I was once asked to install surveillance software on my personal PC, as a remote freelance worker. The person responsible on Slack told me "let me know when you've installed it". So I decided to just wait 15 minutes and then say "yeah I installed it" to see if they would notice that I didn't... and they didn't, they just said "OK, thanks" and I never heard anything about it ever again.
I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
> "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?
Right on. Meta employees, fuck you for building the surveillance state we live in today. You are the fucking scourge and death of the 2000s internet. Eat shit, I care not for your "privacy concerns."
While I can understand the sentiment, it should be expressed with less vulgarity, and frankly, workers should show more solidarity to one another, not because of “deserving it” or not, but simply because it’s the only way out of the pit they put us in. Otherwise we are forever dragging each other back in.
> workers should show more solidarity to one another
Agree, but at one point you're also effectively betraying people who typically want to give you solidarity, especially when you're working on systems and tooling used for suppressing said solidarity. So yeah, fuck you Meta employees for completely lacking any sort of spine.
"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.
It's even worse when you consider that even if you were to opt out of Meta services entirely (which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp), they still build a shadow profile on you based only on data other people upload about you. So yeah, not only "just don't use it" is not a reasonable argument, it doesn't even solve anything!
> which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp
Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential?
I deleted my account when Facebook bought it and I don’t feel like anything of value was lost. Between messages/sms, signal, telegram, discord, I have no shortage of places to chat.
WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
I don’t really care about the shadow profile. Meta is hardly the first to build a database of non customers, and it’s not the only such database I’m in. I avoid all Meta services and will never see an ad from them.
In Brazil, for example, without WhatsApp you are an outcast of modern society there, businesses communicate with customers on WhatsApp, whole families and friend groups only use WhatsApp.
> WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
The network effect is exactly what makes it really hard for any single user to decide "I'm leaving" and tell every single person they need to be in touch to contact on another platform they don't use. What you are suggesting is simply impossible on an individual level, the only way it happens is if the platform has major issues that bleed users because it isn't working or the platform is made inaccessible by the government. Even a better competitor appearing will have a very hard time to crack the market share of a established network exactly due to network effects.
Want them to stick through a 10 year lawsuit while they get fired anyways? Do you think there is a lot of hope of winning such a lawsuit? Metas CEO hangs out at the Pentagon and has bomb bunkers. They can do whatever they want to their employees
In the old days, before federally recognized unions and those things, when the company/boss did something terrible....
The workers would arm up with shotguns, rifles, Molotov cocktails. They'd then go to the bosses' house and have a "chat". If they didn't listen, they'd have their house shot up or burned to the ground.
It was the very bosses that hired Pinkerton's to go murder the union leaders as well.
Some of the railroad unionization got so bloody and violent that even the US military got in on the action, in favor of companies.
In the end, we got the NLRB and a whole host of rights. The violence did indeed work, but saying that is somehow breaking unforgivable speech.
And if violence isnt up to these meta engineers, perhaps they should look into CIA's own simple sabotage field manual techniques.
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.
Ok, so this spyware is another step in the "either they comply with what we force them to do, or they quit, whichever way, for us it's a win-win" strategy, after Return To Office? And, just to make sure the employees get the point, they concurrently announce a further 10% round of layoffs? Yeah, makes sense...
Nothing planned at Meta that can not be achieved with the decently competent engineers who will accept this insane surveillance and don't give a shit about whether they build weapons of mass destruction/surveillance/whatever. Plenty of willing replacements ready at any time.
Long term strategically planned reduction of average salary by replacing uppity rockstars/activists with the groveling creme de la creme of codemonkeys is part of the plan.
> 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?
>Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
I don't know why, but it's endemic. You have ICE, quite literally purchasing your surveillance data so they can sweep people off the streets. But getting people to delete some apps? It's effectively impossible. However you feel about the ICE issue, and future government program could deem you the enemy. And your data is out there just waiting to be weaponized against you. But will people actually do anything about it? Delete their apps? Stop using a smartphone? Write their congressman? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. They will complain online a bit and otherwise change _no_ behavior. The only positive movement I've seen in this regard is people moving away from flock. Otherwise, people are tripping over themselves to allow surveillance into their lives.
I have no idea why you are being downvoted. This is probably the most rational take.
Some level of sacrifice is required when you feel super uncomfortable at work in the US. I get the arguments of "I can't lose my pay", but at the same time, if you aren't aligned with how they treat you now, what do you think they will be doing with that data? What does 1 year from now look like? 2 years? Do you think it will be less invasive? Or will they be tracking your eye movements as well, facial sentiment?
> why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
The answer is simple: Golden handcuffs. If you pay people enough money, they will do anything. Also, labor laws are so weak in the US that this is surely allowed. It would take a federal law (or many powerful states to all pass laws in parallel) to outlaw this behaviour. Hint: It will not happen.
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 (“ah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol I’ve always wanted!”). While you’re doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - “oh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..”). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now you’ve 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, …).
Getting out of all that is much more difficult than overcoming your own greed and discomfort - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family are pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). For some it can be leaving useful social obligations - you lose your social circle 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 it’s less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc. All in all, odds are not in an average Meta employees favour no matter what they might personally think/feel.
I think it can be radically more pedestrian than this. Just affording basic life in a high COL area is insane. Getting an apt in NY and paying for childcare for two kids can already be a 16k/mo endeavor, no porche entering the equation.
> 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? 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.
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.
I wonder though if we're not approaching a time when even those who clung to their jobs will be joining those out of work. My wife, anecdotally, was just laid off from Agilent after having worked there for close to three decades. We were fortunate to see that as an opportunity for her to take her (albeit early) retirement.
I don't doubt there are plenty at Meta who, if not nearing retirement age, might have been harboring some desire to take some time off to hike the Big Three hiking trails in the U.S. Or perhaps write a novel.
The first photo I ever saw of a person covering their laptops camera with tape was a publicity photo of Zuck. Everyone I personally knew in the intelligence-adjacent industry had already been doing it. He was the first "civilian" I saw who did it intentionally.
The Zuckerberg quote from the article reads like someone running for class president in high school.
> helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
… If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
You could use this to train an AI to behave like a Meta-employee. Meta seems to like the behavior of Meta-employees, or it wouldn't have hired so many. It would just prefer to have more of this behavior for less, so they'll try to use clankers instead of employees to produce the key strokes and mouse clicks.
Do people honestly believe their current employers aren’t monitoring them right now?
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
The world of contracts is really interesting. Imagine a country Byteland that has a problem with alcoholism. Lots of people get too drunk and bother others. The parliament gathers and decides to issue a new law. First they try "it is illegal to bother other citizens in public" but the problem is, how do you legally define "to bother other citizens"? Then someone has a bright idea - make a law "it is illegal to be drunk in public". The idea is, only those who are annoying fucks will ever be checked, for obvious practical reasons. Everyone happy, the law passes. Citizens enjoy their beer, but they know that it they drink too much and start causing problems, they'll be arrested. One day a Sillycoin Valley startup comes up with great technology - a device that can pinpoint who exactly is drunk within two kilometers of range. Now suddenly lots of citizens who had just one beer and are minding their own business start getting fines.
The point I'm making is, there is a difference between what contract explicitly says, and what is implicitly understood due to practical limitations of the real world we live in. When the real world changes so does the effective implementation of contracts, even though the contracts themselves don't change. The problem is, by the time the world has changed against your favor, you might not have the power to demand an adjustment to the already signed contract.
As much as everyone is rightly dunking on meta employees, it's an interesting slice of the population. Anyone who cared about surveillance and privacy (and addiction, and societal health, etc.) wouldn't be working for meta in the first place. The hypocrisy point is correct to point out, but I do wonder why this is a bridge too far for them.
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.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
Mostly, the motivation of people making these products are doing so because they believe that if they don't do it, then the "bad guys" will keep winning: terrorists, burglars and whatever boogieman is the current "Public Enemy Number One".
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.
>"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".
Bingo. Tale as old as time. The elites have always stayed in power by paying half the poor people to oppress the other half for them. And if you're thinking about the French revolution as a counter example, then I need to remind you that the wealthy elites didn't lose their heads there, the monarchy did, the rich people got away just fine.
Today the elites got the peasantry to be arguing whether something is "woke" or DEI, and to riot and burn down cities whenever a repeat felon gets killed by police, while the Epstein criminals get away with it while laughing all the way to the bank and nobody rioting.
> It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics
Nothing to do with globalism here. It's still exclusively up to US citizens to implement their destruction. US national security and surveillance tech isn't outsourced to India for them to worry about labor competition from abroad.
> ... 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.
Ghislaine Maxwell is a woman. A fitting proxy for this whole situation, when you realize that she's the only person (so far) to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
OK, and so what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what? Evil doesn't do gender discrimination.
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Most of those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files in ambiguous terms, which isn't enough of strong evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to slam dunk jail them on the spot like Maxwell.
Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get exposed and caught, ending up as patsies to parrade to the public as fake "proof" that the system they pay taxes and answer to, somehow isn't corrupt to the core and working against them.
Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), 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.
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.
Your employer does not think anything they do is 'wrong' and neither should you when your employer is the 'victim' of one of your 'immoral' actions. Strange that they leave morality to the employee like yourself to impose on yourself to make yourself work harder for your employer. "If I bill for 40 hours and only work 10 while saving them millions of dollars, it's actually immoral on my part." You are literally admitting your shame for your own self-described immoral actions against your employer while completely blind or willfully ignorant of their proud immorality.
Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.
You saved the company you worked for 4.5 million a year and I presume your salary was less than 300,000? Who cares how much you worked? You more than 10x'd their investment in you, possibly 45x'd it. I've worked with people at the computer all day who 0.1'd their salary in a year and they were promoted. I have also worked nearby guys at their computer for 80hrs who tanked entire teams by making terrible decisions at 2am when no one else was around.
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 company’s benefit at all times? Many employees may rationalize time theft as “taking a second of mental rest” but it’s 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 “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
If I was hiring anyone for a job over 75k usd I should know very well that they can produce with very few touch points. I would also expect my team to speak up if someone wasn't producing. I wouldn't care about hours worked because they are a salary employee. I would care that the team could contact them and they contributed meaningfully to projects.
I think we misunderstood each other. Contributing to projects means achieving something. Obviously if it's sales the goals are different than if it's development. I care about company accomplishments and teams working together.
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. That’s the whole point. Meta actions also have associated costs, it is just externalized and doesn’t 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.
Meta hasn’t 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.
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.
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?
I’m 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, you’re the one building the planet destroying death laser, so not only are you in a very privileged, specialized position, you’re 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.
Im aware of all of those things. I assume many more terrible things besides those happen internally. I think people directly involved with such decisions, or implementing such decisions, are responsible, and I condemn them. Obviously. I would even suggest that those with internal knowledge of such things before they happened are morally obligated to whistleblow them.
I think expecting everyone else (which is, I believe, almost everyone working at facebook) not involved with any of these things to take a large personal sacrifice or be condemned is unlikely to result in many resignations. You're asking people to be hurt for the actions of others.
The best argument you have here is the moment someone starts working at facebook, after these things happen. I don't know that they should be condemned, but I can understand looking at them with some suspicion. Still, its hard to say its the worst thing in the world to do, accept employment under a shitty person. Who hasn't complained about their boss?
When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions of others together with those committing acts of evil, you are making a totalizing statement. There is nothing they can do to redeem themselves. They are morally equivalent to the people doing the terrible things. Which is absurd.
To claim that my analogies to countries are "non-working" is ridiculous. This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government" or "are citizens of the usa" or "are citizens of palestine" or "are citizens of iran". If anything, I feel citizens of a country have far more potential to change the course of what those countries do than an employee at a company like facebook. (they still have almost no power at all, so the point is essentially moot. But at least democracies are outwardly meant to follow the will of their citizens, and coordination is encouraged) What power workers may have, only works when they coordinate action (which I think should be encouraged. These people are your friend).
We need more rational, sober judgement in the world, not mob justice.
> I think expecting everyone else (which is, I believe, almost everyone working at facebook) not involved with any of these things to take a large personal sacrifice or be condemned is unlikely to result in many resignations.
Ah yes. All those horrible things happened overnight, right? So that's why we don't expect people to take a large personal sacrifice of ... knowing about this shit for years, and still working for the company. Or knowing about all this shit, and still choosing to work for this company.
> When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions
Never once did I ask them to stop the actions of others. However, they chose to work for a company which is complicit in all of this.
> This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government"
You keep pretending that being born in a country is exactly the same as actively choosing to work, and keep working for a company especially when there are plenty of other options. "But where else will I find a 300k salary" is not a moral choice.
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.
I think you’re treating the people at these companies as more dumb/powerless than they really are. I used to work in big tech and quit after a few years due to similar concerns that are being raised here. I will tell you anecdotally that everyone there I worked with thought our company was a net negative on society and that our work was at best indifferent and in my case likely exploited weak labor laws in poor countries to overwork people who we never were allowed to speak with for cheap data labelling. Yes, there definitely was some organizational shuffling to make it hard for us to see. We all knew, we weren’t idiots. My personal favorite book on similar concepts is “Modernity and the Holocaust”.
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
I think your point is well put, and I can agree with most of it, at least in terms of myself. I know I am a robotics engineer, and my best prospects for working on interesting or exciting stuff is in aerospace, defence etc. But I don't do that, because I think this way myself. I find it harder to judge others for the same.
That all being said, I think its worth noting that the reason that coal miners have historically had quite outsized political power and effect on politics was precisely because they required education, which helped them work together as a unit and demand better conditions and wages, as well as the camaraderie generated by experiencing bad conditions together. There are some great books about this, but the coal miners in the uk where im familiar with were much more educated than the average person, due to the engineering understanding involved. Yes it was bad conditions, but you can't have untrained workers using equations to figure out how deep into a rock face you need to put dynamite, and how much explosive of what kind, based on rock samples and tables from books. Same for what kind of supports and where, taking geological surveys etc. It was a high skill job, and also paid relatively well compared to manufacturing workers (not least due to said organization)
The difference between then and now is that there is very little solidarity between software engineers. This is a state of affairs that I believe has been deliberately engineered. I do not think shaming people for where they work will improve things. I think one can assuage ones own guilt by choosing where to work, as you or I do. But I don't see how the solution can be to ask everyone in society to just not take a better life, better income etc. Especially when the harms are very indirect.
> I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
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.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.
I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Agree, but at one point you're also effectively betraying people who typically want to give you solidarity, especially when you're working on systems and tooling used for suppressing said solidarity. So yeah, fuck you Meta employees for completely lacking any sort of spine.
I agree with you about the solidarity though. Anyone speaking out against this shit-world we've created with the internet is welcome.
Clutch those pearls!
It's even worse when you consider that even if you were to opt out of Meta services entirely (which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp), they still build a shadow profile on you based only on data other people upload about you. So yeah, not only "just don't use it" is not a reasonable argument, it doesn't even solve anything!
Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential?
I deleted my account when Facebook bought it and I don’t feel like anything of value was lost. Between messages/sms, signal, telegram, discord, I have no shortage of places to chat.
WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
I don’t really care about the shadow profile. Meta is hardly the first to build a database of non customers, and it’s not the only such database I’m in. I avoid all Meta services and will never see an ad from them.
In Brazil, for example, without WhatsApp you are an outcast of modern society there, businesses communicate with customers on WhatsApp, whole families and friend groups only use WhatsApp.
> WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
The network effect is exactly what makes it really hard for any single user to decide "I'm leaving" and tell every single person they need to be in touch to contact on another platform they don't use. What you are suggesting is simply impossible on an individual level, the only way it happens is if the platform has major issues that bleed users because it isn't working or the platform is made inaccessible by the government. Even a better competitor appearing will have a very hard time to crack the market share of a established network exactly due to network effects.
The workers would arm up with shotguns, rifles, Molotov cocktails. They'd then go to the bosses' house and have a "chat". If they didn't listen, they'd have their house shot up or burned to the ground.
It was the very bosses that hired Pinkerton's to go murder the union leaders as well.
Some of the railroad unionization got so bloody and violent that even the US military got in on the action, in favor of companies.
In the end, we got the NLRB and a whole host of rights. The violence did indeed work, but saying that is somehow breaking unforgivable speech.
And if violence isnt up to these meta engineers, perhaps they should look into CIA's own simple sabotage field manual techniques.
Long term strategically planned reduction of average salary by replacing uppity rockstars/activists with the groveling creme de la creme of codemonkeys is part of the plan.
And will those help them get where they think they want to go?
Meta stock is up 33% last year, up 122% in the last 5 years. If that isn't "being where you want to be", I don't know what is.
I don't know why, but it's endemic. You have ICE, quite literally purchasing your surveillance data so they can sweep people off the streets. But getting people to delete some apps? It's effectively impossible. However you feel about the ICE issue, and future government program could deem you the enemy. And your data is out there just waiting to be weaponized against you. But will people actually do anything about it? Delete their apps? Stop using a smartphone? Write their congressman? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. They will complain online a bit and otherwise change _no_ behavior. The only positive movement I've seen in this regard is people moving away from flock. Otherwise, people are tripping over themselves to allow surveillance into their lives.
It’s 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. I’d quit on the spot. Let them figure it out.
Some level of sacrifice is required when you feel super uncomfortable at work in the US. I get the arguments of "I can't lose my pay", but at the same time, if you aren't aligned with how they treat you now, what do you think they will be doing with that data? What does 1 year from now look like? 2 years? Do you think it will be less invasive? Or will they be tracking your eye movements as well, facial sentiment?
Some of it is intentional. A lot of it is slow creep (“ah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol I’ve always wanted!”). While you’re doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - “oh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..”). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now you’ve 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, …).
Getting out of all that is much more difficult than overcoming your own greed and discomfort - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family are pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). For some it can be leaving useful social obligations - you lose your social circle 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 it’s less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc. All in all, odds are not in an average Meta employees favour no matter what they might personally think/feel.
Let Meta and its officials feel the consequences of their actions.
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.
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.
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.
I don't doubt there are plenty at Meta who, if not nearing retirement age, might have been harboring some desire to take some time off to hike the Big Three hiking trails in the U.S. Or perhaps write a novel.
Seriously.
Citation please.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/t-mobile-claimed...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-cell-m...
> helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
… If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
The point I'm making is, there is a difference between what contract explicitly says, and what is implicitly understood due to practical limitations of the real world we live in. When the real world changes so does the effective implementation of contracts, even though the contracts themselves don't change. The problem is, by the time the world has changed against your favor, you might not have the power to demand an adjustment to the already signed contract.
> .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
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.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
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.
Bingo. Tale as old as time. The elites have always stayed in power by paying half the poor people to oppress the other half for them. And if you're thinking about the French revolution as a counter example, then I need to remind you that the wealthy elites didn't lose their heads there, the monarchy did, the rich people got away just fine.
Today the elites got the peasantry to be arguing whether something is "woke" or DEI, and to riot and burn down cities whenever a repeat felon gets killed by police, while the Epstein criminals get away with it while laughing all the way to the bank and nobody rioting.
> It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics
Nothing to do with globalism here. It's still exclusively up to US citizens to implement their destruction. US national security and surveillance tech isn't outsourced to India for them to worry about labor competition from abroad.
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.
OK, and so what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what? Evil doesn't do gender discrimination.
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Most of those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files in ambiguous terms, which isn't enough of strong evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to slam dunk jail them on the spot like Maxwell.
Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), 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.
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.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
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.
Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
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.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
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?
You can’t choose where you’re born, you can choose who you work for.
How does that even remotely make sense?
Also Meta isn’t a nation state.
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
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).
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.
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?
They all chose to work at Meta. And for the vast majority of them (especially programmers) there were other choices.
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?
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.
I think expecting everyone else (which is, I believe, almost everyone working at facebook) not involved with any of these things to take a large personal sacrifice or be condemned is unlikely to result in many resignations. You're asking people to be hurt for the actions of others.
The best argument you have here is the moment someone starts working at facebook, after these things happen. I don't know that they should be condemned, but I can understand looking at them with some suspicion. Still, its hard to say its the worst thing in the world to do, accept employment under a shitty person. Who hasn't complained about their boss?
When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions of others together with those committing acts of evil, you are making a totalizing statement. There is nothing they can do to redeem themselves. They are morally equivalent to the people doing the terrible things. Which is absurd.
To claim that my analogies to countries are "non-working" is ridiculous. This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government" or "are citizens of the usa" or "are citizens of palestine" or "are citizens of iran". If anything, I feel citizens of a country have far more potential to change the course of what those countries do than an employee at a company like facebook. (they still have almost no power at all, so the point is essentially moot. But at least democracies are outwardly meant to follow the will of their citizens, and coordination is encouraged) What power workers may have, only works when they coordinate action (which I think should be encouraged. These people are your friend).
We need more rational, sober judgement in the world, not mob justice.
Ah yes. All those horrible things happened overnight, right? So that's why we don't expect people to take a large personal sacrifice of ... knowing about this shit for years, and still working for the company. Or knowing about all this shit, and still choosing to work for this company.
> When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions
Never once did I ask them to stop the actions of others. However, they chose to work for a company which is complicit in all of this.
> This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government"
You keep pretending that being born in a country is exactly the same as actively choosing to work, and keep working for a company especially when there are plenty of other options. "But where else will I find a 300k salary" is not a moral choice.
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.
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
That all being said, I think its worth noting that the reason that coal miners have historically had quite outsized political power and effect on politics was precisely because they required education, which helped them work together as a unit and demand better conditions and wages, as well as the camaraderie generated by experiencing bad conditions together. There are some great books about this, but the coal miners in the uk where im familiar with were much more educated than the average person, due to the engineering understanding involved. Yes it was bad conditions, but you can't have untrained workers using equations to figure out how deep into a rock face you need to put dynamite, and how much explosive of what kind, based on rock samples and tables from books. Same for what kind of supports and where, taking geological surveys etc. It was a high skill job, and also paid relatively well compared to manufacturing workers (not least due to said organization)
The difference between then and now is that there is very little solidarity between software engineers. This is a state of affairs that I believe has been deliberately engineered. I do not think shaming people for where they work will improve things. I think one can assuage ones own guilt by choosing where to work, as you or I do. But I don't see how the solution can be to ask everyone in society to just not take a better life, better income etc. Especially when the harms are very indirect.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.
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.
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.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.