jazzpush2

> The Meta employee does as they are told.

Your argument erases the employee's biggest moral choice: did the Meta employee just spawn a Meta employee? No, they chose to work there. You assign maximal agency to someone buying an index fund and minimal agency to someone who voluntarily spends 40 hours a week advancing Meta's objectives. That's backwards. (Or, more likely, a purposeful troll comment).

what a mindset.

I'll make sure to shame my Illumina scientist neighbor for working on tech that deliberately targets underage children (purposely violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.). After all, he owns the world's most popular index fund, which includes Meta. He certainly should feel just as culpable as the Meta employees!

I don't care to dive into imaginary philosophical debates. I'm responding to the person in this thread saying, "I'm stuck" while clearly being financially well-off.

I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.

In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.

We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.

They author thousands of open-source. Nobody would consider those 'products' (though feel free to play pedantic). And many would argue React did far more harm than good.

I'm not sure if you meant to respond to me, but nothing you've said has addressed what I asked, which was very direct.

It's actually incredible that you can share that bottom paragraph with a straight face after we just went to war with Iran.

Let's discuss it openly, as you prime: how do you contrast what you just shared with the war, and Israel's actions after the agreed to ceasefire and declaration of war's end?

You think Meta employees are only expected to work 8 hours a day?

Also, this isn't about tracking social media usage, it's about collecting employee keys/actions.

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.

I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).

Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.

You would think the devrel would be more familiar with OSS policies than anyone else.

Something about their LinkedIn job title at Google ("Developer Relations (Mostly SWE)" also reads odd.

Many dataviz people are like this, and it comes off odd. Awhile back, there was an entire 'Bar Barplots' movement, with exactly the same argument. Same for Pie Charts vs Donut charts ('angle shouldn't encode magnitude!').

The marriage of stats and design can bring the worst from both.

(And even if you find that plot X is bad, that doesn't mean you need to treat it as a personality trait.)

No - not everyone has a moral number, believe it or not. And no, most people don't give a shit about the car you drive, or want to friend you for it. Maybe in your social circles, but as someone in circles of both non-tech people and (literally) the richest bunch in tech - I promise, they don't.

What a truly sad mindset/worldview that you believe that to be true.

I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years.

And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.

I work for a frontier lab, lol.

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.

You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.

You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.

I can't stand Cursor. Every time I open it up I have 3 popups I don't use, that I then need to figure out how to close. Using it for notes is impossible, since the autocomplete just tries to fill in bullshit.

Awful what VC money did to it. Hope to never use it again, now that work stopped mandating it.

Ah, you're right. A broad, contrarian dismissal is exactly the way you should respond in any conversation related to CPI/inflation.

By the way, that coffee is $9. Sorry, Brazil tariffs and everything else - you understand.

You completely ignored every question related to costs/privacy.

Do you feel that way about all forms of entertainment? You also are not, "playing, exercising, practicing, getting injured, losing, or winning, nor are you getting paid" nor doing comedy when you watch Joe Rogan standup, so who cares?

You don't think the last sentence, if proven to be true, is fraud? Or, at the minimum, an example of scam behavior?

Of course teaching pre/post-COVID is very different. Studies abound reveal this, as do plentiful anecdotes from both teachers and staff.

> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.

Which distinction can't be made?

> It's exactly because of the politics...

Which politics, concretely?

I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.

Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?

I think there's a word for this in the dictionary: 'nuance'

I had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system. The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.

Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.

And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.

I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.

0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...

Exactly the type of post you want from someone working on a mental health app...

Not sure why you're being downvoted - I had a blast until the inevitable edgelords spamming the N word. Maybe worth someone adding a PR to filter out such words.

This is what "Building for the future" looks like post-layoffs, huh?

Can't even ship with app-scoped tokens...

See also his new book versus his old. His new book is nothing but name-dropping.

Vibe-coded chemistry is absolute garbage right now. The former would do magnitudes better.

This is what they get for laying off their video teams.

Quick, someone bury the "Do Palantir workers think they're the bad guys?" thread!