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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, having Facebook on your resume should disqualify you as a potential hire.

Because if you are willing to work for Facebook, the best case is that it means you are amoral. But how likely is it that you are probably immoral yourself?

You are working on a platform that is directly responsible for propagating misinformation, often with deadly consequences. And don't get me even started on January 6th.

The founder of the company started Facebook as a site to just put up pictures of women so they could then 'rate' them.

The fish starts to rot at the head, and if that's the kind of 'moral compass' of the CEO, you know things are bad.

If you read this and you work for facebook. I urge you to quit today.

Please: today.

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Facebook is not all bad. It is certainly concerning and some may hold the opinion that social media is tearing society apart, but there is at least as much positive about it as negative. People who work there go for the positive.

So Zuck rated girls in college. I’ve used such sites and behaved badly when I was younger as well. Nobodies hands are spotless. That one thing certainly does not define him.

All of that said, I would not work at Facebook. They wouldn’t hire me anyway.

It is all bad. There is no redeeming quality about Facebook whatsoever. They are a netto negative impact on the world.

The similarity towards religion in that regard doesn't go unnoticed, although I do admit that this is really out-of-scope.

The benefit that Facebook brings to its users does not offset the significant harm it does to others.

Facebook kills.

And that boys-will-be-boys argument is really telling about your own ethics/morality. Because I would not even dream about building a site, to which I would upload pictures of women in my University, to let other men rate them.

That is so profoundly unethical, if you don't understand that, you have a lot to learn about morality and ethics.

> Frankly, having Facebook on your resume should disqualify you as a potential hire

> And that boys-will-be-boys argument is really telling about your own ethics/morality

Yikes, you are incredibly judgemental about people you know nothing about. Not sure what sort of discussion you think this sort of behavior is going to spur, but I can pretty much guarantee it'll be unproductive.

I don't need to know anything about you, because being willing to work for FB or thinking boys-will-be-boys justifies behaviour is all I need to know.

How's the view up there from your high horse?

>So Zuck rated girls in college. I’ve used such sites and behaved badly when I was younger as well. Nobodies hands are spotless. That one thing certainly does not define him.

Sure, one thing doesn't define someone. But in the instance of Zuckerberg, you've got "rating girls in college" followed by every other user-hostile thing his company has done since, so...

What about those who have a change of heart and left facebook to try and do something better?

What about those in third-world countries that could only get in a on a Visa and FB was the one that hired them, could we fault them for choosing to leave a much riskier life to live the life of a FAANNG developer?

Are people beyond redemption because of one bad decision, what about people that see the world differently?

What about

Whataboutism

You are not redeemed because you were poor and FB gave you a ticket out of poverty. Because working for FB made you do things that made the lives of other people miserable.

This is not how ethics and morality works at all.

I don't think we can hold it against the citizens that we, as a society in the US, are fortunate enough to have naturalized by Facebook. For all their myriad harms, Facebook engineers are no slouches. We definitely get talent by Visa holders immigrating by their employment; further, I don't think we're familiar enough with their experience in their home to say that they shouldn't take any opportunity they can get to make it to the US. For all our myriad problems, I do think we're a great nation.

However, excepting these employees alone, I do agree with you: Facebook employees are not good people.

Raising people out of poverty by building a platform that basically chips away at the fabric of society is beyond insane.

I can see why 'poor' people would jump at the opportunity, but that doesn't really excuse them from the basic morality/ethics.

Holding people from poorer countries to lower moral and ethical standards smells like a kind of latent racism to me too but maybe I should give you the benefit of the doubt.

I don't think it's racism, necessarily, because it holds true for our naturalized citizens of any race. You could charge me with some sort of dread nationalism. I still wouldn't agree, but it's closer to my espoused basis. Also, for context: I am the child of a naturalized citizen from a very poor country, which very much colors my opinion.

It's not so much that I hold these people to lower moral or ethical standards; it's moreso that my morals and ethics are entirely arbitrary, based on nothing more than what values I choose to hold. My standards are the same for everyone and everything, which is that my standard will be whatever it is at the moment I choose to query what my position is. Is this wildly inconsistent? Yes. Is it universalizable? No. But it's the best I've got, and it's what commits me the least.

people should be judged by their behavior and actions, not anything else, including not their current or past employers.

Deciding to take a job at Facebook is such behaviour / action. Please do better.

Your employment decisions are significant as it pertains to your behavior and actions.

It's very reasonable to judge someone by who they choose to work for, specifically if there are repeating negative patterns.

If someone builds a career out of violating human rights, working on egregiously anti-privacy tech at several companies, there's a negative pattern there. It provides substantial insight into who they are and what immoral things they're willing to do to other people for the right price.

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