it’s high paid, but that is not relevant to the issue of worker power and power distance.
When we get caught up in blaming the upper middle class we are fighting the wrong class war.
Here's a better statement "I'm glad they're seeing the light, even if they had to become victimized themselves to finally care."
If you hire someone you trust them. Otherwise don't.
I fail to see how treating everyone like a miserable inmate at a Siberian gulag is going to help innovation.
I signed the petition.
Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so.
I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal.
Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent.
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In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.
Still another was that I asked blasphemous questions like "will I get to sleep?" and voiced controversial views like "teams focused on quality move faster".
The thing is that you sometimes get quite daft reasons back. One place said "you gave more examples from Pivotal than Shopify". Well yes, I was at Pivotal about thrice as long, that's how time works. I just let it slide.
This sentiment continues endlessly up the chain. Ultimately, deploying endless adtech, surveillance and data scraping techniques puts you only one or two steps away from a Palantir employee.
I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid
After HR pats you on the back and you met with your team and org? Mask off.
"No, we won't build controls that allow us to block [data sharing that is illegal for agencies in state] for those agencies. That's not our concern. Oh, they want training on how to do that data sharing? Sure."
Garrett would talk regularly at all hands about a very Minority Report-esque future that was driven and made possible by Flock, and he was very clear it wasn't exaggerated for example or aspirational but an organizational goal.
Anyone who stayed there more than a few months knows exactly what they're doing.
“The ox does not mind the yoke until it is on his own neck.”
The employees were all fine with tracking the entire globe and surveilling on Meta's family of apps, but when that is used against them by tracking their own mouse movements and their computers, it is now all too much?
Why are you still at Meta then? Clearly Zuckerberg does not care and can easily (and will) lay them off.
Just leave.
Instead of signing petitions to enact change, which obviously won't happen because you're under a dictatorship, erode the company from the inside out.
Your platforms are already enshittified, enshittify your workplace, make a game out of making your workplace America's #1 toxic workspace. Quiet Quit, Gaslight your superiors, have AI write all your code & workplace communications, hit accept on all, while sludging up communications & the codebase. Make everything harder to do work while claiming all the productivity gains.
You'll be doing humanity a service.
sidebar but I've never aspired to work for faang and as the years go on it seems more and more like the right choice. vampire culture.
Seriously. This goes for all kinds of analytics. We've normalized surveillance, and if you dare suggest opt-in analytics rather than forced or opt-out you get hit with "but then we won't get enough data to improve our product." That's your problem. Do a UX study, interview people, make a focused effort to make good software. That's how we got the best interface design of all time. Now we're drowning in data and our software is fucking garbage that constantly frustrates and confuses its users. Clearly the issue is not a lack of usage data. It may even do you some good to fly blind if this is your alternative.
Really you should do the lab, though. Take this field seriously and cut out the live A/B testing.
Anyways, there is a ton of mouse wigglers out there, notably on aliexpress.com, many external and not connected to your workstation.
Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?
If they were serious they would just walk out. They don't like the mouse tracking tech but I'll bet they like that sweet salary and cushy office job. How are the lunch options? I bet they're great. Oh what's that? You work from home? Must be nice.