Hacker News Reader

Comment by 98codes | Hacker News Reader

I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.

It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

View on HN

I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.

Meta's problem isn't that they "maximize shareholder value" it's how they decided to go about doing it.

I would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).

One way to decide is whether the company has a dedicated Wikipedia page with criticism, or, for the next level, a section.

Imagine yourself describing to your relatives how the company has made money and see how embarrassed you feel.

The difficulty isn't in making the moral assessment, it's in searching through tens of thousands of employers and understanding their business models.

How can you take a job without knowing what the company does?

Are we talking about Lumen or something?

You don't need to work tens of thousands of jobs anyways, just 1 (maybe 2 or 3).

Jesus dude, I don’t want to wade through thousands of shitty companies to find the companies worth applying to.

>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

The "amazing" organizations seem amazingly evil.

For example the just mentioned Cursor. Looks amazing and not evil. Couple years there probably would have made unnecessary any other job after that.

You don't become a Big Tech company by being ethical. It's like trying to become a world champion boxer by refusing to punch. Not happening.

The reality is that most of these self described rational and super intelligent devs who see themselves as good people refuse to accept that joining big tech and joining an ethical company are mutually exclusive by definition. Hence all the companies saying "We make the world a better place by doing x". Everyone knows it's not true. But it helps swallow the fantasy and selling your ethics for a big fat pay check every month.

A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.

What groups do you subscribe to? My feed is mostly relatives, friends and their photos. Occasionally there are panels with people I don't subscribe to, which you can press X on and you won't see them again.

I don't subscribe to any groups except maybe a neighborhood association or similar. I was basically inactive on Facebook from 2014 until the last year. I've never been remotely right-wing and while I'm sure I have some old acquaintances who have become MAGA, the overwhelming majority of my Facebook friends are decent people--either normies, moderates, or left of center.

> you can press X on and you won't see them again.

I'm not worried about Facebook showing me propaganda, I'm worried about Facebook aggressively propagandizing society at large.

Man, are people on HN still this unaware of how personalization algorithms work at all?

They don't _have_ to propagandize for one particular pole by default.

Right, in the tech world it’s a continuum between “do no evil (fingers crossed behind back)” and “They trust me. Dumb fucks”

Also notable that they willingly and knowingly allowed FB to be used to facilitate genocide, which makes them culpable in it.

Can you elaborate?

I'm referring to the 2016 genocide in Myanmar:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/amnesty-report-finds-...

https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

In short:

> Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar.

Thank you

> they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda

In my feed, they are aggressively pushing an approximately equal mix of woke propaganda, far-right propaganda, funny memes, and discussions of literature and philosophy. It just depends on what the Meta model decided you and your friends are into.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com