I wonder how Facebook devs feel when they read such posts.
Do they feel rejected ? shameful ?
Does their salary really outweigh this collective disapproval
of their peers ?
I actually just got a job there out of school, starting in a few months. Reading these comments is certainly interesting although it's not news to me that Hacker News hates Facebook.
I've long been skeptical of the effects of social media though, and I'm taking this job mostly just because doing otherwise seems like a really poor career choice. Plus it seems like Facebook is here to stay, and I can dream of helping to fix the problem instead of just enabling it.
EDIT: Is HN's Facebook hate getting so heated I'm getting down-voted for sending some good vibes to a newgrad about to start her/his first job?
I bet you all took you first job at Doctors Without Borders helping children in Angola. FFS the Waltons are the scourge of this world but I don't blame the kids going off to work at Walmart. I bet a lot of you pay taxes in the US too-- those taxes financed the war in Afghanistan but you didn't move to Morocco, did you?
Give me a break. Let this kid come in with a good attitude, eyes open, loud and proud. Who knows maybe he'll turn some heads. The guy signed and it is a good career move, what's wrong with cheering the guy up. Disappointed at you HN.
Actually, it is down to you to make a change, and do ethical things. There are ways to influence things which you mentioned from the war in Afghanistan to privacy issues with Facebook. But to do that, you have to care.
That's about all though, isn't it? There's a negligible chance you'll actually fix the problem, unless you manage to leak evidence to the media or similar.
I write software for biologists, am I feel I'm much, much happier doing that than I would be working at Facebook.
I spilled OJ at myself when I read his post. I mean its great he is so gullible to believe he can change something at such big corp, and he reminds me when I was 16 with big head of dreams how to change the world.
But seriously - do we know any single example of an intern coming to a big corp and "saving it" - by that I mean steering it off the dark and deceiving waters and actually bringing it into light for the good of society and people in general??
Getting a job offer at Facebook is a great achievement. Some people I know just moved to US to pursue masters and then apply at Facebook. If you have offers from another tech giants like Google than you can do your own analysis (SWOT maybe) to choose the right options.
Some years down the line you can always switch to any company in the world.
I worked for a less-than stellar online publication in Australia. Think low-budget Daily Mail. I didnt care, I still got paid and got to switch off and do my own thing when I wanted to. I'm not my job.
Examine the present embroglio over Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, weaponised viral clickbait, fake news, radicalisation, etc., etc.
Media are the information sourcing and feedback loop for societies. The print media went through its crisis of awareness in the early 20th century. See especially Lippmann's Public Policy.
I heard once that if there is something - whether of a monetary value or not - that allows you to "sidestep your morals", then you didn't have any morals in the first place.
Then I'd argue that I don't have any morals in the first place.
There are differing levels of how strongly I feel about certain moral values I hold. For example, working for a company that dealt in wholesale killing of others is obviously worse than working for an advertising network. Would I work for doubleclick for $1M a year? Hell yeah. Would I spy on citizens of my country for the same amount? No.
That is what I suspect but still.. Respect in the eye of peers is a human need. If I met a developper and learned he works for FB, it would be visible on my face that I feel somewhat put-off.
'Peer' is very flexible. This could be a comparison to people the same age in other careers.
Also, keep in mind that Facebook engineers are constantly surrounded by other Facebook engineers so their SE peers probably do approve. They collectively don't think Facebook is a problem so they implicitly approve of each other.
I don't use FB and definitely do not like their business model, but it's also true that their users are there voluntarily and most of them are at least vaguely aware that they're being aggressively data harvested by an amoral, profit-maximizing corporation. So I don't see a legit reason to blame or hate on the devs there. Especially when you consider that most of them work on the "good" rather than the "evil" part of their stack.
Except for the folks who didn't make an account whose friends have contributed to "shadow profiles" for them...
I mean, let's just admit that you don't have to be a Facebook user and you don't have to sign a Facebook TOS for them to accumulate data about you, so it's not quite as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be.
As far as the "good" and "evil" parts of the stack... fair point. I think most devs are somewhat abstracted away from the collectively malicious vision, since most of the constituent parts are relatively benign on their own -- "let's identify faces in photos!", "let's automatically identify faces in photos", etc. It's product folks, or maybe even higher up than that, who connect the powerful pieces produced by devs to actually make Facebook the monster it is today. I'd guess that even the devs who have impact on that vision don't really have the power to dramatically sway that vision, they've got a bit of technical input at best.
Still, have you ever worked on a product you don't believe in? If you're just cashing in a check, I guess it could work, but if you're as idealistic as me you want to work on something that's doing good in the world. Especially when so many tech companies proclaim their intent to "make the world a better place" or "do cool things that matter."
Not really. Many people just feel they have to use Facebook to connect with the society efficiently. Some people even consider those who don't use Facebook weird.
That's their problem. I never use FB and it does not hurt one bit. People have to be responsible for their own choices. No one is forced to use FB. Their weak will is not my problem.
The network effect is strong but it does not make FB use necessary or involuntary. You will not be put in a cage, fined, beaten, fired, etc, for not using FB.
Yep, but you might be left out of many events and slowly become a social outcast amongst your friends. As a first-hand non-facebook user, this aspect really blows.
Would you say the same about gambling software? What about software related to selling heroin?
All of these products are designed to be as addictive as possible (to varying degrees). The whole point of of an addiction is that your are there voluntarily. (Not saying facebook is as bad as the things above, just that they are all designed to addict.)
They certainly do make it as addictive as possible, but IMO that still does not mean users are there involuntarily. Persuasion is not the same as coercion.
Doesn't FB keep track of (possibly profile) people who don't directly use FB? They can possibly profile you from using data brokers and information actual FB users give to them.
That's a fair point but I would put much of the blame for that on the US government for not having proper EU-like privacy laws which make it illegal, or at least mandate an opt-out mechanism.
In capitalism it's mostly the customer's responsibility to switch when a company becomes too-evil in some way. Depending on your politics you could, perhaps, argue with some truth that network effects make that extremely difficult for social media sites, so the only solution is to have the government extensively regulate FB, twitter, etc, but I am not entirely convinced. IIRC FB engagement with teenagers and early-20s folks is already declining noticably in the US (though there probably are multiple reasons for that beyond just privacy concerns).
Does their salary really outweigh this collective disapproval of their peers?
Isn't that the going ethos currently?
Something akin to: Pay me as much as possible, don't ask me to be part of your culture, don't ask me to work more than 40 hours a week, don't ask me to take stock, don't have a mission statement, make sure I'm working on something that is engaging mentally.
Depends on what you mean by “going ethos.” Healthy perspective on an employment relationship from your perspective, yes. Anathema to a large number of Silicon Valley startups where you will likely get branded as neither a culture fit nor a team player, as well, yes.
It’s wise in the Valley to hold such an opinion but not make it very prominently known. There are a number of people who want your job and will say something more palatable to your employer, and eat your free meal while shipping a feature at 10pm because they buy into the posters on the wall. Many allegations of ageism (but not all) can probably trace back to something like this, in my uninformed gut opinion, because you will almost certainly get replaced by a new grad when the hammer falls. I don’t even see it as personal, but a demonstration of incentives: they can get a loud 40 from you or a quiet 80 from a newly minted BSc. QED.
Just decline invites and push back on over 40. Expressing that attitude at a typical company within this audience basically paints “please lay me off” on your back. When you’re getting into post-senior titling, or you’re really specialized in a tough req to fill, is when that approach becomes more feasible.
I met some of them. They either don't think about it, or they actively revel in not being one of the proles that aren't in on it. The ones that stress about it eventually leave.
I worked for an AV vendor for years. The online hate it gets is huge and constant (mostly wrong, but some points are valid). And even though I don't like the monetization strategies for example, I believe the product itself was OK, and most importantly helpful to many.
As a Facebook user I obviously don't like what they do with the data, but at the same time I think they provide an OK service that is beneficial to many. I wouldn't mind working as a developer there on what I imagine is overwhelming majority of positions.
I think most of their peers are mature enough to realize that the poor (historic) management decisions of a company (which are now catching up to said company) are not reflective of the personality or character of the hundreds of thousands of employees performing various roles at said company.
