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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time.

They have been involved in so many shady things and have had such a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach it sounds maddening.

I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it.

Even if you are in the ML/AI stuff. You have to balance out that they were funding at a very high rate versus that they were funding the work for less than stellar reasons.

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I worked there, the compensation was best in the industry, I worked on infrastructure that billions of people depended on, and in a very small way increased security and privacy. I'm proud of that work, and the people I worked with were awesome.

Let’s call it what is, any adTech company is diametrically opposed to increasing user privacy.

You have no idea what I worked on, yet you're quite confident that it didn't increase security or privacy.

Ok.

Your ultimate goal was to help an adTech company. Everything anyone does is ultimately in service of that.

Once I had a manager justify his employment at Palantir by saying he helped troops detect and avoid landmines. Well cool, they still murdered people after getting past the minefield though.

So your take is...soldiers should die to landmines?

My take is to think about what your work accomplishes beyond the surface level.

So do you believe soldiers in Ukraine are “murdering” Russians?

Yeah they are. The Russian soldiers most likely didn't ask to be there either. Obviously a rock and a hard place for Ukrainians.

That being said, Palantir's business with the US government dwarfs any they might have with the Ukrainian army. And last I checked the US is in the business of murdering brown people.

It’s been the money.

Literally said in the comment you are replying to if you bother to read until the 3rd para!

I think you’re missing the point of my deliberately terse reply.

All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you that there’s no deep thinking involved. There’s no “hey I considered it and the comp overcame my concerns” etc. Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking about the ethical aspects.

There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays well so they work there.

Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but also implies that for Facebook employees, on average, there is any thought process beyond economic maximization. There isn’t.

I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and Uber. Now and then they’ll do the pretend performative handwringing or whatever but their decisions are consistent.

There is just money.

It is a very tricky philosophical question you’re asking: should you consider the broadest impact of what you’re doing OR should you ensure you’re doing good work and leave the ramifications to higher up decision makers?

The former approach means you can’t do anything with clear conscience: do you take that vacation or donate the money? Do you punish yourself if your work on databases eventually was used for a scam?

I find it paralyzing to operate in the former way: so I take the traditional stem person approach. I just ensure what I do is good (obviously for the highest bidder). I won’t work for an explicitly criminal organization - but as long as the government approves, am in. I am going to let them do the policy making and governing because frankly I am tired and probably incompetent at that since I don’t sink much time thinking about it.

> It is a very tricky philosophical question you’re asking:

There is nothing tricky about it. No one works at Meta thinking they are feeding starving children.

It’s also “difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

I’m not making any moral stand either way.

It’s a very narrow viewpoint to take.

Engineers in Meta have advanced technology in so many ways (buck / react / so many contributions to distributed software / leveldb …). I think it is very reductionist to discount all that work.

There’s nothing about salary depending on it here: there’s a ton about your work contributing to the global good irrespective of who’s funding it (and whatever ways they end up utilizing it).

And that software was also written to further the concerns and profits of an adTech company. Facebook may have allowed open sourcing non critical parts of its software - every major tech company does.

You work at Amazon where advertising brings in more profit than AWS... https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...

Yes, and if you check my posting history, I never tried to justify my doing so was for any other reason than “trading labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter”.

I’m not judging anyone for making an outsized salary for working at Facebook. Just be honest that you’re there for the money and not some high minded ideals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35035560

Exactly right. I mean unless long term means 6 months or such, no one looking for job would really care in an year that Meta had layoffs in 2023.

> It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time.

Maybe because, I don’t know, Meta pays well? I don’t go to work for self fulfillment. I work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

No I don’t work for Meta nor have I ever.

It’s almost as if that was already said if you had kept reading past the first sentence.

> I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it.

Is this our level of laziness now? To read the first sentence and base our snarky replies entirely off it, ignoring the fact that it’s a rhetorical question that was answered immediately after?

Its a post-communication world. While before only a title was read and comments made based on assuming what the content is, now we assume what the comment is and reply based on that.

> I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it.

That didn’t help. It’s like saying “I don’t know why the guy died. Maybe it’s because he got shot in the head at point blank range”?

Of course people work at Meta because of the money. No one works for Meta to make the world a better place

Do you understand the concept of rhetorical questions?

Because your comment indicates that you clearly don’t understand that people sometimes ask questions not because they want an answer but for emphasis or dramatic effect.

This was, clearly, such a case.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

Digging down on your snark when you’re called out is a bold play that doesn’t generally work. Most people have this thing called humbleness but I guess you left it with the rhetorical questions.

In other words, there is nothing insightful about wondering why people work for the best paying company in tech is because they like making money.

The original post was no more insightful than “I wonder why he got wet when he jumped into the wster”

> It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time.

Largely because much of the company is a great place to work. Actually working there, I don't find this hard to see at all.

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