I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were: - Working on something I care about - Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations: - Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
I’m nowhere close to $5m, and I’m hoping to leave Meta in the next few months. But I’d love to be able to “retire” and work exclusively for companies that match my morals.
I figured the amount I’m donating doesn’t make a huge difference to my FIRE date
What were you hoping to achieve with this comment other than making a person who is being vulnerable to anonymous internet denizens feel worse?
Hope for your sake that it doesn’t happen. In the meantime, I’ll keep supporting Ukrainians.
I don’t consider it harmful.
He dedicated his life to the defence of his home, then to Britain and then spent 37 years in the coal-mines powering the country. All the while being a refugee.
I totally understand your worry about globalism, and to be clear: very human feelings about demographic shifts and change are being stoked by both sides of an ever polarising political spectrum.
But, I think it's important to remember that the reason refugee protections even exist as a concept is because there are real people who suffer, and we offer protection to those who need it not because we think ourselves superior: but because we hope that if the day were ever to come for us: that other nations would help us live our life so we could return home.
Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, even though he settled in the UK; he would have returned, but his part of Poland had become part of Ukraine, and Ukraine was the Soviet Union: the entity he went to war against.
They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after they’ve done their part. They do the necessary work to keep the system in motion, without caring too deeply about what happens next. They worry about their locus of understanding and control and don’t mind much what happens after. That was my impression.
Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?
On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?
(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)
If there was no reason for it to exist, it wouldn't. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's a question of accepting the construct of existence as what is not what I hope it could be under different circumstances.
There's probably an evolutionary reason why we need people who don't get paralyzed by second and third order effects.
I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.
1) Work with top minds in ML 2) Money
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
Besides, if the company only seeks spineless lackeys would you want to work there anyway?
You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.
And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.
But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.
Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.
(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)
So i doubt you are really "working with" top minds at ml meta.
If you are not in the Bay Area, the absolute numbers might seem unbelievable but here you go - I have seen mid-senior engineers (4-5 years exp) get Meta offers with 700k yearly TC.
You can stay at the company and get stock appreciation up to that but you’re not getting a new hire offer at $700k below staff level. (Even for staff, it’s high)
For future reference, here’s all that’s needed to exhaust a 700k TC without liquidating much in assets: Bay Area mortgage, private school for a kid or two, 3-4 family vacations.
Now I guess all that is gone though so you are only left with the $?
It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.
Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.
However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.
Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".