Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe you're on H1B and if you get let go you have to go back to Sri Lanka, whose government collapsed 2 years ago and left the country in political disarray. Some people have better choices than others.

Like I wouldn't work on this project, but I have US citizenship. In college I slept over at some of my Indian friends' apartments and often they had like 8-12 guys sleeping in one bedroom, it was just a bunch of mattresses all laid together with no specific sleeping arrangement. Generally they made a giant pot of stew/daal/whatever once a week and ate the same thing for every meal all week, some even long after graduating with PhD's and getting low-tier visa-mill jobs. This was not a T10 school, our international students rarely came from wealthy families. One of my Saudi classmates came from a poor family in a remote village near the Iraq border and brushed his teeth with a twig from the Salvadora persica tree.

I couldn't really blame them if they didn't have another good option readily available.

I can't resist annotating the Sri Lanka comment, it was responsible for some of the most absurd headlines I've ever read; completely beyond parody. Typical example:

- Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs

> https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...

Or you have a nice bucket of RSUs that have been jumping in value and figure it’s just another project to pass time.

If you have other good options, thats just greed. Sure its painful to turn down $200k in RSU’s but if you can jump ship and still get paid a respectable $160k I don’t have much sympathy for your choice to fuck over millions of people just so you can buy a house two years sooner.

I don't either. It seems to me that a lot of CS people don't have the same values as we do unfortunately. A sad mix of computers seeming apolitical - 'I just wanna hack' and as a well paid industry, the same money maximizers that would in previous years been business majors.

> Why do people work on such projects?

>> Maybe you're on H1B and if you get let go you have to go back to Sri Lanka...

I mean that's there too, but in this case, the guy who ran this spyware op was a former IDF turned chief of Facebook in Israel, later promoted to CISO for all of Meta.

Yes, I generally blame management. But sometimes I blame the engineers when its obvious they had other good options.

I think its fair to blame both, usually. Got enough hate left in my heart for it

> I blame the engineers when its obvious they had other good options

Their manager was promoted to c-suite for running a covert worldwide spyware op (that also informed the company's M&A strategy). I'd reserve most of my blame on corporate culture that incentivized & rewarded such orgs and its management.

It's important to note that the "Guy" was not just with the IDF, but with Unit 8200.

Otherwise you'd be essentially saying "Hey look out, the guy who ran this op was an Israeli" (because nearly every male Israeli serves in the IDF).

> important to note ... "Guy" [was] with Unit 8200

Good thing they're less Fascist and more upstanding & liberal, yeah? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/12/world/middlee...

> every male Israeli serves in the IDF

Shame on them if they continue to be associated with an institution found guilty by the International courts of occupation, torture, sexual assault, dispossession, crimes against humanity.

https://x.com/wattheactualfuq/status/1818340892651975052 / https://ghostarchive.org/archive/sx6lC

The burden is not mine or anyone else's.

Your scenario describes real people, but Facebook was not built by vulnerable visa holders.

Facebook hired and retained engineers over its entire company history by offering enormous amounts of stock. They successfully demonstrated there are a lot of engineers willing to build unethical products when offered 2-3x their previous salary.

holy fuck can we please stop letting circumstances be the excuse we continuously fall back on, when enabling and reinforcing behavior with long-term impact and consequences.

imagine all of the times in history where this type of enabling of behavior reached an extreme, and now ask yourself where do you draw the line.

are you really asking me to enjoy the growing consequences of corporate overreach in the name of data, and all the sketchy ass, unethical, and invasive work all these foreign engineers are getting paid ridiculous salaries to propogate, and feel good about being held hostage because said engineers.. don't have a home.

so we are supposed to enable them to wreck mine (ours)?

> so we are supposed to enable them to wreck mine (ours)?

No, we’re supposed to attack it from a different direction. Whether these people are H1B or outsourced overseas, U.S. corporations will always be able to find people in desperate enough situations (civil war-torn country with a literal famine going on). We can absolutely blame and shame the engineers who have other options for sustenance and medicine for their families, but if you want to solve this problem, it can only be solved through the legislative and executive branches.

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