Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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Remember that Meta owns their own data centers. I have found jobs for Meta on their careers page in places like Ohio, Alabama, and South Carolina, and Illinois outside Chicagoland that pay under $100k or just barely above it.

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.

You’re free to work for Meta and you’re free to make as much money as you want. You’re also free to tell yourself whatever story you’d like to make yourself sleep at night.

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 am free to call you ignorant for not agreeing with my world view, actually. I’m not sure why you’d claim I can’t do that, the statement is factually false.

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.

I love comments like this here. Just trolling for the sake of trolling, paragraph after paragraph. The fact that _some_ Meta employees earn less than $100,000 a year is completely irrelevant to this whole discussion.

It’s literally paramount to this discussion.

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.

Okay buddy, you’re not making very compelling arguments here. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. People will and should hate the players because they’re participating in a dirty game and benefiting from it. You’re free to continue doing it, but don’t expect others to respect it.

"okay buddy you're not making very compelling arguments here" isn't even a basic contribution to the discussion.

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.

> all doctors in America

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.

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