Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

I work at Meta.

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.

View on HN

Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?

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.

I mean, from the post it sounds like they already have a bank account large enough to say what they want without any repercussions having any side effects, such as unemployment.

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.

> 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?

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.

Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.

Good (or at least smart) employers pay quite a lot of money on quarterly anonymised surveys precisely to hear what their employees truly think about the company. I think some shareholders care about those numbers as well enough to want to see them. Of course there is a difference between saying what is obvious to anyone interested anyway (like above) and crying publicly over some petty grievance.

Besides, if the company only seeks spineless lackeys would you want to work there anyway?

I don't understand the mindset of being surprised that people are honest about their own opinions about their work. I don't have any uniquely bad concerns about my employer so I don't think I've ever written anything like the GP, but I have spoken honestly about my past experiences. If we can't be honest about how we think and feel about something we spend the majority of our time and energy doing, aren't we just being oppressed?

Saying "fuck you" after having fuck you money is just fun. I don't see any bravery to it.

BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure...

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.)

Do you think both are worth the harms your company is causing to the rest of the world?

Actions speak. Of course they do.

I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.

Cool. Maybe you can tell me why when I reported a private message that was like "Looking for a super easy part-time job? Earn $100-$10000 per day working from anywhere! [...]" as spam, I got a response that the message didn't go against community standards and no action was being taken.

If you are working with top minds in ML then you must be a top mind yourself that can get equal or more money at any of the ai labs.

So i doubt you are really "working with" top minds at ml meta.

Why do you stay?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com