> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" was the top-rated comment in response to the internal announcement, according to a post on Meta's internal workplace communications site seen by Business Insider."
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
"Companies should be able to offer massively addictive and manipulative websites, since their users are free to not look at them" is not compatible with a decent society either.
I agree and consider a lot of regulation to be useful but there are some examples of this where I think we just perpetuate bad companies into existing when they'dgo bankrupt or have to pay wild salaries to compensate being shitty. But it just doesn't seem practical to expect people to stop working for bad companies. In the country I'm from the average salary is super close to the minimum wage with low unemployment so technically employees could change easily and find another job with the same minimum wage and still people stay at bad companies. It'd be the best regulator if people quit, even unions wouldn't need to exist, under this light a union just perpetuates a bad boss, but human nature is not changing so protections are needed.
That's the crux. People aren't asking "Am I earning enough?" but "How can I earn more?", and it all spirals into whatever the current system could be called.
The majority of people working at Meta will never ever again in their lives get a job offer that good. Meta knows this and doesn't care about many of them quitting. They can currently scoop up an endless supply of developers that have memorized every single leetcode hard, system design and """behavioral""" interview question.
> They can currently scoop up an endless supply of developers that have memorized every single leetcode hard, system design and """behavioral""" interview question.
And will those help them get where they think they want to go?
And existing obligations. Most people I know, myself including, stretch our current situation as the paycheque grows.
Some of it is intentional. A lot of it is slow creep (âah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol Iâve always wanted!â). While youâre doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - âoh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..â). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now youâve landed yourself with new loans and obligations (more expensive car = higher maintenance cost, same with house, etc - higher expectation all around, keeping up with Joneses, charity events, âŚ).
Getting out of all that is much more than greed - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family is pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). Some are difficult social obligations - you lose your group if you downgrade (may have to move further away, no more club or association memberships).
The only real remedy is to not let your expenditure go up when you get a raise. But itâs less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc.
> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
While I agree with you, sadly not everyone is in a position to just quit so easily, and even if the majority of the company quits, there are always people who are desperate enough to do the work and not complain.
> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Come on, they may be caring for children, sick relatives, or have a million other reasons to want a stable, well-paying job. There are many well-justified reasons they could have to stay, and yet want to opt-out. "Just quit your job" is extremely out-of-touch.
Claiming that developers and technology workers at Meta are working there because that's the only stable, well-paying job they can find, is extremely out of touch. People forget how comfortable us developers really have it, compared to almost any other field out there.
Yes, but this being Meta who are one of the several poster-children for surveillance capitalism, this comes across as more a face-leopard than a missing spine: https://old.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
> seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Have you seen the job market lately? Not just in the USA, but also in the USA, there's a lot of people holding on to whatever they've got because it's hard to find replacement work.
Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu. "It's a big club and you're not in it."
I guess these individuals think like "if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get caught and exposed to the public. But other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now, and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
I agree. In fact, even ensuring the employee is at the work station moving the mouse and pressing the keys is failing to measure their productive engagement at work. How do you know they are cogitating to the companyâs benefit at all times? Many employees may rationalize time theft as âtaking a second of mental restâ but itâs a breach of their employment contract, and potentially criminal embezzlement, all the same.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to ârest and vestâ at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. I don't work at meta, I work at a large non-tech company.
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Dave working at meta is indeed in part responsible for meta doings. Yes leaving has a cost. Thatâs the whole point. Meta actions also have associated costs, it is just externalized and doesnât impact Dave directly
We should focus on effective means for change. Focusing external influence on low-level individuals with no decision making power might feel good but it has accomplished a sum total of nothing in the past. Why would we think it will make the situation better this time? They swap people in and out of projects all the time and it's really not disruptive at all. The only ways these tech behemoths have made any meaningful positive changes is through sustained governmental pressure either through oversight or regulation.
Techies believed they didn't need unions because their compensation is high, and "meritocracy" yadda yadda. But unions were never just about compensation. Crucially, they also collectively negotiate working conditions.
You quitting your job is not necessarily much of a threat to your employer. But a union going on strike, effectively everyone quitting simlultaneously, is a major threat.
As I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met.
You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.
The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?
This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?
I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
You are confusing pointing out that people are morally responsible for the their actions with suggesting "that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds".
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
Meta hasnât suddenly gone bad in the last 12 months. Anyone who has joined in the last 15 years has done so knowing full well what sort of company it is, and what sort of evil it does.
yes? this isn't a "just following orders isnt a defence" case. Almost everyone at meta did nothing of the sort of bad stuff. There are nearly a hundred thousand people working at meta.
This is a "being a part of an extremely large group of people, some entirely separate members of the group are doing bad stuff"
Are there no groups you are a part of where members have done bad things? are you sure?
Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen? I find that extremely hard to understand. Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
Iâm open to the concept of there being some scale of culpability where the janitors at Meta contracted from some third party company are less culpable than the c suite. But as a software engineer who has chosen to work there, youâre the one building the planet destroying death laser, so not only are you in a very privileged, specialized position, youâre directly contributing to the effects.
my arguments above already respond to the substance of what you have written, you haven't adressed them, merely restated the position I objected to at the start.
I'm no debate lord, merely expressed my dislike of the baying for blood people clearly have here, pointed at everyone seemingly except the actual people responsible
"I chose to work as a developer for this supranational corporation, but nothing bad this corporation does is any reflection on me personally, I only work there, making sure this supranational corporation keeps existing through my work. It's also the same thing as being born in a country."
> Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
When their governments are democratically elected, sometimes, ya. I don't want to give you any spoilers, but there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late.
There are also cultural beefs that have existed for longer than I've been alive that are not even all that rational, but continue to persist. Whole cultures hating each other.
> Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen?
I think someone from Aldereen might have a hard time grabbing a beer with a death star technician. Most people probably understand that blame is not equally shared, but that those technicians were on the wrong side of history. Exceptions might include people forcefully enslaved to work on the death star - and, from a distance, an external observer still would not know the difference at first glance between forceful participation, passive participation, and active participation.
It often takes time/generations to heal from the pain of their parents choices - whether those choices were active or passive. Sins of the father and all that (though I think it's unfair to put parental misdeeds onto their kids, it also historically happens a lot).
> there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late
I understand THAT its happening, but do you think that's right? moral?
would you be happy about it if you were a random american? one who had voted against whatever is happening there? What about one who couldn't vote at all?
Not that I agree with the idea of blaming all Meta employees (e.g. janitors, drivers etc don't deserve the blame), but I do think the ones doing the computer work deserve some blame.
Do all of the hundred thousand meta employees have a say in what happens?
Do they even have as much say as citizens in a democracy?
I can agree that the teams working on the specific features have quite a lot of blame. Those asked to implement immoral ads/algorithm stuff. But how many are those people as a proportion of the entire staff?
im using those as a proxy for the largest employers. If we think the people working in those companies are all bad people, that means most people full stop are bad people.
If people are supposed to stop working at meta if they want to keep being a "good person" then they go work somewhere else.
Can they work at any of the largest employers? can they be sure?
You keep diluting the arguments with sweeping generalizing statements and non-working analogies like "but think of people in other countries". When it's actually pretty easy:
The people worked and kept working at Facebook after these huge and small issues
- after Myanmar genocide
- after paying teenagers to spy on them through VPN
- after falsifying its ad metrics that ended up negatively affecting and outright destroying multiple publishers and creators
- after billions in dollars of fines paid over multiple breaches of user privacy, and misleading users about their privacy
And that's just off the top of my head.
- and (irony is dead) after Facebook unconditionally opted every single user, and their data, and their content on their platform into AI training
So don't give me the righteous indignant spiel about innocent workers who are just doing their jobs and are really really good at heart. Most of them chose to work for Meta despite all these things (and despite significantly more NDA things discussed inside the company that we don't know about). Many of those also chose to work on and contribute to ads, tracking, AI, surveillance etc. and all the infrastructure for it and have no moral qualms doing so. Spare me the sanctimoniousness.
Yes, many companies are morally gray. But, again, especially developers have their pick of companies they can go to. Including companies that are less morally gray. They chose Facebook.
1) As others have said, there's a big difference between a country you're born in without choice and a company you've actively chosen to have a career at, so I don't want to get too off topic.
1a) Life's not fair sometimes and talking about the morality of life not being fair isn't going to change how people perceive you when you vote a certain way or happen to live in a country where the majority of the country voted a certain way. Once your country is shitting on other countries, y'all end up being painted by the same broad strokes. Reputational damage does not discriminate and the long term consequences of such damage won't, either. Not all that different than how when bombs are launched during war, the bombs are not checking the voting records of the civilians in their paths. If people don't like this reality and they did not vote for it, they should actively try harder to fix that reality - even if this is a hard thing to ask.
2) I'll repeat - once you're working on the death star, no matter why, people and history are not going to look at you favourably. At some later point in time, this might even become a shame you try to hide from the world.
If they were a cleaner or some other position that people typically take up because they have no alternatives, then I'd understand and sympathize a bit, you usually don't have any choice and can't really help it, you need to survive somehow, that's OK.
But most of the people working in technology positions at Meta and Facebook are not in that sort of position, they're usually well paid already, and could easily change jobs if they had a tiny bit of spine and could sacrifice getting paid less. Internally they'll reason and justify why they can't just leave, but from the outside it's embarrassingly obvious they don't really care in the end.
> Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.
This article is just a summary of other articles. Specifically these two more detailed ones:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" was the top-rated comment in response to the internal announcement, according to a post on Meta's internal workplace communications site seen by Business Insider."
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
"Companies should be able to bully their staff, since their staff are free to quit" is not compatible with a decent society.
"Companies should be able to offer massively addictive and manipulative websites, since their users are free to not look at them" is not compatible with a decent society either.
I agree and consider a lot of regulation to be useful but there are some examples of this where I think we just perpetuate bad companies into existing when they'dgo bankrupt or have to pay wild salaries to compensate being shitty. But it just doesn't seem practical to expect people to stop working for bad companies. In the country I'm from the average salary is super close to the minimum wage with low unemployment so technically employees could change easily and find another job with the same minimum wage and still people stay at bad companies. It'd be the best regulator if people quit, even unions wouldn't need to exist, under this light a union just perpetuates a bad boss, but human nature is not changing so protections are needed.
Have you seen the salaries Meta pay?
That's the crux. People aren't asking "Am I earning enough?" but "How can I earn more?", and it all spirals into whatever the current system could be called.
So employees should have plenty in the bank to fall back on while they found their own companies to compete ⌠right?
Health insurance and opportunity cost
The majority of people working at Meta will never ever again in their lives get a job offer that good. Meta knows this and doesn't care about many of them quitting. They can currently scoop up an endless supply of developers that have memorized every single leetcode hard, system design and """behavioral""" interview question.
> They can currently scoop up an endless supply of developers that have memorized every single leetcode hard, system design and """behavioral""" interview question.
And will those help them get where they think they want to go?
Money, of course. Both greed and comfort.
And existing obligations. Most people I know, myself including, stretch our current situation as the paycheque grows.
Some of it is intentional. A lot of it is slow creep (âah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol Iâve always wanted!â). While youâre doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - âoh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..â). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now youâve landed yourself with new loans and obligations (more expensive car = higher maintenance cost, same with house, etc - higher expectation all around, keeping up with Joneses, charity events, âŚ).
Getting out of all that is much more than greed - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family is pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). Some are difficult social obligations - you lose your group if you downgrade (may have to move further away, no more club or association memberships).
The only real remedy is to not let your expenditure go up when you get a raise. But itâs less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc.
Exactly.
Itâs the same defeatist attitude people who get an extra three months of pay to train their Eastern European or Indian replacements.
They will gladly take the three months pay to train a replacement. Iâd quit on the spot. Let them figure it out.
There are other methods broadly classified as self-defense that an employee can apply against a company and its officials who attack their privacy.
Let Meta and its officials feel the consequences of their actions.
If itâs company equipment itâs fair game. Literally everytime I sign in it states I have no expectation of privacy while using the equipment.
> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
While I agree with you, sadly not everyone is in a position to just quit so easily, and even if the majority of the company quits, there are always people who are desperate enough to do the work and not complain.
> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Come on, they may be caring for children, sick relatives, or have a million other reasons to want a stable, well-paying job. There are many well-justified reasons they could have to stay, and yet want to opt-out. "Just quit your job" is extremely out-of-touch.
Claiming that developers and technology workers at Meta are working there because that's the only stable, well-paying job they can find, is extremely out of touch. People forget how comfortable us developers really have it, compared to almost any other field out there.
> Have people lost their spine?
Yes, but this being Meta who are one of the several poster-children for surveillance capitalism, this comes across as more a face-leopard than a missing spine: https://old.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
> seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Have you seen the job market lately? Not just in the USA, but also in the USA, there's a lot of people holding on to whatever they've got because it's hard to find replacement work.
Read Careless People. The fish rots from the head
I don't see what can be trained with that, but it would be a nightmare to be always recorded like that
Probably to detect all variations of dangerous words such as "union", "genocide" and "peace".
Surveillance for thee, not for me
Surveillance for all
That would imply that Zuck is being surveilled.
Has anyone asked Palantir and their many subsidiaries and foundations what they have on Zuck?
In the actual article (not the headline) there is no mention of staff reporting to be unhappy.
The actual irony is that this very title is the ragebait, as they say in the article:
> .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
Quotes from unhappy staff are in the Business Insider article which the article links to in its third paragraph.
Ah I saw it now through another HN submission.
gonna cry
s/Irony/Schadenfreude/g
Full title prefixed "Magnificent"
Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu. "It's a big club and you're not in it."
I guess these individuals think like "if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get caught and exposed to the public. But other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now, and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
Fam, what should we actually do about this?
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
Monitor output. No need for surveillance.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
I agree with this kind of... I did automate $4.5M/yr in labor, but I probably only worked 10 hours a week and billed for 40.
For 5 years everyone was happy, but I kind of knew what I was doing was wrong.
Not that I think I could have automated $16M/yr, but I def knew I was billing for doing dishes.
If you feel the need to babysit your employees you probably need new employees.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
I agree. In fact, even ensuring the employee is at the work station moving the mouse and pressing the keys is failing to measure their productive engagement at work. How do you know they are cogitating to the companyâs benefit at all times? Many employees may rationalize time theft as âtaking a second of mental restâ but itâs a breach of their employment contract, and potentially criminal embezzlement, all the same.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to ârest and vestâ at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
> its my manager's job to supervise
No it isnât. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because theyâre supervised.
Supervised != surveilled
No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?
> the freedom of Covid WFH
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
> We all did dishes and billed for it.
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
This is basically my case against RTO... I am a talker. I wont stop talking. I actually waste people's time talking philosophy.
I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. I don't work at meta, I work at a large non-tech company.
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Dave working at meta is indeed in part responsible for meta doings. Yes leaving has a cost. Thatâs the whole point. Meta actions also have associated costs, it is just externalized and doesnât impact Dave directly
We should focus on effective means for change. Focusing external influence on low-level individuals with no decision making power might feel good but it has accomplished a sum total of nothing in the past. Why would we think it will make the situation better this time? They swap people in and out of projects all the time and it's really not disruptive at all. The only ways these tech behemoths have made any meaningful positive changes is through sustained governmental pressure either through oversight or regulation.
> We should focus on effective means for change.
Labor unions.
Techies believed they didn't need unions because their compensation is high, and "meritocracy" yadda yadda. But unions were never just about compensation. Crucially, they also collectively negotiate working conditions.
You quitting your job is not necessarily much of a threat to your employer. But a union going on strike, effectively everyone quitting simlultaneously, is a major threat.
As I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met.
You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.
The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?
This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?
I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
You are confusing pointing out that people are morally responsible for the their actions with suggesting "that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds".
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
Meta hasnât suddenly gone bad in the last 12 months. Anyone who has joined in the last 15 years has done so knowing full well what sort of company it is, and what sort of evil it does.
Do you see how this topic might mirror something like some dudes just working on the Death Star, never having actually met a sith?
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
yes? this isn't a "just following orders isnt a defence" case. Almost everyone at meta did nothing of the sort of bad stuff. There are nearly a hundred thousand people working at meta.
This is a "being a part of an extremely large group of people, some entirely separate members of the group are doing bad stuff"
Are there no groups you are a part of where members have done bad things? are you sure?
Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen? I find that extremely hard to understand. Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
> Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
You canât choose where youâre born, you can choose who you work for.
You are equating countries with corporations now?
How does that even remotely make sense?
Iâm open to the concept of there being some scale of culpability where the janitors at Meta contracted from some third party company are less culpable than the c suite. But as a software engineer who has chosen to work there, youâre the one building the planet destroying death laser, so not only are you in a very privileged, specialized position, youâre directly contributing to the effects.
Also Meta isnât a nation state.
I do not work at meta. I have never even been to America. Chill on the personal assumptions...
Respond to the substance, donât give a cop out response.
my arguments above already respond to the substance of what you have written, you haven't adressed them, merely restated the position I objected to at the start.
I'm no debate lord, merely expressed my dislike of the baying for blood people clearly have here, pointed at everyone seemingly except the actual people responsible
Iâve been seeing this sort of response more and more lately. :(
"I chose to work as a developer for this supranational corporation, but nothing bad this corporation does is any reflection on me personally, I only work there, making sure this supranational corporation keeps existing through my work. It's also the same thing as being born in a country."
> Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
When their governments are democratically elected, sometimes, ya. I don't want to give you any spoilers, but there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late.
There are also cultural beefs that have existed for longer than I've been alive that are not even all that rational, but continue to persist. Whole cultures hating each other.
> Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen?
I think someone from Aldereen might have a hard time grabbing a beer with a death star technician. Most people probably understand that blame is not equally shared, but that those technicians were on the wrong side of history. Exceptions might include people forcefully enslaved to work on the death star - and, from a distance, an external observer still would not know the difference at first glance between forceful participation, passive participation, and active participation.
It often takes time/generations to heal from the pain of their parents choices - whether those choices were active or passive. Sins of the father and all that (though I think it's unfair to put parental misdeeds onto their kids, it also historically happens a lot).
> there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late
I understand THAT its happening, but do you think that's right? moral?
would you be happy about it if you were a random american? one who had voted against whatever is happening there? What about one who couldn't vote at all?
Were Meta employees forced to work for Meta?
Not that I agree with the idea of blaming all Meta employees (e.g. janitors, drivers etc don't deserve the blame), but I do think the ones doing the computer work deserve some blame.
Do all of the hundred thousand meta employees have a say in what happens? Do they even have as much say as citizens in a democracy?
I can agree that the teams working on the specific features have quite a lot of blame. Those asked to implement immoral ads/algorithm stuff. But how many are those people as a proportion of the entire staff?
> Do all of the hundred thousand meta employees have a say in what happens?
They all chose to work at Meta. And for the vast majority of them (especially programmers) there were other choices.
How many companies on the SNP 500 are moral, do you think? are you sure?
Ah yes. Only companies that are in SNP 500 matter. Also, the existence of those other companies fully absolves any people working at Facebook.
im using those as a proxy for the largest employers. If we think the people working in those companies are all bad people, that means most people full stop are bad people.
If people are supposed to stop working at meta if they want to keep being a "good person" then they go work somewhere else.
Can they work at any of the largest employers? can they be sure?
You keep diluting the arguments with sweeping generalizing statements and non-working analogies like "but think of people in other countries". When it's actually pretty easy:
The people worked and kept working at Facebook after these huge and small issues
- after Myanmar genocide
- after paying teenagers to spy on them through VPN
- after falsifying its ad metrics that ended up negatively affecting and outright destroying multiple publishers and creators
- after billions in dollars of fines paid over multiple breaches of user privacy, and misleading users about their privacy
And that's just off the top of my head.
- and (irony is dead) after Facebook unconditionally opted every single user, and their data, and their content on their platform into AI training
So don't give me the righteous indignant spiel about innocent workers who are just doing their jobs and are really really good at heart. Most of them chose to work for Meta despite all these things (and despite significantly more NDA things discussed inside the company that we don't know about). Many of those also chose to work on and contribute to ads, tracking, AI, surveillance etc. and all the infrastructure for it and have no moral qualms doing so. Spare me the sanctimoniousness.
Yes, many companies are morally gray. But, again, especially developers have their pick of companies they can go to. Including companies that are less morally gray. They chose Facebook.
1) As others have said, there's a big difference between a country you're born in without choice and a company you've actively chosen to have a career at, so I don't want to get too off topic.
1a) Life's not fair sometimes and talking about the morality of life not being fair isn't going to change how people perceive you when you vote a certain way or happen to live in a country where the majority of the country voted a certain way. Once your country is shitting on other countries, y'all end up being painted by the same broad strokes. Reputational damage does not discriminate and the long term consequences of such damage won't, either. Not all that different than how when bombs are launched during war, the bombs are not checking the voting records of the civilians in their paths. If people don't like this reality and they did not vote for it, they should actively try harder to fix that reality - even if this is a hard thing to ask.
2) I'll repeat - once you're working on the death star, no matter why, people and history are not going to look at you favourably. At some later point in time, this might even become a shame you try to hide from the world.
Relevant: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
If you work there, you are part of the problem, there is no excuse for that.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.
If they were a cleaner or some other position that people typically take up because they have no alternatives, then I'd understand and sympathize a bit, you usually don't have any choice and can't really help it, you need to survive somehow, that's OK.
But most of the people working in technology positions at Meta and Facebook are not in that sort of position, they're usually well paid already, and could easily change jobs if they had a tiny bit of spine and could sacrifice getting paid less. Internally they'll reason and justify why they can't just leave, but from the outside it's embarrassingly obvious they don't really care in the end.
> Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.