> Ms. Brown said a lot of students criticize Facebook and talk about how they would not work there, but ultimately join. “Everyone cares about ethics in tech before they get a contract,” she said.
This describes my what I've observed perfectly. There are very few companies that make new grad offers comparable to Facebook's, and career advancement opportunities and working conditions at Facebook tend to be better than the other 'Big-n companies'. So it's hard for a new grad to say no to a Facebook offer, even if they're morally opposed to its products.
> “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”
I call these anodyne mission statements, false mission. Mission that feels good, but that doesn't have teeth in incentives — or selectively ignores inconvenient facts.
My assumption with mission statements was that they were always bullshit made up by a marketing team or some exec and I wouldn't expect them to have much relation to reality. Was I in the minority?
Ironically I think Facebook is one example that (at least in the early days) had values that actually had teeth.
"Move fast and break things" isn't just a feel-good truism like most values that companies come up with are. It's something that at least some people are going to disagree with, and it's something that can actually be instructive when making a decision at that company.
I don't personally agree with it, but I respect that at least in the past Facebook was willing to take a stance on how they developed products that wasn't some saccharine feel-good BS that values usually are.
It might actually be that things like election interference came up so quickly that their problem was not moving fast enough to stop it before it was a problem. If their motto was "observe the problem for a year and have at least thirty-three planning meetings before making a decision", would they have addressed the problem better? Probably not. The problem was that they didn't move fast enough and break enough things.
That's the point of the parent : at least the motto has a point and mean something that you can debate, a nice change from marketing meaningless bullshit like "Imagination at work" (GE) or "Energy lives here" (Exxon)
Think of them as the "objective" section on a resume, something you really only tend to have early on in your career... as you get more experienced, you dont have an "objective" section any longer - and you realize that the only true objective-statement on a resume is "to get a paying job"...
That's a cynical position, and tends to be correct!
A real one does have a _huge_ effect on the culture of the organisation, above and beyond what is achievable otherwise. I've seen one be transformative at a former workplace. I hope you have the opportunity as part of your career.
That outlier quality is why they are seen as important, even if they get cargo-culted in most instances.
Maybe it's the flip side of the hustle mentality that the mission statement is used to manipulate rather than a genuine expression of shared values and goals?
>My assumption with mission statements was that they were always bullshit made up by a marketing team or some exec
In my experience they are concocted by a dozen people from across the company sitting in a room all day filling white boards with feel good, businessy words that only vaguely relate to their employer.
Agreement on the mission statement has to be unanimous within this group as well as being signed off on by several execs who will not be present during its drafting. The requirement for consensus ensures that only something incredibly tepid can get over the line.
Amazon has "Leadership Principles". Lots of them. And they (we? I work there) do seem to take them seriously.
Hiring? Every interviewer is trying to gain insight into one or two of those specific leadership principles. Promotions? Better have demonstrated them and have documentation to prove it.
It's not perfect, but the company tries really hard to make them not be bullshit.
Not at all, but it's important to know that they're not universally bullshit. The last two companies I've worked for (both <1k people) have genuinely valued their mission statements, and finally incentivise results that exemplify it.
Show the ads to the most users with the highest bid price ?
What is Google's mission nowadays? I don't see them following a lot of "Organize the world's information and make it open". There's a ton of closed walls, they even acquired companies like freebase and then their stuff went behind closed doors.
If I remember right from when I worked there (years ago), the wording is "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I can definitely see interpretations of that which require direct and open access to the raw data and others which just require universal and useful access to an assistive/suggestive product or service that leverages the data.
To be clear, I prefer the first interpretation, but I realize open data geeks (and those who would use the raw data if granted access) are far fewer than ML geeks (and those who enjoy the automagic suggestions) and the gap is only widening.
If I’m interpreting you correctly, both those approaches involve Google housing (owning?) the data.
In the early days of Google, I assumed that to organize and make accessible meant to index and link to information presented by others - and not to ‘own’ the data.
It saddens me that that interpretation is no longer correct - and perhaps never was?
I wouldn't know what the early interpretation was - I was there in 2006 as an intern plus 2011-2015 as a full-timer.
But the wording is certainly neutral on who houses and owns the data.
I'm guessing that you're right as to the early interpretation, since that's what makes sense for web search.
But other interpretations are the logical thing to think of first for some of their more recent ML-powered assist/suggest products, and the wording of the mission statement leaves product managers and architects/designers free to apply whatever interpretation makes natural sense in context.
I'm a very big user of Google Books. They've digitized a large chunk of the world's libraries and made them freely available. Despite the thousand and one ways in which they have betrayed their original principles, I am personally very grateful for this one offering of theirs.
They make clothes out of plastic in order to recycle. It is a conscious choice they make. (I read the book by the founder.) Patagonia may be the only company I trust.
They probably also contribute to microplastics pollution when the clothes slowly break down during washing.
Intentions don't matter anywhere near as much as results.
In the real world, you get rewarded only for achieving results, not for trying.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. They acknowledge there are always trade offs and costs. Their goal is to find the option that does the least harm.
Mission statements are always bullshit. The reason being that I have never seen a case where, when push comes to shove, that a company would forgo needed revenue if it contradicted their mission statement. Instead what happens is that leaders go through mental gymnastics trying to show "No, it still aligns with our mission statement, you just have to twist the meaning of the words in the mission statement beyond any reasonable recognition."
I am not going to argue that mission statements are not bullshit, but I don't think your argument is persuasive. Just because you will compromise some values when push comes to shove doesn't mean those values were completely meaningless... it just means they were not as important as another value that they came into conflict with.
For example, I value pacifism. I think non-violence is almost always the right choice, and feel we should work towards a world of peace.
However, if I saw someone attacking my daughter, I might use violence to stop them if I felt it was the only way to protect her.
This doesn't mean that I don't value non-violence, or that my non-violence stance is meaningless. It just means that my value of keeping my daughter safe is more important to me than non-violence.
If the mission statement is superceded by other implicit values, like creating shareholder value, it's not much of a mission statement. The whole point of a mission statement is to make your primary values explicit.
I mean, you might think that is what mission statements SHOULD be, but that doesn't mean that is the definition everyone agrees on. I think a more reasonable definition is "what our company stands for besides the things that every company stands for"
Then the mission statement should just be "Our goal is to make as much money as possible." That's what the goal always ends up being, at least once a company becomes public.
Categorically denying any role for these statements (or rather what they represent) seems slightly silly. We all have values and goals besides money, and when they inevitably come into conflict, we make decisions.
Google sees "organising information" as its mission. My desk would currently make an excellent opportunity to organise some information. Are they going to pay someone to sort all these papers? Probably not. Does that mean they have sold out their values? Unlikely...
You're hiding some of that range in the phrase:
> push comes to shove,..
...which makes the idea rather meaningless. I've shown one side above, the other is equally trivial: When Google has few billion dollars it can invest either into wearable sensors for health tech, or opening a Pizza chain, they are more likely to go with the former, even if they have similar expected returns.
If "push coming to shove" is intended to mean a situation where the very existence of Google is at stake, then they'll choose to live another day, even if they have to scale back their ambitions. I doubt anybody would expect them to behave differently.
As for examples: it seems that Apple is forgoing some profits by not participating in the big data grab. Yes, it might also be a good business decision. But it takes some commitment to values to be motivated enough, and to have the courage, to make a decision so markedly different than what the competition does.
Google leaving China is another example. Yes, they may soon return. But in the meantime they left a few billion on the table.
> Categorically denying any role for these statements (or rather what they represent) seems slightly silly. We all have values and goals besides money, and when they inevitably come into conflict, we make decisions.
Anthropomorphizing publicly held companies is quite a bit more silly. Just because I have values and goals besides money doesn't mean that companies do; I also go to the restroom and breathe oxygen.
It's often impossible to say conclusively whether money is being left on the table in the cases that you've mentioned, because there's a PR hit taken when certain things are done that could ultimately reduce revenue. In the case of Apple, the fact that the flipside of fairly tyrannical possessiveness over their customers is a vigorous defense of their customers from outside entities makes the lock-in and intentional incompatibility and obfuscation seem almost like a hug. Without that defense, it would just feel like a snare - being known to give anyone access to anything willingly would definitely affect Apple's sales in a big way. Courage in that case would be to exploit that data, figure out a way to sell that idea to the users or to conceal it from the users, and risk a lot of users abandoning the platform.
Also, Google doing what it takes to make it in China might endanger their increasing integration in the US government. The brave thing would be to try to work both at the same time.
>Categorically denying any role for these statements (or rather what they represent) seems slightly silly. We all have values and goals besides money, and when they inevitably come into conflict, we make decisions.
That's because we are people, not organizations.
>Google leaving China is another example. Yes, they may soon return. But in the meantime they left a few billion on the table.
Just because of bad PR/backslash. They were perfectly OK to work there.
Usually mission statements are crafted to align incentives between employees and customers (or users, if the product you sell to customers is users' attention). The company's mission should focus on what the customer is trying to achieve with the company's product. As the company works toward that mission, customers accomplish their goals, they become dependent upon the product, they fork over lots of money, and the company's revenues rise naturally.
Where this fails is when a company actually achieves its mission. At that point, its original mission is taken for granted, but all of the negative consequences of that mission are suddenly on everyone's mind.
For example, Microsoft's original mission was "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." Throughout the 80s and early 90s, that meant making MS-DOS and Windows easier to use, making Office handle more of the tasks needed for a modern office, and getting distribution deals so that all of these came pre-loaded. Customers benefitted from the increasing computerization, they forked over lots of money, Bill Gates became the richest man on earth. But after around 1998, Microsoft basically succeeded in that, people already had a computer on their desk running Microsoft software, and the biggest problem on their minds was that Microsoft had a stranglehold on PC software and was unfairly killing off new innovations in software.
Google's initial mission statement was "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." When search sucked, email sucked, online maps weren't a thing, finding a book meant going to a library, finding an academic paper meant forking over hundreds to Elsevier, and "web browser" meant IE6, this was a huge service to humanity. But then around 2010, they succeeded at all of these, the baseline became "I can find anything I want now", and the huge questions were what kind of information does Google have on us and what sort of nefarious purposes could they use it for?
Facebook's mission was "Make the world a more open and connected place." The world is now a more open and connected place. The result is that people are routinely put in contact with folks whose views they find abhorrent, and that you can influence an election from the other side of the world, and that Facebook has all our personal data. While the world was still cut off from each other, everyone was happy to sign up; now that we're all on one big social network, they're miserable.
Once the mission statement is no longer a problem that needs solving, then the bullshit starts. Without an actual reason for the company to exist or for anyone to do the work they're ostensibly doing, people fall back on "Well, might as well make as much money as we can."
when these huge companies have succeeded what they set out to achieve, they are ultimately left without direction
in theory, that means the company would disband. mission accomplished, let's all go home -- right?
however, large organizations and all those who depend on them for pay cannot disappear overnight -- which leads to the type of ethically gray decisionmaking that creates this issue
My friend was contracted to do some marketing for Frito-Lay and according to the team that hired them, Frito Lay's mission was to capture the 30% of non-prepackaged food eaten by Americans.
Their public mission statement is a bit more innocuous: At Frito-Lay, delighting our consumers is job No. 1. To us, that means putting consumers first in every decision we make - from the quality and care that goes into making our snacks to the ways in which we give back to the community and care for our environment.
It's basic marketing. Draw in the followers under false pretense, then all you have to do is worry about maintaining them which is much easier than bringing them in under honest terms.
This can be seen in politics as well. How often do electees follow what they were promising constituents while in the running. Then they'll do the same thing again and make a big fuss for the week or 2 prior to reelection, then go back to business as normal.
Likewise with products. Get the customer to come into the store, visit your website, or call a number. Then by the time they see it, or in some cases have already made a purchase, and find out thing aren't as advertised it's either already too late with s purchase made or they've "come too far" and the shortfalls are close enough to where they shrug and purchase anyways.
I guess I would read some of his books: Profit over People and the one on Media. He has a 1997 talk at northeastern on youtube where he addresses it a bit during question time.
There are some good thoughts and complaints in there about propaganda and nepotism, but isn't this old news? Isn't it also pervasive throughout society? I mean, there are even blatant industry-wide propaganda agendas such as Harvard scientsts lying about sugar, MIT scientists lying about climate change, and scientists lying before courts about leaded gasoline... Of course always after payments from profit-seeking industry.
There are countless examples. Of course Walmart is known for both nepotism, and brainwashing their employees about union membership. And of course they are also close with the top-echelon of politicians at state and federal levels.
Like the article mentions, companies say they are progressive, and for an example， promote gender equality, but their engineering divisions tell a completely different story. And then if you really take a moment to stop and look around the world we live in, we are in a society full of propaganda. Of course the War on Drugs, War on Terror, and War on Poverty all increased poverty, poor outcomes related to drugs, and removal of liberties and prosperity that terrorists sought for.
Over the last year, MSNBC covered Stormy Daniels on average >1/day. War in Yemen? 0 times. Or, here is Wolf Blitzer saying that arms sales to Saudis is a "moral issue" because defense contractors will "lose jobs."
Propaganda is part of our daily lives. My favorite Einstein quote is: "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
I think if you read Chomsky you will find that we've been lead this way for a long time. It is modus operandi.. aka meet the new boss same as the old boss. It's useful to understand the world and why it is the way it is. And in fact the more interesting idea is that we the people can actually exercise our democratic rights to change the situation.
Matt Taibbi in collaboration with Chomsky is writing a sequel to Manufacturing Consent, discussing history and the media environment since its publication. I'm not suggesting he is an heir, only that interested readers might check out.
This was very insightful for me. I enjoyed how he interpreted Manufacturing Consent and pointed out that the obvious interpretation is mistaken i.e. that the media peddles lies. The thesis is more subtle than that.
My theory is that pay and working conditions at Facebook are as good as they are precisely because of people feeling like this. They are having to pay a premium to attract engineers as a result of the moral opposition.
Interesting. In the same vein, video game companies have a negative compensating differential. Lots of kids want to grow up to program video games, so they don't have to pay them as much under worse work environments.
WAY worse job security. It seems like every month there's a big Twitter thread about which developer laid off dozens as soon as they finished a project, with no warning or severance.
This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job.
In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute. These jobs are hard only in the sense that you have to know the right people, (being born to the right people helps) to even be considered.
On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history. In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage...
Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation.
> On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage.
Medical licenses are controlled by the government, not the free market.
> [The free market] is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history.
... and also the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage? What does a living wage even mean - the ability to live in a single bedroom apartment? That runs ~3K/month in SF which is roughly commensurate to $50/hour.
The definition of living wage is fairly established. It is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. Needs are defined to include food, housing, and other essentials such as clothing. This definition is why, in the United States, at least, every few years Minimum Wage (used interchangeably here with Living Wage) would be raised, to keep up with inflation. It allowed the average American to start saving for a down-payment for a house even if all they had was a high school education and nothing else (so, the paperboy you mention). Until, for some reason, we stopped doing that as much.
Instead of looking at one of the most inflated rental markets in the country (SF), let's look at somewhere like Idaho - you'll find that inflation has still affected that place, but minimum wage (living wage) to be able to provide those basic needs has not kept up. This is why, countrywide, 40% of non-elderly adults report difficulty meeting basic needs such as food, housing, health care and utilities [1].
But let's consider that paperboy, for a minute. Do you really believe that the only people who deserve the most basic income to be able to live (living wage) are those that are capable of getting a higher education? What about all the other members of a functional society that we rely on?
Maybe a functional society doesn't necessarily rely on jobs with below-living wages?
Point is, the question of whether you should pay living wages to every worker is basically equivalent to whether you should provide living income to every person, employed or not. When you enforce a living wage, some jobs would disappear and you have to answer question 2 to people who lost their jobs. I don't have an answer for question 2 but I think recognizing the theoretical equivalency here would make the discussion much more straightforward.
I am quite on the left I would say (not from or in the US), so
>why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage?
My opinion is that it is everyone responsibility to create a society were were abject poverty and marginalization is minimized. There are many tools to our disposal, paying a living wage is one.
The point is do you have a problem of people working as paperboy and not being able to live properly? Then you either pay them more or try to make other jobs possible for them. We should be careful not to do it immorally, we should not just "give" to the poor, but we should make sure that they have always a chance to rise.
I do not think of this as a moral obligation to help other, it is simply my answer to the question: Do you want an entire demographic to be hopeless and disillusioned? I do not and I believe sorta high living wages are a good tool often.
ps: this is not meant to be an argumentation for anything, there are no proof or facts in this comments, just heartfelt personal opinions. I find those pretty useful sometimes and hope mines can help too.
edit: the parent was referring to non-adults paperboy, my answer completely ignores the very important concept of families which are particularly important for non-adults
"Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation."
I think the implication is that society and technology have advanced to the point where, ostensibly, work that can't be automated away should be work that would demand a living wage. If it's tenable for my job to still exist, it's tenable for it to pay me enough to live. If it doesn't... well, that would be less a function of higher level characterizations of the economy or any individual job and more a function of the basic availability of food and housing, anyway. If there isn't enough food and housing, people start dying, but since there does seem to be enough of those, what is happening?
I work retail full-time. It's definitely not "fun," and I definitely can't afford to carry my own weight; I have to rely on family to make ends meet, and I know people who rely on welfare. In regards to the time and opportunity cost of working that job in relation to compensation, it is unfair (imbalanced), but the situation emerges from a context defined by labor's complete lack of leverage, juxtaposed with the, perhaps, overcompensation of the people who support us, encompassed by our mutual desire for society to not collapse.
I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought. If it's a job that needs to be done to secure the solvency of the overall business, and that's what it costs to live in the area where whoever holds that job must live, then... that's the going rate. If someone can live on less, they get the job and are paid less. If the business can't afford to pay a full time wage for a full-time paperboy (or a commensurate wage for a part-time one), maybe we don't need or can't afford paperboys. But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
> I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought.
$50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy. If you think otherwise, why stop at merely $50/hour? I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
> But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
>$50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy.
I imagine it would merely cause the prompt and total collapse of the paperboy position, until efficiencies were created to support it (e.x., there's only one paperboy for n square miles, they oversee a swarm of paper-delivering drones, and the number of papers they deliver justifies a $50/hr salary); people simply decided that physical paper delivery wasn't worth the cost; or they decided that it was worth it, and had their pay and expenses adjusted commensurately.
>I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
I'm not sure you've proven that.
>I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
The laissez-faire approach to market management is what "innovated" tent cities into existence in the first place, man.
What's the "logical basis" for concluding that they think it's good for anyone to collapse economies?
I don't think this weak "gotcha" rhetoric is conducive to good discussion. You're trying to disarm their point by putting words in their mouth. And you're taking it off topic.
For example, since you only mention banks and large corporations, can we assume you're okay with every other possible way economies can be collapsed? No, that would have no "logical basis."
All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage?
Because we, as a society, are paying that paperboy* a living wage one way or another. The alternative is to let him starve to freeze to death. So, we build robust safety nets to catch these people - food stamps, housing assistance, etc.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to simply pay the person a living wage vs pumping the money through government programs?
* I'm assuming we're talking about an adult employee here, and not a literal paperboy as in the video game. I haven't seen one of those in decades.
> This seems to capture the current intellectual zeitgeist very well. Once we name something, we can dismiss it without engaging it.
In the internet age, this is a necessity because the other pattern is the same claims repeated over and over again with the expectation that a comprehensive rebuttal must be provided each time. At some point you have to name the thing so it can be added as an entry to Wikipedia and move on. See also: how global warming denialists have an evergreen grab bag of false claims to pull from and expect a thesis-length answer to each one.
Also, this is nothing new. Commonly referenced fallacies like tu quoque are a way of saying that the other person is arguing from shaky ground, and their argument does not need a complete rebuttal until they refine it a bit. In fact, the comment I was replying to can be considered a derivative of the just-world fallacy[1], substituting the hand of the free market for the kind of ephemeral karma that the original just-world fallacy implies.
I mean, I see what you're doing here, haha, but AlexanderB brings up a good point about asymmetrical debate, where one side says something sloppy, vague and poorly sourced and then expects you to "write a thesis" to rebut. Personally, I think this phenomena really does need a name, less to dismiss it, more to get lazy arguers to stop demanding high quality rebuttals (and at the very least to make the debate easier to walk away from). Fundamentally it's a kind of hypocrisy, but it needs a lyrical name. I like the pattern of naming a fallacy and then opting out that you're demonstrating, but a name could actually be useful. Indeed you could even term it a fallacy, the "vice demanding virtue" fallacy, or something like that.
> ...and at the very least to make the debate easier to walk away from...
I find simply reminding myself that duty doesn't actually call[0] to be a very easy way to walk away from any debate that isn't going anywhere productive
If you are going this way, someone could very well "adjectivize" your comment with the label "fallacy of fallacies" it fits very well: The fact that the comment you criticize uses a fallacy, doesn't make that comment wrong! Duckduckgo that!
edit: ok, i saw now Haberman has already provided a even better explanation about your superficial use of the word "fallacy" in your argument. Check his link, and learn something.
I regret that my point may not have come across. I don't actually believe in pejoratively labeling any good-faith argument, and I would not actually use a label like "Jacobin whinging" in earnest. My point is: labeling something is not the same as refuting it.
Apologies, my irony meter is malfunctioning today. I read it twice but I'm so used to reading this serious comments similar to your sarcastic critique online these days, it didn't read as sarcasm.
When discussing deals, jobs etc, an old boss of mine used to ask "is the juice worth the squeeze?". A job that you are morally against requires more squeeze, so you expect more juice.
>The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy.
It's fair, but not based on effort like people mistakenly think it should be. It's silly to think "I should be paid X because it was really hard work" or to try to interfere with the market to force that price.
A big part of the issue is ignorance of economics among most of the population. People don't realize they are always participating in markets, even when it's a regulated market.
>Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute.
I don't think you know what the word "average" means, because that's very far from the truth. There are hundreds of thousands of people with the title "CEO". Only a tiny fraction are of companies with publicly traded shares and only a fraction of those get large golden parachute deals (<1000).
There are more professional football players becoming millionaires for playing a game than there are CEOs who lose companies tons of money and get a golden parachute.
>On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
So what? Their medical degree obvious isn't qualifying them to be a doctor in the new country.
>So what? Their medical degree obvious isn't qualifying them to be a doctor in the new country.
I never understood this, even while in the medical industry myself. Perhaps this might be a little true for an immigrant from Venezuela with a medical degree. But for an immigrant from England, Why not?
That's analogous to switching from being a data-base administrator to a systems ops engineer. Sure, fundamental knowledge of logic is transferable (compare: knowledge of human anatomy on a general scale, courtesy of medical school), but the intricacies and applications of that knowledge are different. Some re-schooling from one extremely specialized medical post to another makes sense.
I'm talking about, for instance: being an orthopedic surgeon in England (or even France, or Russia). I operate on human bodies. Those human bodies work the same way in the United States, do they not?
Maybe there are some discrepancies in established best practices, country to country. But there is no necessity to go through the entirety of relearning fundamental medical knowledge just to demonstrate you didn't go to a "worse" medical school. Even if you did - what should be looked at is your medical practice, not school, and your patient track record.
For many jobs, the pay and working conditions really are a product of market forces. For other jobs, not so much.
For software jobs, and for jobs with garbage pay and which also suck, it's mostly true. People who can competently write software aren't that common, and there's tons of jobs and demand for them, so the pay goes up, and companies compete with each other for them by offering better pay, better perks, etc. Jobs which both suck and have horrible pay are that way because there's desperate people willing to do them, and because those jobs generally have a very low barrier to entry.
CEO jobs aren't very common, and are largely a factor of "who you know". Going to the right fraternity in college is more important than how competently you can run a company, so obviously it's not a merit-based job.
As for immigrants with medical degrees, here again there's a barrier to entry: you can't just immigrate here and get a medical license by taking a test; the industry actively limits how many licenses they allow.
>In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is.
Software jobs that pay poorly DO pay "living wages"; they surely pay far better than any random horrible minimum-wage job. You're not going to get any sympathy from me about not getting paid "enough" for some software job that doesn't pay median pay, but is more "fun". If you want more money, go find a big-corporate job that's boring as hell but pays well. Nothing is stopping you.
For actual shitty jobs, this sounds good, but how do we enforce it, besides simply raising the minimum wage? And there is an argument to be made that raising the minimum wage will simply cause many of these jobs to go away (increasing unemployment), and also cause the prices of products and services to raise, increasing inflation so that poor peoples' purchasing power isn't any better than it was before.
IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.). Automation is going to put more and more people out of work by rendering so many jobs obsolete, as machines can do them faster and more efficiently, and as a society we need to prepare for that. Remember, a century ago people thought that in the 2000s, we'd all be working 10 hours a week.
> IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.).
How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job? How do you decide what it means to be productive? How much of the success of a business relies on its innovation, or the success of a book on how well written it is? How many people have the drive and self-discipline for self employment?
On the face of it, what it sounds like you're contrasting isn't "pointless bullshit" and innovative productivity, but "what bores me" and "what excites me" or "what fulfills me."
It's easy to confuse the good-in-itself of work with the goods-in-themselves that work facilitates (paying the bills, feeding a family, giving to the less fortunate, et c). If we prioritize the former over the latter, we're going to have a crummy society in whatever regime we use to try to solve the thorny issues of automation and living wages.
>How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job?
Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs. Businesses aren't going to be able to afford to employ people to do bullshit when they have to pay enough to make them want to come to work, and when they can get a computer/robot to do it instead for next to nothing.
Non-"pointless bullshit" jobs aren't necessarily exciting or fulfilling either. They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
> Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs.
"Pointless" and "bullshit" seem like value judgments, not economic judgments. Why not simply say they are "cheaper to automate than to pay a human for"?
Suppose, though, that they are economic judgments. If the market were persuaded that working was a good whose value outweighed the cost savings of automation, then wouldn't said jobs be perforce, uh, "pointful" and smell better?
> They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
In that vein, why should it be that employers should determine the value of a job? I'm genuinely curious in your opinion here, not trying to beg the question.
The free market is not fair. It's just fairer than anything else we know of. It's not a meritocracy, just more meritorious than anything else we know of. If you think things are bad when greedy people are pitted against each other, wait until greedy people are pitted against the average man, as they are in nearly every other economic system.
I wouldn't say it's the fairest thing we know, but it scales the best. A centralized market system could be extremely fair, if there's only 7 participants. With 7 billion, there's just no way. At a national or global level, we need decentralization.
At smaller scales, we do use other systems. Within a company, essentially nobody uses a free market system.
There is something to note here, the "free market" is a pretty wide term, goes from corporate anarchy to heavy regulations with everything in between.
I agree that it is the right pattern to organize into as in "freedom for private enterprise to provide goods and services" but it not necessarily the right way to handle retirements funds.
Overall I am quite far on the side of regulations, claiming that free market needs to be constantly beaten into shape to keep it a meritocracy.
you could say that this is the free market greatest strength: private enterprise and public government can have a dynamic dialogue trough regulations often with an almost symmetric power structure (when things run smoothly).
> The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history.
Based on context, I suspect you mean merit as in moral merit. Economic merit is defined as the economic value add in a free market, so free markets are tautologically a meritocracy, because success in a free market is basically a definition of economic merit.
It certainly isn't fair, but nearly nothing is. Life is profoundly unfair.
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
A debatable point - it is easy to justify making it as easy as possible for a worker to leave a job that isn't paying a living wage and find something else. However there are a lot of people out there and not all of them are working to live. Eg, maybe someone has a stead source of income (spouse, parents or investment money) and wants to get involved in something worthwhile but low value add. It isn't at all obvious why we should prevent that as a society because nobody thinks it is worth a living wage worth of money per hour.
A minimum wage is basically a declaration that work with less value add than some number is not worth doing. From an incentives point of view, it is really weird and there are probably better ways of helping people with nothing to offer their community.
>This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job.
Maybe this is true when you consider not just the job itself, but acquiring the job. How many minimum wage jobs offer minimum entry requirements? How many offer secondary benefits that are worth a lot, but only to a very small percent of the population (such as internships offering access to important people).
Of courses, none of this means fair. Some people are unfairly born with advantages or disadvantages, many of which have no solution that I've ever seen.
I'd agree; welders is beginning to pay nicely due to their demand. You won't enjoy the time away from home or the work conditions, but you'll be paid reasonably well.
> It's because you love your job, you have to pay for that.
I don't buy that. I don't think enjoying your job and being paid well need to be mutually exclusive. I think it's in an employer's best interest that their employees enjoy their job. Part of that is that an employee has to not feel the stress of being underpaid or overworked.
> I don't think enjoying your job and being paid well need to be mutually exclusive
If there is a job, say museum docent, that the majority of qualified people would love to do then the salary of that job will approach $0. Museum docents are usually volunteers, but the chance for an art history major to practice their craft is valuable to the worker even at $0
No. In capitalism its a question of supply and demand. Usually the jobs that most people love, are in low demand, and high supply, so they can pay less.
If you love a job that only very few people love, you can still make demands and request a high salary.
They're not mutually exclusive, but they are negatively correlated.
The more enjoyable a job is, the lower the salary the boss can offer before people balk at taking it. It isn't something you can suss out in individual cases, but statistically speaking it holds up.
When I sysadminned in the turn of the millenium, I could definitely see the pay gap between running systems for corporate America and doing it for scientists in academia.
"The more enjoyable a job is, the lower the salary the boss can offer before people balk at taking it. "
This is not in line what I saw when I worked as a contractor. The higher the pay was, the better people got treated. The worst places were non-profits where people took really low salaries. They not only didn't make money but were also treated like sh.t.
Why do you think working conditions are good at Facebook. Facebook’s style of open-plan office & surveillance culture is one of the unhealthiest, anti-human work environments around. Even if the company had ethical self-awareness, I’d stillstay away just due to the physical health degradation that results from that type of open-plan office, and to help reduce the cargo-cult copying that leads other companies to mistakenly adopt that type of open-plan layout just because Facebook does.
Came here to mention the Open Plan Hell that being a FB dev would mean, which is just a layer on top of the primary evil they create with product.
Or do the kids just think that's how it is/has to be these days?
The data against open plans is abundant and solid, but firms just won't abandon a clearly failed design experiment <beats head against desk ... in our new open office>.
> Or do the kids just think that's how it is/has to be these days?
I just don't think that's the defining feature of a job for most people, and most people don't care so much. All of my schooling happened in "open office" plans, like studying at the uni library. I also learned to cope with an eight hour workday. Why are more people not demanding four hour workdays?
Open plans are less stifling/depressing to me than cubicles, and I don't watch enough Mad Men to be fixated on having my own office.
To me, it's like being fixated on any office perk. You could die on the hill of demanding catered food. And that may be worthwhile to you. But I think I'd be at a worse position in life if I suddenly needed catered food to tolerate my job.
If we're ranking job perks, floor plan just isn't in my top 5, and I reckon it's the same for most people. Pay, how interesting the day-to-day, how cool are my coworkers, how long is my commute, is it slave labor, is there a culture of people interrupting me regardless of floor plan, etc.
Finding a good job just isn't Build-a-Bear workshop, so you have to pick your battles. Keep that in mind when you look around and assume "I guess other people aren't up in arms over $thing because they know no better."
You’re just using anecdotes to argue against evidence here. Nobody cares who has mere preferences for what. No part of the open plan office debate is about that. It’s just about demonstrable losses of productivity, morale and workplace health.
The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.
Facebook also has a comparatively small number of employees compared to the other big players and as a result significantly more net income / per employee.
that isn't really a fair comparison considering microsoft makes a significant chunk of money from enterprise and that requires a lot of salesmen instead of engineers.
I doubt it, it's probably just a factor of the West coast talent wars. FB understands that talent is the life blood of any tech companies and is willing to go above and beyond to secure it. No company wants to pay a cent more than it feels it has to.
Except there are companies at the other end of the spectrum that don't seem to care. Apple was almost legendary for its long hours (not sure if that has changed post-Jobs), and perhaps as a more extreme example, the games companies are especially notorious for treating junior devs like garbage. They get away with it because people want to work in the industry for reasons unconnected with pay or work-life balance.
Unfortunately, I don't know if those new grads realize, when they work in a "sexy" industry, that they are basically paying, with either salary or working conditions, for the privilege. It seems like many don't realize this until a couple of years in, when the shine wears off...
At least at Facebook, you're starting out with your eyes open and know what you're getting into.
I’d argue that most people are aware of the working environment at Apple (which has changed, by the way-I know many people who 9-5, though many of those close to deadlines still do work more) and the gaming industry, just as they know what it’s like to work at Facebook.
Anecdotally, FB's work/life balance is apparently pretty poor compared to other 'tier 1' tech companies. 50-60hrs+ is required to get above 'meets most expectations'.
It feels like Facebook would be a great place to start a unionization effort. Fix the working conditions and use their collective power to fix Facebook's ethical problems.
Well, if the expectation is that you work a standard 40 hours, then 'meets most expectations' sounds like a typical and expected outcome from working 40 hours.
Ha, that sounds like average IT company. I wonder what 1000s of FB engineers typically do. Writing some big data processing system? or mostly just wrangling with javascript, react native etc.
I think that's unlikely. As a moderator of r/cscareerquestions, I've heard way more people talk about moral qualms when it comes to working at defense contractors than Facebook/Google, but the working conditions and pay at the former are substantially worse than at the latter.
I disagree. facebook pays a premium because they make a ton of money. Facebook has been a place people have wanted to work for a long time, and its only until January 2016 (which would contradict your theory) the media hate machine turned on them. I am not pro-facebook, but I do call it how I see it.
Are you kidding? The worst pay, worst perks, and worst working environment I ever had was at a large defense contractor, and I didn't see any of our competitors offering anything better. Almost any established tech company can beat them easily.
What are you talking about? Defense jobs, at least on the east coast, have 1) regular working hours (no unpaid overtime), 2) generally very high pay, depending on exactly what you're doing, because not that many people can acquire and hang onto a clearance. Also, 3) lots of vacation, including all the Federal holidays, and never any trouble actually using that vacation unlike so many other companies. All the stuff I read about "established tech companies" like Google and Apple is pretty horrific by comparison (like Apple's new "panopticon" HQ). I think Silicon Valley people have some pretty severe myopia when it comes to jobs outside the valley.
> All the stuff I read about "established tech companies" like Google
What did you read about Google? I have never seen an article stating that they overwork their employees, but I have seen articles saying that they encourage people to work less.
yes, I think this is because defense contractors want (or feel obligated) to be like DoD which is in the unique position of being able to prevent its 'employees' from quitting.
> Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors?
Doubtless some of those junior devs will be willing to stick around. In for a penny, in for a pound — very few people want to suddenly take a pay cut; your lifestyle has a way of keeping you hooked on a paycheck of a certain amount, once you get used to it.
And assuming the organization follows a standard "pyramid" model, you don't need that many people to stick around to give a good balance of junior to senior people, and have opportunities for promotion for high-performing/interested junior folks. Lots of companies have to create that attrition artificially; if they get it naturally as a result of people parting ways when their school loans are paid, it's probably solving a problem for them.
> Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors?
Only if everyone that has an opportunity to work there shares your moral compass. This industry is really good at marketing, and not just to customers but employees too.
I mean, look at how popular facebook still is among the public even after all of these scandals. There doesn't appear to be any serious attempt by the shareholders to demand change, and Zuck always seems to escape responsibility. I don't remember the exact number, but someone posted data on HN showing that a high percentage of current employees at FB (far more than 50%) see the company as still providing a net positive impact on the world.
> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
Consider Joseph Rotblat. He worked on the Manhattan Project because believed that it was needed as a deterrent against a German nuclear weapon. After he learned that Germany had given up on the bomb, he left the Manhattan Project - the only one to do so - and felt betrayed by its use in Japan.
"Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[39] He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race ... Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat .
Should scientists always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work?
Should Facebook employees always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work?
I think your argument is that the ethics means we really needed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over?
And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public?
It's all very odd ethics. I'm sure the Rand Corporation has some game theorists who would clear everything up.
> And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public?
From memory the "missile gap" wasn't a government lie to hide anything but an election campaign lie by Kennedy to attack the govt and appear tougher on the "commies".
> According to Robert McNamara, Kennedy was leaked the inflated US Air Force estimates by Senator Stuart Symington, the former Secretary of the Air Force. Unaware that the report was misleading, Kennedy used the numbers in the document and based some of his 1960 election campaign platform on the Republicans being "weak on defense."[5] The missile gap was a common theme.
> Eisenhower refused to refute the claims publicly for fear that public disclosure would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the USSR in its number of missiles.[6]
> In an attempt to defuse the situation, Eisenhower arranged for Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to be apprised of the information, first with a meeting by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then Strategic Air Command, and finally with the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in July 1960. Still, Kennedy continued to use the same rhetoric, which modern historians have debated as likely being so useful to the campaign that he was willing to ignore the truth.
If you want an explicit lie, the Eisenhower administration lied to the US public saying that the U-2 was for high-altitude weather research. When Powers was shot down, the official US lie was that a high-altitude research flight was missing, and may have 'drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 .
If the Manhattan Project is a useful comparison, then we have to take the totality of the people working on project, including the one person who quit, for moral reasons.
He 'believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work'.
In other words, yes, we should apportion some blame to 'the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb'.
(For that matter, Philip Morrison was one of those scientists. He helped load the atomic bombs onto the planes that made the two bomb runs. Certainly there's direct blame there, if blame is to be placed.)
Certainly the rest of the scientific staff did not have the same views, or at least, didn't place the same weight on the different aspects of the ethics.
Even then, remember that Oppenheimer remarked that he felt he had "blood on my hands" because he and others of the scientific staff thought the bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary. Truman later told Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again."
Regarding your point, and quoting from the WP page on Rotblat: "Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. In 1985, he related that at a private dinner at the Chadwicks' house at Los Alamos in March 1944, he was shocked to hear the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., say words to the effect that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets."
I interpret that to mean that Rotblat would have considered using the bomb against the Soviets in the way you summarized it as being sufficiently unethical that he would not work on it.
> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
I'm the last one to defend Facebook here but I don't see how designing an atomic bomb is comparable to working for Facebook, regardless of what you think about the morality of each.
It is an extreme example to illustrate the point, not a direct comparison of FB to atomic bombs.
However, one might argue that FB is actually worse. It is hard to quantify widespread societal effects and determine if they would have occurred through other channels. The massive privacy violations across the world through FB is another item that is hard to quantify yet 100% morally wrong.
I don't think it would be a very persuasive argument. Atomic bombs have some easily quantifiable negatives, for example $5+ trillion spent on nuclear arms in the US alone, and ~200,000 mostly civilians killed.
The atomic bombs were dropped as a result of a dangerous political movement gaining power in Germany. That's the sort of thing people are upset about Facebook enabling now.
Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society. Things like censorship and tracking don’t have clear and immediate negative externalities, but they are clearly wrong and they can enable other, worse things.
"Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society."
I never asserted that Facebook was a positive for society, neither here nor ever in my life. I'm just saying it's a very steep uphill climb to make a convincing argument that it's worse than something that directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars.
Facebook basically fueled a genocide in Myanmar and extreme violence in other places. The whole fake news thing we went through in 2016 was pioneered by Russia to annex Ukraine. Facebook was warned about these behaviors repeatedly by government and watchdog organizations and apparently did nothing to curtail them. So Facebook is this great tool to stay connected to people but at the same time it has been hijacked to cause real harm.
Facebook basically fueled a genocide in Myanmar and extreme violence in other places.
If we widen the definition slightly to include other social media firms then the most recent phase of chaos in the Middle East (post "Arab Spring") and the rise of ISIS can directly be blamed on FB and Twitter.
> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms
Perhaps, though I tend to think that developers are largely overcompensated for the benefit they provide to society as a whole. (Yes, I'm one of them.)
> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms
I disagree, we just have a favourable job market. We're a privileged slice of the population, my salary is way higher than anyone in my family, than my partner or most of my school mates. Am I smarter than them? Am I working harder than them? I don't think so.
It's sheer luck. It's not to dismiss any of the effort/creativity/perseverance it takes to get into that class of work, but devs are anything but "undercompensated". There's just not enough of us around.
Now the bay area might be a special case where the reliance on our industry completely distorted everything else.
Regarding your point about blaming students working for Facebook, I agree, I don't think they should be blamed. Everyone has their own situation to deal with.
I'd have a lot more understanding for the people working on the atomic bomb. From their perspective they were in the midst of a world war with an enemy that was trying to do the same thing. That's just a matter of preserving your own existence.
New grads don't have the liberty of filtering out 85+% of companies that have shitty morals. The ones that are too small to be newsworthy likely wish they could do what facebook does and more.
It really depends. You can be selective to where you apply and still a job, even as a new graduate. It’s not like it’s impossible to get offers if you’re talented.
It doesn’t mean grads are excited about working at Facebook, it means they accept an offer for the sake of common sense.
This will most likely work to Facebooks disadvantage long term however; Facebooks workforce can’t only be motivated by money.
There was certainly a time that people would’ve took way less money to be part of FB because they believed in the product and mission, which is now a joke.
Agreed. Also, now if any other Big-N company is willing to offer about the same compensation as fb, people will be more inclined to leave fb because of the joke their product and mission have become.
There are a lot of people who interview at the big tech companies + a couple small impact oriented startups, but it's very rare for them to take the small impact oriented startups offer. It's hard to turn down 250k a year.
I actually don't think this is true. Many computer science students are not only looking for morality in companies but also excitement. Also it's not 250K. Big Tech might give advantage of like +15K. Also, the work is not nearly as exciting. It's safe and cushy, but as a person in their 20s out of college, safe and cushy isn't fun.
As a new grad out of college with friends at FB, I can attest that it can actually be 250k (base + equity + returning intern signing bonus). At least for year 1.
15k? Maybe it widens as you gain experience, but my last job search (at ~3.5 years of experience) resulted in a 90k difference between the highest startup offer and lowest non-startup offer.
This is true of anything, just a bunch of talk. It's easy to be opposed to X when X does not offer you anything. As soon as X is good for you, many (most?) people don't stick to their guns.
It’s always a compromise. Facebook offering you an extra $10K but you have to work on increasing engagement? Probably a pass. Facebook offering an extra $500K to work on public research that doesn’t help their bottom line? Maybe something worth looking at. Currently, I don’t see any jobs at Facebook that tip the scale for me personally.
“What’s best for them” often also includes a vague notion of “feeling good by helping humanity” of similar, which often doesn’t show up when just looking at salaries.
Facebook doesn't just come out and offer students contracts. They have to apply and do a phone screen and travel to the office and spend a whole day interviewing. There are so many steps where it's still easy to be opposed but they're doing it anyway.
Where did I say "no one"? Putting words in my mouth and then finding a single example which refutes something I never said I a complete waste of energy.
Right, as long as there is still prestige associated with the company name, people will still try and work there. We as a society encourage it. You can get social clout from working at Exxon-Mobil or any of the big banks -- likewise the social capital you get from working at Facebook/Google/etc. is large, regardless of the privacy and ethics implications in working there.
That's fine. You can't expect 100% of the taskforce to have the same morals. Thing is, there are enough out there so that immoral companies need to pay more or offer better conditions to have people who would work for less for an ethical competitor.
And actually it probably also means that some people competent enough to gain a salary they consider enough in ethical venues will just say no to Facebook whichever salary they are proposed.
If you can't change the incentives, change the game: either cap salaries and stock grants, or provide a universal basic income. The point being is, you want to make it easier for people to make the ethical choice.
So true!! I really wonder how some of the folks that live there sleep at night. Like some of the things they do, do in fact change the world, but many more do harm it!
Actually, we know from the Milgram Experiment[1] that most people just compromise their morals for authority figures regardless of pay.
Most people aren't bad inherently they just do what they are told and then alter their world view to justify what they've done because internally we generally don't think of ourselves as bad people.
So if you do nasty things to someone because someone else in authority tells you to, you tend to dehumanise them after the fact not before. Next time you have to do something nasty you'll find it easier because you've dehumanised the victim previously.
This is a good point, however, I think this would apply more to workers who have already been employed for awhile. Anyone joining should have the sense they'll be subjected to dubious practices.
You'd think that but that isn't what the experiment showed.
None of the subjects had been through the experiment before.
They were all commanded by an authority figer (man in a white coat with a clipboard) to shock an unseen but heard fellow subject with increasingly large voltages. The "victim" was an actor who begs for mercy with each shock and then suddenly goes quiet. The experiment goes on with the subject shocking the "dead" actor when it finishes.
Most did what they were told with no complaints.
Some complained that what they were doing was wrong but still did it anyway.
Only a very few said "no I won't do that, it's wrong" and left the experiment.
There's no reason to think that the people working for Facebook or Google are any different to those test subjects. They'll spread fake news, dodge taxes or compile massive amounts of data on people just because they're told to by their boss. Just like most other people would.
I get that we don’t like Facebook, but isn’t this a bit much? Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the people who make mobile games and loot boxes for Blizzard?
Where is it ethical to work?
I mean, I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money, but that’s not for everyone and I frankly don’t think Facebook is really that more evil than around 90% of the hundreds of software companies we deal with.
Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back.
So some company is making 118 million because the world is rotten. That company is the most popular tech destination for newly educated CS grads in my country by the way.
From my experience, most of this negativity just appears on HN or on channels who have some strong bias (usually business related) against Facebook.
All my acquaintances working in tech, which includes people from very wide sociodemographics ranges, consider Facebook an absolutely prestigious employer, with top talent, top challenges, top compensation and top name for building a personal brand.
Hell, I interviewed at FB about a year ago and was _thrilled_ to get an offer (which I ultimately didn't accept for other reasons) and I loved the technical challenges that they are working and how they are advancing the state of the art on some really cool scalability problems.
I'll be downvoted, but when it comes to Facebook, HN is a broken record.
As a Googler, Facebook would certainly be a place I would consider if I wasn’t at google. You’re right, of course, that it is a better than fine employer.
That doesn't prove anything though: employee at biggest surveillance machine in the world considers working at the 2nd biggest surveillance machine in the world.
A lot of us software engineering types lack integrity and are perfectly happy to work on socially harmful projects as long as the pay's right and there's opportunity to grow one's skills.
> A lot of us software engineering types lack integrity
This is pretty insulting, working at Facebook doesn't necessarily mean you don't have integrity. The majority of the company is engaged in development efforts that aren't related to the odious part of the business to do with brokering personal data.
Additionally, I'm sure Facebook would move away from that if there was a viable way to get people to pay directly for social media. It's not like they're selling data because they're moustache twirling villains, they're doing it because it's the only business model anyone can make work for social media.
Further, it's interesting how Google is in exactly the same business at Facebook, yet receives a small fraction of public hatred for it.
Working at the company which is responsible for making election manipulation easier, facilitating murders and manipulating billions of people into giving up their private information is not ok, even if one actually works on some cool JavaScript library and not the evil bits themselves.
By this definition, anyone working for any platform that facilitates communication could be responsible for this unless they're policing literally every message, in which case they're grossly violating the privacy of users. This is a ridiculous standard to hold engineering staff against.
No it's not ridiculous. If Facebook is paying you to work on anything, they are getting more value out of you than your salary in their tracking endeavors.
Would you justify working for the Nazis if it was on open source libraries to better enable tracking people?
I've been visiting this website for almost 10 years.
Firstly, only in the past year have Google's or Facebook's reputations taken a turn for the worse. There are critics but there are many more cheerleaders, excuse-finders and whataboutists.
Secondly, this is not an HN bubble thing. Major publications in both the EU and US have written about the damage companies like Google and Facebook do to democracy, society and individuals.
And even if it were an HN bubble, it's about time HN woke up to the malignancy of these corporations.
I don’t work on anything I consider socially harmful, FWIW. Before you ask, I don’t think most people would consider what I do socially harmful either, if they knew what it was.
Whatever you're working on, you're helping Google maintain their dominance and continue their abuse, otherwise you can be pretty sure they wouldn't be paying you for it.
I seriously don't get why Google and Facebook got that brand name. 95% of engineers there are part of the pack and do mainly mindless jobs with very little impact. They are the mot "Sheep-ish" people I know, convinced that working for Google/Facebook give them something to brag at dinner parties.
The top 5 rockstars % (the ones they really want to attract with big money) are the ones taking all decisions.
??? You seem like you’re trying to find a fight here for reasons I cannot fathom. All I think of you as an employee of one of these companies is that you’re probably less well compensated than you could be.
Clearly it can't be that prestigious since they declined me :).
But seriously, while they probably are prestigious and cool right now, I do feel that there's enough hostility towards FB in the hacker community (and thus their supply of employees) that it might start forcing them to hire average-at-best engineers.
Anecdotally, I’m helping several friends, who are each exceptionally capable, employed at Facebook with new jobs. They reached out before this revelation, to their credit, though this threw fuel on the fire. I suspect Facebook will be known for having hired mediocre sell-outs a few years from now.
> I trade private equity stakes in technology companies. Former aerospace investment banker and before that, algorithmic equity derivatives trader.
You're also the one who submitted this article. Somehow I doubt you are actually helping friends at FB find new jobs.
I think it's much more likely that you are short FB. There's a lot of your type out there spreading articles like this as much as possible.
Maybe you should spend some time thinking about what contributions you investment banker types are making to society, if there is any. Good riddance...
I graduated six years ago, have worked at Microsoft and Dropbox, and anecdotally around a quarter of my friends at either of them wouldn't work at Facebook now. Parent comment is not obviously wrong, and you shouldn't assume bad faith.
Your last submission was titled "We're lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" and around half your comment history is devoted to defending Facebook. At least if you're going to question someones motives, you should state yours.
Did you actually do a poll of your coworkers on this topic? :)
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume an investment banker isn't going to be much help to FB employees in finding a new job. Claiming that "Facebook will be known for having hired mediocre sell-outs a few years from now." is at best a baseless slander. How in the world is that not in bad faith?
Spreading misinformation to aid one's short position is a much worse case of bias, in my mind, than what I've said in defense of the company.
1. No, it's not reasonable to assume a technology-sector investor isn't going to be able to help techie friends find jobs.
2. The "slander" was supported by an anecdote. And this is a comment section -- opinionated statements will be found.
3. What might be closer to slander is the fantastic assumption that the other commenter is shilling for a short position in Facebook. That's a mind-boggling assumption to make on the flimsiest of evidence. Even setting aside that trying to promote your short in a random HN comment is laughable
4. You're curiously silent on your own bias, well noted by pantaloons
I'm not "curiously silent" on my own bias. What do you want me to say exactly? You're trying really hard to paint the same picture you're criticizing, namely that I'm some sort of shill.
I think the idea that everyone at FB who doesn't leave immediately is a "mediocre sell-out" is very far from the truth, and contrary to my own experience. Thus I'm suspicious of people who claim such.
There's already enough people on HN that will type out a borderline vitriolic four point list of why anyone who defends FB is wrong.
Why don't you look at JumpCrisscross' post history? This isn't the only anti-FB article he's submitted. Or are you a bit biased here? :) He has even commented on FB's stock price and predicted it will go down more in the future.
My bias is that I think there's another side to the story.
> I think the idea that everyone at FB who doesn't leave immediately is a "mediocre sell-out" is very far from the truth, and contrary to my own experience. Thus I'm suspicious of people who claim such.
You are so self-assured about your position that you immediately take the contrary assertion to be in _bad faith_? This seems silly to me, but perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree.
> I doubt you are actually helping friends at FB find new jobs
I did.
> it's much more likely that you are short FB
I don’t own a single share, nor am I short a single share, of any public company. I play in private companies’ equities and debts. That’s my day job, and it (along with super-safe bonds) are where I put my money. You may be confusing bankers with fund managers.
> you should spend some time thinking about what contributions you investment banker types are making to society
I think about this frequently. Many bankers waste their oxygen. But I don’t think I do.
At best, someone at Facebook might do something I strive to—help bring something new to the world that is good and wouldn’t have otherwise existed. At worst, I lose money. (Never fun, but by legal requirement I can only lose the money of those with very much of it.) At worst, Facebook prompts violent atrocities.
Hey what are the top challenges that Facebook offer? I dont work in tech and follow HN as I find the less technical posts interesting, and I can’t grasp why people want to work in many of these companies, like where is the buzz from working at Facebook now?
Downvotes but no responses... But seriously, its already built to a huge scale, its core product that people actually use (newsfeed / apps) havn’t changed in years(functionally - I’m sure the code base has..). is it the appeal of working on a product used by a significant proportion of the worlds population or just working at a huge company?
Downvotes because to be honest your response sounds either incredibly clueless, or incredibly arrogant/condescending (I wasn't the one who downvoted FWIW).
Here for a preview of something that is completely led by Facebook due to their scalability needs, and that most small/mid/large employers would never have the resources to fund, or the need to pursue: https://code.fb.com/open-source/linux/
All these projects have had major contributions during 2018, so not everything has been "figured out" yet.
Hi, thanks for the information, I did not mean to be condescending, definitely completely clueless! The interesting thing is building the tools that lets you run a platform the size of Facebook. Cool.
Generally it's FAANG (minus Amazon, plus some unicorns), for the reasons mentioned above: a very good balance of excellent compensation, talented peers to work with, and interesting work.
Joining these companies in the right teams is literally what makes it possible to have an exciting technical career AND the guarantee of being able to retire (or more generally, gain financial freedom) in your early/mid 40s, if one decides to stay on an individual contributor technical track. Seriously, it's the only decision that makes sense if one has the chops to get into one of those places. Always pay yourself first, with interesting works that keeps you marketable and with liquid cash to put into your retirement savings!
I would have jumped ship myself but, as I said in a few other previous comments, I had crazy luck to join a "very mediocre" startup who is growing a lot, so my appreciated equity prevents me from leaving, otherwise I'd for sure be in FB right now, since the offer they extended me was very generous and the specific work was something I wouldn't be able to do anywhere else.
A close friend of mine was hired for their network traffic team a few months ago. I spoke to him recently and he said: "boy, I thought I knew many things about handling large traffic at scale, but the things I'm seeing here are simply unprecedented". So, to all the people who say FB will go down in history for hiring mediocre people, please recognize how ridiculous your statements are.
> Seriously, it's the only decision that makes sense if one has the chops to get into one of those places.
For you, sure.
There are better ways I can think of spending my 20s and 30s than just setting up for retirement in my 40s, because when you're in your 40s, you're not in your 20s or 30s anymore.
I never said "than _just_ setting up for retirement". I am in my early 30s and early retirement has always been a major goal for me (grew up dirt poor and suffered because of it), and yet I don't feel I will ever regret working very hard during this past decade, since it allowed me to accomplish some things I'm pretty proud of:
- It allowed me to immigrate to the US and become a citizen in 8 years, coming from a poor European country, thanks to my engineering background I obtained by getting a BS + MS in computer engineering while other acquaintances were going down an easier path (e.g. "I don't want to waste my early 20s studying").
- It allowed me to live in San Francisco, an absolutely amazing city where I am having the time of my life, cultivating relationships with my diverse group of friends, exploring nature, ...
- It allowed me to work on very interesting projects and technical work.
- It allowed me to travel without worrying about budgeting, I take a month of international travel every year and in between jobs I took a 4 months break to explore more deeply SE Asia.
- All that hard work allowed me to be incredibly well compensated, and in my very early 30s my liquid net worth is in the 7 figures now (started from exactly 0 out of school), which gives me an immense freedom for the rest of my life.
So, I didn't "_just_ set up for retirement", and had I been in FAANG I would have likely done exactly the same (since that's what my friends working there do), just being paid more so right now my net worth would be even higher.
I'll certainly agree to disagree since my statement was perhaps too strong, but I just wanted to bring the perspective that one can work hard with an early retirement goal without giving up on the things that one could "otherwise enjoy" if pursuing a different goal.
Amazon is known to pay less and have a brutal work life balance.
Microsoft is known for paying less and being too big and too political to the point where making an impact is really difficult.
Mind you, this is on average: there are stellar teams at both of those companies that work on incredible stuff, and I would consider an honor and privilege to be in that situation, if the opportunity was given to me. Likewise, there are many teams in Google maintaining internal legacy applications with no challenges to solve, and you would have to pay me 7 figures to force me to work on those.
According to my experience, the average Amazon/Microsoft engineer would jump in a heartbeat to Google/Facebook, given the opportunity and assuming the logistics are feasible. The opposite is much less common. If you download the Blind app and start reading threads, you’ll quickly realize this trend yourself, and it matches what I’ve heard from acquaintances. Based on these observations, yes, I conclude those engineers have less prestige until they stay with those employers (relative obviously, they are still at a top tech company, so probably in the very top percentiles of the market).
Once again, this is on average, it depends on the specific team. There are insanely talented people at both MS and Amazon!
As far as you not getting accepted, not passing an interview there doesn’t mean you are not talented, but passing the interview very likely means you are talented, and for them this high false negative rate is good enough at this time.
I’ve been lucky enough to get offers at Google, Netflix and Facebook and the interviews were definitely hard, I can’t imagine a weak candidate passing those interviews by mistake, but I can very well imagine a smart candidate not passing them. Preparation is key: I played the game for a few months and prepared according to their interview style. It’s tedious and time consuming work.
>> Seriously, it's the only decision that makes sense if one has the chops to get into one of those places.
I don't apparently
> I conclude those engineers have less prestige until they stay with those employers
Well, I appreciate your honesty - when I tell most people about how I make ~$150k at one of those companies they usually claim they don't look down on me when I've always maintained they secretly do. Thanks for clearing it up.
I hope my life isn't forever ruined by my inability to get into FB/G/top startups out of undergrad. I prepared for years but never got past the onsites. Hopefully someday I'll be able to gain the respect of people like you.
The point is that these peoples in the article have leverage. Companies are competing for them not the other way around, so it's natural for them to consider ethics because it will not affect their standard of living.
If I have the choice between working for Palantir or Facebook, I choose Facebook. If have to choose to between Facebook and Apple I choose Apple. Whatever I choose I will still live extremely comfortably. And yes not all those companies have an equally bad impact on society.
In both of your examples it's fair to say that you (or CS grads in Denmark) probably don't have that kind of leverage, because this is not the Silicon Valley.
If you have to choose between working for FB at 150k$/year or public service for a third of that, then yes, choosing ethics has a big negative impacts on your life and it's hard to blame anyone for choosing FB.
Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English.
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us.
You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service.
The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
"Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English.
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us."
That is my point. Many of them move to the SV because they can get better conditions (caused by more leverage) there than if they stay in Denmark because there is a magnitude more tech companies there than in DK.
I'm pretty sure they don't just move to avoid the rain :)
I'm coming to the conclusion, pretty much nowhere is inscrutable and free from scandal in one form or another.
However that doesn't give us a pass to be glib and just throw our hands up and say, it's all bad who cares, get money. Nothing positive comes from cynicism.
It's especially important to call this out when companies are talking about "making the world better" or otherwise making broad statements about them being a positive force in the world. It's incongruous between reality and their public relations, and that needs to be talked about.
I live in Brazil, where a Facebook company, was used in a plot to spread fake news to elect a far right president. They are really against doing anything that may affect their bottom line.
Can you elaborate? What was Facebook's role in this? Do you blame Facebook for not filtering out any potential fake news or did they take an active position in the matter?
The winner candidate created a well funded structure to disseminate fake news through WhatsApp. There were demands to limit the ability for a individual to spread fake news, but WhatsApp/Facebook had deaf ears.
Here are a bunch of links from reputable sourcers:
It was a Conspiracy Theory created by a journalist who wrote that non-media companies were sending fake news, with no evidence to show for it. Whatsapp, which is supposed to be E2E encrypted, is the most popular app in Brazil and the government wanted Facebook to censor information, but they said no. Obviously there were false messages about every candidate in the election, not just the one the above guy didn't like. There was even a deepfake video. I can't stress how dangerous it is to ask the government to classify what is true and what is not. This is totally different from the facebook case in America because there it involved ads. Here it was messages from individuals. But sadly the left was advocating for censorship while calling the others fascists.
> Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the people who make mobile games and loot boxes for Blizzard?
The recent Times article indicates that they are dirtier than Google and Apple, so yes.
When I was in college and looking for an intern job I declined to interview with RJ Reynolds and several local alcohol producers on moral grounds. I wouldn't have accepted a job there no matter what they offered me. So, I can understand why people wouldn't want to work for a company and believe that there are people in the world that won't compromise their morals for a paycheck.
I still like Facebook, but I get all the hate. It is an annoying product and can be addictive. And it used to be less annoying, more about persons and not products, and they don't care about not being addictive. They seems to be trying to cope with thinks like fake news, though. It is part of being a totally new product.
Working at Netflix, Apple, Salesforce, Oracle, or Microsoft seems to be a category more ethical than Facebook/Google, wouldn't you say? Isn't that a good place to start? At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes)
I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money
Even here, different people in different situations might see this as either choosing idealism over money or the opposite.
I hear the Danish public service is good. Here though (ireland) the public service has a name for meaningless jobs with good conditions. This may be a self fullfiling prophecy.
Sometimes the differences can get abstract.
I watched an interview while back with coalition soldiers and mercenaries. Soldiers are generally seen as self sacrificing patriots. Mercenaries as greedy assholes. But, both are being paid and they do the same job in the same war and take orders from the same place.
Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to perspective.
They aren't worse. They are different. People want to work on products they relate to, especially when they are young and without dependents. Young people don't relate to facebook anymore, but they relate to google and amazon because they use those services in their home life and career life.
There are plenty of ethical places to work. You just need to not look only at the richest companies with the most generous compensation, because they tend to be the ones that aren't.
It's a simple question you have to ask yourself. Do you value money more than your principles?
It is their personal moral decision, you can't make it for them. I encourage everybody to try to align their values with their work. Capitalism is wrong that we are all just replaceable cogs that can be put to work on any capitalist's dreams.
> Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back.
Can you give the name of this company / case? I can't find anything in English news of Denmark.
The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys.
It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.
I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money.
They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff.
I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that.
You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range.
The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.
Oh yeah, companies of substantial size have large/meaningless overheads too. That's the unfortunate consequence of having a lot of people work together with varying opinions/motivations.
They also have to spend a lot on warm bodies/lobbying to get those contracts in the first place.
I'm not letting the enterprise providers off the hook. Just pointing out (as you note) that true responsibility lies with the project managers. Ineffectual project managers mean overblown budgets and undercooked results.
> You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders.
Yeah don't blame the exploiter, blame the victim!
I am sickened by this philosophy. Why do we let people get away with doing horrible things because "they're just doing their job". This sort of thinking breeds more immoral actions that are easily excused.
If you can link the fall of democracy to misinformation being spread on their platform, genocide and mob murders, yes I’d say not all tech companies are that bad.
I think poor education, stagnation of living standards and rising inequality is a lot worse in that area than Facebook.
Granted, I think angrymob-media would be a much more fitting description than social-media, but it’s not like humanity wasn’t perfectly capable of making really shitty decisions long before the internet.
yes, they are worse than all those. Perhaps loot box companies are close and only less so because of current scale and not because of less sinister intent.
Google is not fbook, (not that I am a fan of big G - it's evil in other ways more so than fbook) -
Where is ethical in my mind is more shades of grey rather than place A is and Place B is not..
I think many people do not understand the immense power the fbook wields to truly get how damaging it is and can be. Some of us may not get sucked in by our evolving news feed, but that does not mean that it is not indeed sucking people in and keeping them hooked for it's benefit and to the detriment of other's lives.
there are so many ethical things you can use your brain on. first of all, you can start by not investing your talent/intelligence on advertisement. everybody knows ads are bad and they make making people suffer in many ways. we know so well that facebook, google et.al have no good intentions for the planet and are harvesting massive profits. ultra capitalist, maybe? we have many choices as humans, we can choose to organize, work for honest people and take a big shit on evil companies destroying our environment!
...the head of the start-up incubator and investment firm, Y Combinator, gave opening remarks, recommending that young people avoid jobs in big tech. “You get to program your life on a totally different scale.... The worst thing that can happen to you is you get a job at Google.” He called those jobs “$100,000 a year welfare” — meaning, he said, that workers can get tethered to the paycheck and avoid taking risks.
Why would you want to work for a YCombinator startup if you're not a founder? You're taking the risk, you get underpaid, and you don't get the big potential payoff.
The head of YC will always give advice that helps their cause. They will not say "go get a job elsewhere and don't work for the companies we invest in". Setting aside if that is good advice or not you should always consider the motive behind it. In this case, they are too biased to be trustworthy so don't try to analyze something possibly thrown in bad faith. Plus, I know for a fact that they have invested on companies started by recent grads that started their careers at big corps and then jumped ship. You gotta find a problem to fix somewhere, right?
... only that in 2018, it's anything but $100k. New grads would scoff at that; they're easily clearing $200k if not more[1]
And I wholeheartedly agree with your statement. YC's stance is convenient since they have a vested interest in getting talent for your startup. I see it as more desperation in the face of the current reality that most people can comfortably earn for their future while working at a big co and then choose to move to a startup (in whatever capacity) further down the line once they're more "woke" so to speak.
If (big if) you can choose the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc. and become one of the first 20 employees, your payoff is going to be far greater than if you're the founder of an average YC startup. There's also the closer-knit network than at a huge company like Google & the opportunity to learn several times more than you would at a big company.
Definitely not for everyone and you will be paid less off the bat. But if you think about the course of your career, working at a startup(s) for a few years is probably a good way to lengthen the upper tail of your future potential wealth distribution with relatively limited downside risk.
> If (big if) you can choose the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase etc. and become one of the first 20 employees,
Completely irrelevant. As one of the first 20, you have exactly zero idea if it's going to be the next Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, etc.
Your chances of landing at a company like this as a first 20 are perhaps .0001%, and if you did land there, you won't know it was a success for 5-10 years afterwards. And as a person straight out of school, you are not getting key-hire level of equity in your offer package. You'll get an amount that would equalize the total comp were you to go to a bigco, IF the startup sees modest success.
Big payoff is not the reason to go to a startup. As one of the parents said, work environment is the reason. IMHO anyone out of school should go to a startup, not a bigco. For the work environment.
Same reason you'd work for any startup - because startups are fun and interesting? You get a level of autonomy you can never have at an established company, with freedom to experiment and work creatively.
As someone who has worked for five separate startups, I have to disagree. While you do get close to your teammates, in my experience the managers in startup-land tend to be a lot less flexible because they have their vision of how something is supposed to be done.
I work for a giant evil megacorporation now, and I honestly feel like I have more freedom here to explore new stuff than I ever did as a JS/PHP/GOLANG/MONGODB Ninja/Rockstar/Guru in startup land.
It's an interesting dynamic. BigCo doesn't live or die by a single employee or customer, so they can afford for devs to explore tech/ideas/etc.
But in terms of actually commercializing/releasing something, there's so many hoops to jump through that good ideas simply get stifled.
Startups are the opposite - they can ill afford a developer spending a week learning NewStack, but if someone floats an idea that fits (or improves) their business model, they can execute in the blink of an eye.
As with most things in life, there's pros and cons to both.
Worked at 3 startups and 2 mega-corps and had the absolute opposite experience.
The only time a manager at a startup was trying to stringently manage me was when he was hired from a mega-corp. Lot of startups make that mistake.
For me, startups still remain the best place to explore new technologies and capabilities (incl. personal upskilling) under a deadline (as opposed to personal projects).
The (in?)famous article Don't Call Yourself a Programmer [0] argues otherwise. The author warns against working for a startup, unless you're the founder or committed to what he calls a lifestyle. Instead, he argues you can work for a hi-tech big corp, enjoying autonomy and fun projects as well as a good work-life balance.
Not that I agree with everything in that essay -- some pretty cynical and controversial statements there -- but what he says about startups seems worth considering.
That's a great article. I especially love the bit about equity, which ought to be valued at $0 for all practical decision-making purposes.
My experiences with the tech giants have featured neither autonomy, fun, nor anything resembling a work-life balance; they do pay well, but not well enough to make that kind of experience worthwhile. Life is here to be lived, not put off for later, and I'm not going to waste mine grinding away on a bunch of tedious bullshit so long as I have an alternative.
Then again, here I am writing from my cubicle at yet another tech giant, which recently acquired the startup I was working for, and it's been a much better experience so far. Who knows? Maybe I'll end up sticking around for a while.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I definitely agree that life's too short to waste it grinding away at tedious tasks. I'm certainly not arguing for doing boring stuff at a big corp!
>you can work for a hi-tech big corp, enjoying autonomy and fun projects as well as a good work-life balance.
The big companies I have worked with have always had legacy software and slow moving projects. (Edit: 2 out of 3 of the big companies I have worked for. One was very cool, but the location was absolutely terrible).
I suppose the author of TFA argues you should choose your big corp wisely ;)
My own experience has been mostly low/mid-tier companies (software factories mostly) and they are terrible: slow moving, legacy and uninteresting projects; low motivation; no highly qualified people to learn anything from; nobody cares if the damn thing works.
My current job is at a relatively big company. Fast moving projects, interesting tech (depending on the project), high motivation, lots of very knowledgeable coworkers. Granted, my experience is a really small sample (1 out of 1) and I've never worked for a startup so I can't compare. One of my friends has been struggling with his own startup for some years, and while the tech is interesting, his day to day is very stressful (and highly focused on staying afloat) and I wouldn't want it for me.
I know a fair number of people who had fun, interesting careers in their 20s. But when we talk about investments and saving, they all seem to suddenly realize that time is limited, and if you’re going to trade it for money, it’s best to get as much money for your time as you comfortably can.
Who cares about the payoff? Startups will still pay you a good enough salary, and if they don't why would you even consider working there? It's not like startups don't pay a salary at all.
And if a startup does pay well, why is it risky to join? Worst case scenario it folds and goes bankrupt in a year. It's not like there's a shortage of software jobs that you'll be unemployed for a long time. Also, for people who want to become founders in the future, joining a startup is their best option to learn about how businesses are built and what mistakes to avoid in building said businesses.
So not everyone is joining startups just for the payoff or to make it big. People are way more realistic than that.
The best way to learn how to start your own company is to join an early stage where they give you lots of responsibility and ownership. The closer you are to the founders the easier it is to learn from their mistakes.
This isn’t really true. The important experiences at a startup are meeting and learning to work with investors, the board, regulators, early key customers and so on. As an employee you won’t get this exposure (tho’ the founders will dangle it in front of you like a carrot). As an early employee your job is to grind, sacrifice your health and relationships, then get diluted out by the next fundraising round.
I was contacted by a facebook recruiter a few years ago. I started the process and also started thinking about if I would like working there. I realized that I disagree strongly with the product, its effects on society, culture and politics. But more importantly I realized I hadn't used the product in like 3 years. I just said no thanks before even finishing the "take home" exercise.
At the time I was not a college grad, I was a team lead at a startup. This was before all of the recent news (2016?). It turns out I was right to make that decision.
I think there is strong incentive for engineers who commit to working on projects which they would actually use themselves. I am not overly ethical as a person (although I do have opinions I try to stick to), but I am very happy to have the opportunity to work at companies with products I actually use.
>But more importantly I realized I hadn't used the product in like 3 years.
How does this matter? Most people don't personally use the products they work on.
If someone works on software in flight computers (I don't know the proper term), in most cases I doubt they're pilots actively using said software.
I certainly don't personally use the products I work on for my job.
A job is a job. Sure some people find work "doing what they love" or doing things they enjoy/can benefit from personally, but not everybody, and that's certainly not a standard.
Flight computers are niche software, while Facebook is meant to be accessible to everyone. If you look at similar products, such as operating systems or browsers, you’ll find many engineers actually do use what they what they work on.
That's a weird thing to say about oneself. Do you really consider yourself to be "less ethical" or have you internalized "mainstream" ethics as "good", and found that that's not what _you_ think is ethical/good behavior?
This mostly. But also I don't self identify with a strongly held ethic. I identify more with a balanced approach where sometimes ethics are a guide, and other times the outcome is as or more important, just depends on the situation.
In the case above, both my ethics and the outcome pointed me in the same direction. In others the might conflict and I do a cost benefit analysis.
After Susan Fowler wrote her exposè on Uber's culture a couple years ago, many commented saying that they would have trouble attracting talent given their tarnished reputation. Did that ever happen in practice?
I don't think so. I found that Uber's culture was apparent throughout its interview process. (I interviewed with Uber and ultimately turned down a Strategy & Operations offer in early 2016.)
This is anecdotal evidence based on my interview experience and conversations with employees, but it was obvious to me that the company had a win-at-all-costs, cutthroat culture. Fowler's exposé certainly took things to a whole new level, but before her report you could see enough from public information (reports of execs' behavior, etc.) and the interview process to know Uber's values & culture. I know of people who were avoiding Uber before the Fowler exposé. I suspect that Uber wouldn't have wanted those people anyways because of contrasting values.
Put another way, I think that the type of people who wouldn't have joined after the Fowler report wouldn't have joined before it. This is now a few years back, though - seems like things may be different now with Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO.
Anecdotally, I know some developers who express disinterest in working for a company like Uber or Facebook. But it would be really difficult to gauge how many or the overall effect - except that over years, maybe, you would see their product suffer as they fail to attract and retain decent talent.
Several other things happened near the same time to make Uber no longer look like a rocket ship, it's probably really hard to separate out those effects.
With respect, I think you might be succumbing to a weak form of selection bias (perhaps theres a better bias at play). In my thinking, people who don't work at megacorps have issues with bringing technocratic dystopia into reality (either due to horrific cultural issues at these companies, or by turning humans into labor-machines, either internally, or via externally-developed markets) aren't taken seriously as "opposing voices" in the narrative. No one is debating the fact that you get cheap goods using these practices, but it certainly seems to have a negative effect on overall empathy/humanity, in my perhaps naive opinion.
To bring the point home, if you aren't at Google, Facebook, Amazon, or any of the other gigantic tech companies, you aren't considered part of the "talent pool" unless you have some kind of in, or just deal with the interview process and get one of the roles. I've noticed that because I haven't worked at a "real tech company" individuals at one of the larger Internet companies seem to discount what I have to say, with perhaps what you'd call 'pure tech'-adjacent software development experience at a large investment bank.
I think a huge number of talented people are choosing not to work at one of these firms, Uber as one example, specifically because of moral issues with one of the above issues mentioned.
I think you´re right. I certainly wouldn´t work for any of those companies, and have repeatedly turned down interview requests. Would not have had Google on that list up until a year ago, but am starting to feel glad I escaped there.
Anecdotally most of my friends didn't even apply to internships/FT at Uber after their reputation got tarnished. Uber used to be my dream company, but after Fowler and their new grad pay started to go down I never even applied.
> Now, she said, job candidates “want to meet the team. They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”
This seems to not be only Facebook, but Google and other big names where the people interviewing you aren't going to be working with you.
I don't think most people realize how this actively tilts the interview against being useful for the interviewee - a large part of it is knowing who you will be working with, and if you like them and can make a good team together. Not knowing the team you will work for (by design) can really make it hard for a candidate to make a choice, given they don't have all the information. I think this is especially true for minority candidates, since you don't know if someone on the team you will be working with might have a problem with you.
While facebook is huge and everyone knows it, i still don't see facebook the same way i see companies like: Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, ...
Sure they have so much money that they do research, build open source tools etc. but how that company came by and what it is actually doing, is so different to all the others.
I have always wondered why (especially junior) software developers glorify Facebook/Google/Netflix/whatever claiming that they are the best places to work and "only the best people work there". What a load of nonsense. Those companies are about making money getting people to look at and click on ads. Nothing else! An activity that provide no real value to society. And (adding insult to injury) are responsible for increasing the distribution of non-fact as facts. Compare that with software developers working for companies providing real beneficial products for people, saving lives, giving happiness and improving health. Now that is companies worth working for.
Because delivering ads to a few billion people is a hard problem which leads to needing good engineers. They pay _really_ well compared to smaller orgs because it's difficult to hire that talent and ads are _very_ profitable.
I have concerns about Facebook just like everyone else, but I'd also like to point out that the New York Times is not repeatedly publishing articles criticizing FB simply because of their superior moral stance. They are doing it because FB took away a lot of revenue from publishers like them, and they are very, very angry about it.
That's a lovely conspiracy theory, and it makes people feel better about the situation, but it's not how things work in real life.
Speaking as someone who worked in this field for a couple of decades, it's more likely that one or more New York Times reporters have developed good sources inside Facebook, and are milking them.
The New York Times didn't make Facebook a monster, Facebook did.
And it's so transparent at this point. I've listened to podcasts with reporters and they lament the rise of Facebook and how "Facebook is stealing their business" through ads and algorithm changes that hurt them.
But the bias doesn't matter because everyone on the internet hates them (and Google) so they just rush to pile on. Anything negative about Facebook gets to the front page very quickly. The thing is, Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil. People may not love Facebook, but there really isn't a better way to keep up with friends, family, and to organize get togethers. I don't use Facebook that much, but I'll never delete it. It's just too valuable in my life.
As an aside: we're all engineers here, and if Facebook offered you guys a job, almost everyone here would take it. Their engineering team, quality of life, and compensation is extremely hard to beat. The NY Times found a couple college kids who don't want to work for Facebook. Okay. As a recent college graduate I can assure you that almost everyone in my graduating class would have taken a job at Facebook if given the chance. Facebook came and hired the smartest of my graduating class and the "hackathon" crowd puts Facebook at close to the top of their list of companies to work for. Facebook isn't hurting for talent and they have the compensation packages to compete for the best of the best.
> Anything negative about Facebook gets to the front page very quickly.
Pretty much everyone (whether you're a Facebook user or not) got their privacy violated by Facebook. The majority doesn't know it but we're on HN and everyone is aware of what's happening, so it's not too surprising that people feel bitter about it. I feel bitter about it too.
> Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil.
They got billions of users back when they actually had a decent product, nowadays it's just network effects - nobody signs up for the product itself. In fact, they're perfectly aware that Facebook (the product) is on its deathbed, otherwise they wouldn't be chasing new trends by buying Instagram & WhatsApp.
> Facebook puts a tax on being human, on trying to exist outside of a social vacuum.
I don't know what "trying to exist outside of a social vacuum" means. I also don't know what type of "tax" Facebook puts on being human that isn't levied--to at least some extent--by every other technological advance (telegraph, phone, internet, email, SMS...)
The thing is, Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil
This is such an obviously nonsensical thing to say. What about the tobacco industry? What about sweatshop-manufactured clothing? It’s easy to find examples where being evil is in fact a necessary prerequisite of getting billions of users...
That's not how real journalism works. The journalists are separated from the business side. Good publications go as far as prohibiting their editors from talking to anyone who deals with revenue.
Your impression of how real journalism works is a lot harder to believe.
You don't think writers see and care about how many clicks or views their articles get? Everyone knows these metrics are _directly_ correlated with revenue.
FB used to drive an insane amount of traffic to these publishers back when our news feeds were full of news articles. They pivoted very sharply and suddenly away from that, which hurt publisher revenues (and views) very substantially.
> You don't think writers see and care about how many clicks or views their articles get?
I think they care, but even so, they would write about FaceBook because it gets clicks, not because the org is mad at Facebook. The Times being mad at Facebook isn't what makes people click on the articles. It's people being mad at Facebook that gets them to click. There is no one in the chain of approval for content that would care about the loss of revenue from Facebook and specifically tell them to target Facebook for bad articles.
They would say, "hey writing about FaceBook gets us lots of views, do more of that".
> they would write about FaceBook because it gets clicks
Well I don't disagree with that.
> The Times being mad at Facebook
You're trying very hard to separate the corporation from the people. There's plenty of evidence that the journalists themselves are mad at Facebook. As another commenter notes, it's not hard to find podcasts with them complaining about the rise of FB.
There's another reason for journalists to be mad at FB: it's goal is to give everyone a voice. If everyone gets to publish their opinion, and not just people who work for big companies, that makes journalists a lot less important in society.
Ever since Trump was elected, yes. It's been climbing up from about $10 in November 2016 to the high $20s.
Before that it was fairly flat, after being in free fall from the mid-$40s range in 2004, to like 5 bucks in 2009 (which is coincidentally the rise of social media: Facebook 2004, Youtube 2005, Twitter 2006, etc).
I'm at university right now and have a ton of friends in CS (I was previously as well), and I can tell you the overwhelming majority are more than ok with working for FB.
I was getting heavily recruited, by Facebook earlier this year (they checked in with me every two months), and I finally decided to send them more than the canned LinkedIn, “I’m not interested”, response. I told them that I didn’t think I was a good fit, because I didn’t use the product and would probably have a hard time understanding it (if you’re going to help build a consumer app you really ought to use it in my opinion). I thought the recruiter would be surprised by my response, but I actually got the vibe from her that she had heard that before, promptly removing me from their recruitment tool (and to their credit they haven’t contacted me since).
It makes me think that Facebook will probably end up being one of the better places to work as they know they will have to offer benefits to make up for the stigma and/or lack of interest in working there.
Yeah...I doubt that. Especially people attending hackathons. Underlying modern hackathon culture is a serious amount of careerism and showmanship. Most of the kids at hackathons would sacrifice a lot more than morals to get a job at Facebook.
I graduated college not too long ago, and you hear stuff like this all the time. A big one is Financial Tech-- people talk a lot about how they don't want to work for those companies.
Some people are against working in big-tech, or AirBnB because of the housing crisis, Uber because of the sexual harassment and competitive culture, etc.
This is however the first time I see a NYT article about this. They're really going after Facebook with all they can find.
I have to wonder how many of the top 50 or so tech companies have really sterling reputations for warm-hearted goodness. Powerful organizations usually end up stepping on somebody's toes either in getting to the top or staying there.
And really, where else are you going to work if you are a developer and want to make money? One of the big banks? Plenty of dirt there. A defence contractor? Ditto.
I'd say Netflix has a pretty good external reputation. They do good by their customers and don't sell them out. They take your money and show your videos and don't share your data. They have hits and misses on their original content, but they don't actually make that stuff, they just compete with all the other big entertainment outlets to distribute what production companies make.
There is of course strong opinions about their internal culture, but as I described it to someone recently, it's an environment where you have to choose what to work on and then make it successful without a lot of help and guidance. If that's the kind of place that you thrive, then you'll love working at Netflix.
That's the internal reputation, not external. And as I said, many of us liked that culture. I liked that fact that I didn't have to deal with people who were clearly there just to collect a paycheck. Those folks didn't last long. Like I said, you had to take control of your own destiny with little guidance. If you like that kind of thing, Netflix is a great place.
I have worked in places that refuse to fire anyone and it's not fun. The cruft just builds up.
But, plenty of places are willing to fire people who have given up or completely check out and nobody is really has that aspect of their company culture talked about as much as Netflix's.
I'm not really trying to imply what Netflix does is wrong if it works for them, but it could definitely be interpreted as unethical and sounds like it could be toxic. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate and saying that every company has their skeletons, even respectable companies like Netflix.
Netflix does as a company to consumers, though among workers their cutthroat culture has been infamous even before the recent NYT profile, though so is their high compensation.
I don’t agree with lumping them in with the tech giants though. Why them and not Tesla, Uber, AirBnB, Dropbox, etc.?
He said "top 50" and by most measures Netflix would be "top 50". That's why I chose it (plus familiarity with it personally). All those other ones you mentioned could be "top 50" as well. In which case, I think the general feeling of external perception is negative for all of them except Dropbox.
Op asked "I have to wonder how many of the top 50 or so tech companies have really sterling reputations for warm-hearted goodness." and I threw Netflix out there as a "top 50" that has a warm-hearted (external) reputation.
I think tech has a reputation for being supposedly enlightened and nicer and making the world a better place. Maybe it’s the original ‘60s Berkeley ancestry (never mind the first electronic computing machines were birthed in the military labs of WWII), maybe it’s naïveté that comes with working in a field where you literally don’t have to get your hands dirty.
I think what’s really stunning is the media blitz in the last few months about the real shady stuff in the major tech firms. Google protecting high level sex abusers and also legal but unprofessional HR violating conduct. Amazon getting sweetheart deals from city governments. Both criticized for military and security state contracts. Google and Mark Zuckerberg both pandering to the Chinese government. Netflix having a cultish abusive work environment. Everything going on at Facebook, which is this year’s Uber in terms of cascading scandals- though last month that was Tesla. Even consumer outrage against Apple’s products for getting increasingly overpriced or less innovative, though that’s more purely subjective. Saudi blood money funding SoftBank and SV startups, alike. It’s almost as if the only leading tech company getting goodwill or at least lack of controversy has been Microsoft.
Finishing up my degree in spring, very few people say no to prestige coming out of new grad, but there are some, and those are absolutely avoiding Facebook among a few others. Currently, the main blacklist companies in my book are Facebook, Palantir, and Uber. Google still isn't evil enough. Amazon gets a bad rep overall for work environment but isn't avoided on moral grounds.
Is it weird that when reading this I just think how nice it must be to be able to turn down such a high paying job when many people are just trying to make ends meet?
Don't get me wrong I am happy now working at Google but I am sure I would have been elated to get a job at FB earlier in my career.
Allowing 19-year-old kids to have their name and photo published in the newspaper of record in an article that quotes their snarky comments about how they're not sure if they'd deign to work for any given company is journalistic malpractice.
I don't blame the kids. They're young and naturally earnest, and are marinating in an environment where performative wokeness results in positive social reinforcement. They don't know any better.
Oh please. "19-year-old kids" can sign their life away to the military. They can vote in elections.
To suggest that we shouldn't allow people who are adults by every meaning of the word, voice their opinions publicly and attributed to themselves is ludicrous.
Likewise, it takes courage to put your name, face and words out there in this manner. As the OP was saying, it can haunt you. Saying they're young a naive for doing this may be true, but it's dismissive of what they've done. What they've done is something I like and respect, I wish more would say that.
If you had to bet $5 on whether or not the reporter sat these kids down before interviewing them for the record and said something like, "Be advised, what you say in this article is going to be seen by every potential employer for the next 5+ years, are you ready to drop some truth bombs?" how would you bet?
I mean, most of the people raised on the internet have generally learned by now that anything they say online will probably show up to their potential employers. So I’m pretty sure they do realize that this might hurt their chances of working at Facebook, which is a risk they are willing to make.
I don't think they're saying the students aren't "allowed" to voice their opinions. They're making the point that this is obviously what a college student would say when asked a question like this in the current social climate. No one is saying they are bad for doing so. The point is that it's an easy, ultimately fruitless article that highlights the well-known views of a large population of young adults.
I'm a similar age group / community and this sort of perspective is not at all uncommon, and it's legit. There is no "performative wokeness" going on in my experience.
On the flip side I'm still roughly in that age group (first half of my 20s) and I absolutely did engage in performative wokeness at that age and continue to do so today. Not to the degree of interviewing with the NYT, but I definitely voice support in view if my peers and co-workers for social issues I don't really care about. Maybe people do believe in the trending issues, plenty are just playing along because failure to do so results in loss of status and respect.
With respect to the original comment, though, I agree that 20 year olds are mature enough make their views public. Sure their views may change, but that's life. It doesn't mean they should refrain from sharing their views.
I agree it's a legit perspective and I know it's not uncommon. That's not my point. My point is that the students quoted likely do not grasp the potential future consequences of their name being in the newspaper this way.
Prospective employer Googles your name, sees that you recently trashed their company (or strategic partner, or largest client), and decides to take a pass.
I think their comments will come across as arrogant and entitled to potential employers and/or colleagues who google them in the future. I think the kids are probably not that way, they're just really earnest, but the reporter did them a disservice by putting their juicy hot college sophomore takes into the ether for all of eternity.
These kids are computer science students from Berkeley. They're not going to be hurting for job offers. If it helps filter out dumbass employers who are going to hold their opinions about Facebook against them, so much the better.
Of course they're not going to be hurting for job offers, in general. The issue is that hiring teams at high-performing, stressed-out early stage startups (including many that are doing important work that will change people's lives for the better) can be ridiculously petty and catty in the hiring process -- especially when they're looking at 10+ qualified candidates for every new hire.
Regardless of how well these students are set up for life in general, it would still suck for them if they lost out on a great career opportunity because the people guarding the door for that opportunity, on the day that they reviewed that candidate, decided to be douchily dismissive of the fact that said candidate decided to provide overeager quotes for a NYT article back when they were a college student.
I get what you're saying, but I think people waste way too much time worrying about what hypothetical future employers might think about something.
Yes, it's possible some future employer might take offense to what they said and throw their resume in the trash. It's equally likely some other employer with an equally awesome opportunity will agree with them and admire them for having the guts to speak their mind and with 10 bland inoffensive candidates and one who was quoted in the NY Times, they'll choose to call the latter. As a bonus, they're probably going to get along much better with the employer who liked what they said.
You can't predict how some imaginary future people are going to react. Be true to yourself and let the rest work itself out. Optimizing to try and please the sensibilities of every imaginable person is both impossible and miserable.
The same age that rental car companies have converged on for "enough" judgement to have developed.
Personally, I was ridiculously vulnerable to influence by social groups between the ages of 16 and 25. So much so, that I impulsively joined the Mormon church and threw two years away trying to convert other people to Mormonism. I also wrote an anti-Microsoft rant in a newspaper editorial, since I was so caught up in the Free Software hysteria of the time.
Fast forward 8 years, and I'm ashamed to have the name "Brigham Young" on my resume, and I work at Microsoft -- hoping nobody ever runs across the misguided crap I wrote about my employer in that local newspaper.
Several of my colleagues wish some public things wouldn't show up in Google searches for idiotic things they did because of societal pressure before their "adult" brains fully developed. They really are much more reasonable and responsible people now than they were then.
How sad for you. My judgment at age 18 was perfectly fine, thanks.
By point of comparison, at age 23 Horatio Nelson was the captain of a warship and responsible for leading hundreds of men in combat. Nowadays we're way too tolerant of young people who refuse to grow up and accept the consequences of their actions.
I don't really think about it in terms of an age limit. To spell it out, my quibble is that the reporter quoted these kids by name and got them to agree to have their picture taken for publication, for a story that will likely give at least some prospective employers pause at some point.
It totally could! If any of these kids want to work as, like, the software engineer-in-residence at a social impact VC, having this come up in a Google name search might very well be a positive.
I think that people vastly overestimate how much detective work that employers do, when hiring people.
I don't think companies are searching people's Twitter or Facebook accounts for controversial statements. The furthest that most would go is to call up a reference or talk to a previous employer.
Hiring committees don't have time to scrutinize every little last comment that someone has made.
The only people to blame here are hiring managers who think the snarky comments you made when you were 19 are in any way relevant or representative.
Why would an employer ever even see this unless their hiring practices are so broken that they think it's a good idea to go looking for this kind of thing in the first place? And if that's the case, then, sheesh, I don't even know what to say. That's so silly that it's not even wrong.
Is it "wokeness" or just ambition? When I was 19 I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I'm pretty sure being yet another cog in a 30,000-employee machine was not high on the list.
My intended point with regard to wokeness was that college is a place where there is limited downside to screaming your carefully considered, morally pure opinions from the rooftops. People accultured to that kind of environment often don't understand how people outside the college bubble will interpret their comments.
Just because there are no downsides to screaming you carefully considered, morally pure opinions doesn’t make them any less valid. Actually, I’d think the opposite: someone who’s dependent on getting a job at Facebook is far more likely to be be disingenuous in their criticism of the company than someone who has no reason to filter their views.
People seem to have this one backwards. They seem to think only people in the worst position get to make moral statements.
Except that's the opposite of how it works. Upholding morality requires leverage and power. Any person can be broken. That's not a good measure of validity of valid claims.
The 'kids' of the late 1960s included many college students and enlisted men who were against US involvement in Vietnam.
They were ridiculed for not knowing any better, for being 'young and naturally earnest', etc., though the exact phrasing used was different.
And yet, they were right. It was their elders who didn't know better.
Since it seems you are using an argument which is structurally similar to the ones used against the kids of the 1960s, it doesn't seem like it should put much trust in it.
“I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”
I think it's short cited to come out in a public forum against any employer. I imagine hiring managers are Googling candidates, news sites tend to show up pretty high in search results.
> I think it's short cited to come out in a public forum against any employer.
I mean, if you are saying you don’t want to work there, why does it matter if their hiring managers see that? Also, just from personal experience: I’m pretty vocal about my criticisms for Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped me from getting recruiting material from them ;)
They're probably not smart enough to get in, anyway. If they were, they'd go to FB, milk that huge salary, unload their RSU's on a regular basis, save and invest, and FIRE by age 35.
Signed, a CS graduate and FB stock holder with 500% return.
Is it possible that someone smarter than you doesn’t want to work at Facebook?
There are plenty of reasons, beyond ideological ones, not to want to work there. I don’t think I have any ideological objections to Facebook, but the product itself doesn’t interest me and I’m not a user.
> I don’t think I have any ideological objections to Facebook, but the product itself doesn’t interest me and I’m not a user.
I don't work at FB but I'm sure for a product of that scale even if you don't use or care about the product itself, there may be interesting projects for you to work on.
I also don't think I'd care to work on FB the product, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to get to use Haskell to fight spam and work with Simon Marlow. They also use OCaml for some compiler stuff that I'm sure would be interesting.
Just because you work on something interesting does not absolve you of the moral responsibility you have to yourself. And just because your project doesn’t seem like it will be used in one way today doesn’t mean it won’t be used to censor people the next.
> Just because you work on something interesting does not absolve you of the moral responsibility you have to yourself.
I agree and am not sure why you think I thought otherwise.
The person I was replying to said "I don't think I have any ideological objections to Facebook" which I assumed to mean they don't see any moral problems with Facebook.
I was merely disagreeing with the idea that someone's lack of interest in the exterior facing product implies there are no interesting projects for that person in the entire company.
I don't work at Facebook... I'm probably not smart enough, to be honest, and also don't have much interest in the product either. I just bought their stock after the IPO.
>Is it possible that someone smarter than you doesn’t want to work at Facebook?
It's definitely possible, but they'd probably be working at another top tech company or finance company (think Citadel, Google, Jane Street) or starting their own company instead.
Sorry, but yes, they probably are smart enough to get in. Or capable enough, which is the real thing that the wise amongst us actually measure rather than how smart one is.
Of the dozen or so folks I know at Facebook, I'd be excited to work with about two of them again. The others are...fine. Much like the folks Google hires now. They're fine.
Once you hit a certain point, you start hiring ditch-diggers just like everybody else. Because you've got ditches to dig.
I found this comment to be really distasteful. Nothing about your "signature" proves you're any smarter than engineers that choose not to work at Facebook. It just makes you appear to be mean-spirited.
Forget about Monsanto. The point I wanted to make is that FB is that they have a lot of power to shape culture/discourse and take little to no responsibility when things go wrong.
Until I don't see a change on their behavior/policies (by them or some regulating power). I will be weary about working with them or using their products.
This is incredibly hard to do, especially if the culture seems ingrained in the policy decisions of the other 30,000 employees. Sure, it’s possible to join a company and change a couple of small things, but usually if you go against the company’s culture for long enough you’ll end up on your way out: either because your life will just be miserable, or because someone will fire you.
These are companies, not governments; there's no democracy there. You either do as management says, or you get fired. Good luck organizing enough coworkers to try to force management's hand.
Sure, I can accept that CS students say and believe that; ask them again when they're CS graduates. Also, stated & revealed preferences are often dissimilar, plus virtue signaling costs nothing.
Bottom line, until the FANNG initialism changes, I wouldn't take the report seriously.
While I feel this title is sensationalized and a little too over your face, like come on you guys all know it is NOT easy to get a facebook job, it is well paid and definitely can have a lots of challenging fun and had a offer from Facebook and at the same the determination/confidence to reject it, IMO, is a privilege not that many people in the world have, I do sympathize with the fact to have a long term career within certain company, you have to align your mission with the company's, otherwise it will eventually leads to suffering. Facebook has now its own identity crisis, a lost cause from within. It needs to rediscover or reinvent its vision, if not successfully done, such loss of great minds will definitely continue.
I mean, you can often find a high paying, interesting job building missiles as well, but I’m sure many would turn that down. The same can be true for Facebook, which has generally had a history of not being the most ethical place to work for. It’s only recently that it’s started to have a negative effect if it’s on your resume, though.
Would surprised to know if they are paying half of what Facebook is paying to new grad, which can reach 200k.
Well, i think saying Facebook has a negative effect on the resume is definitely a stretch. It is probably more proper to say that working at Facebook no longer bears the showing off value it once did, though that is largely true for ALL tech companies as well. The general public just grows more skeptic and indifferent towards tech industry overall.
I was very recently one of those students. Knew from the very beginning I never wanted to work for FB. If you don't totally agree with their political leaning, disagree with censorship, and hate ads, why would you want to work there? Sounds miserable.
There is a great dissonance between what people claim and what they do and without bridging these gaps discussions on ethical issues become useless.
For instance commentators here may stridently criticize Facebook and others and yet if they were in Zuckerberg or Sandberg's position may do no differently. It's techies who went to town about liberty and freedom and now are building the most invasive and creepy surveillance systems. This is perhaps the biggest betrayal of our generation.
There are always excuses but if you cannot stick to stated principles its your responsibility to examine yourself and not make claims you will not follow through in circumstances of power.
> "Now it’s like, just because it does what you want doesn’t mean it’s doing good."
I'm actually impressed that an 18 year old has this attitude and hasn't been swayed by the free-market fundamentalism so prevalent among the HN crowd.
Too many people treat as a truism the idea that if people are buying or using something provided by a company then that thing is obviously of great positive value to society and should be nurtured and grown.
It's an incredibly naive, irresponsible and socially and ecologically destructive viewpoint in my opinion.
On this topic: could someone tell me whatever happened since the "security incident" that they were "very sorry" for? Did they commit to making even a single tangible change to their coding practices to prevent millions of people's accounts from being hacked again? Or is it business, condolences, and hoping-the-wind-blows-past-quietly as usual?
Maybe all the recent news about facebook using misdirection is in and of itself misdirection to emotionally distract you from their technical failings.
For every One person who says they dont want to work for FB or GOOG or whatever other "evil" Co. there are millions who do. GooG last year received 1.1mil resumes. There is no shortage of people who will gladly take away your paycheck if you dont want it. This was always the case and will always be (until we progress to a new level humanity as a whole).
Personally, I’ve just never applied. Based on what they do, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could do something useful at Facebook, but I just don’t think I could stand working there as it is now. Am I missing out on some potentially interesting projects? Of course. Will I have a lower salary? Probably. But generally I believe the compromises I need to make aren’t all that large, and I can feel better about myself just not working there. If they change their culture, sure, I might reconsider, but from what I’ve seen so far nothing has changed (down to the people they hire-some of my acquaintances who have gotten good offers from them are what I might call “morally dubious”).
I despise Facebook as a product (not because of any ethical qualms; I just don't like it as a social network).
At the same time, I have enormous respect for Facebook engineers. Facebook gave us, frontend web developers, React, Flow, Flux (and eventually redux), GraphQL, ReasonML, ImmutableJS, DraftJS. They are maintaining Jest now, gradually making it into one of the most pleasant testing frameworks to work with. Don't know about their contributions in other areas, but they must be numerous.
So I can totally understand those who want to work for Facebook. Fuck their social network or their ads delivery platform; their tech looks dope!
Funny coincidence, there was a new grad hire event yesterday at "The Patio" in Palo Alto. FB don't seem to be having a problem hiring new grads despite what this article says.
Pshh I was accidentally turning down Facebook job offers by getting ghosted after expressing my initial ethical reservations to recruiters back in 2012 before it was even cool
It’s obviously not black and white, but I do feel that joining a company as an employee endorses the activities of the company, to some extent. That’s definitely more true for sought-after tech workers, who at least have the luxury of choice in many cases. We all ultimately compromise some beliefs or desires when we take employment - but is this something more tech workers will take into account when choosing who to work for?
I remember casually looking at Facebook back in 2010:
I was invited for lunch; I liked their campus, but it just had the "freshman year at college" vibe. Even though I was still early in my career, I felt like I was already too old for that.
Later, when I started the interview process, they demanded that I sign a broad NDA. That was the what really pushed me out. I don't sign broad NDAs to interview for a job.
“I’ve heard a lot of employees who work there don’t even use it,” said Niky Arora, 19, an engineering student, who was recently invited to a Facebook recruiting event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif."
This is really thought provoking, I think I'm going to start asking interviewers if they use their products and see if they squirm.
As a soon-to-be college grad, I can attest to this. I applied and interviewed at a number of big tech companies, but explicitly avoided Facebook because of ethical concerns.
On the other hand, I know of only a few classmates whom I believe would not consider them as an employer.
Facebook and its properties Instagram are destroying the very fabric of modern relationships by creating an always hooked experiences in the name of connecting the world. The sooner people realize the better it will be for it’s wellbeing.
Yeah sure. Ask debt ridden students to take the high ground. Anyways I have no problems working for Facebook. So fellow hackers how would you most efficiently prepare for an fb interview ?
This is just character assassination. Where are the metrics that say new grads don't want to work for Facebook? Cherry picking quotes is journalism as its worst, and the fact that this crap keeps popping up in HN disturbing. What's worse is that they're preying on young adults.
If we really wanted to fix the problem instead of virtue signal and mud-sling, we'd be encouraging bright minds to join and make things better, and offer better solutions like real engineers.
I've really lost a lot of faith in HN lately, when I keep seeing these posts pop up and the comments are just dog piles of negativity and confirmation of views with no data.
This isn't new to STEM jobs and ethics
Mechanical Engineers - Defense contractors
Chemical Engineers - Chemical companies
Geological Engineers - Oil and gas companies
The NYT keeps peddling this idea that what Facebook and Google are doing is somehow dirty. These companies are disseminating information in exchange for ad revenue. This is exactly the NYT's business model. Which arguably is why the NYT is so upset.
I was excited to explore the possibility of a job at Facebook last week. An opportunity to work with some of the smartest (and nicest!) engineers in the world on a problem space I've been intellectually invested in for several years. This latest revelation crosses a line for me.
> But this Soros thing is different. This is no passive failure. It’s a malevolent action taken against groups who criticize Facebook for things that Facebook admits it has failed at. It takes advantage of and contributes to the most poisonous aspects of our public discourse.
- https://twitter.com/juliacarriew/status/1062932740729856000
Facebook's response is utterly confused. When the unseemly smears their PR/lobbying firm propagated come to light they quickly sack them but also attempt to defend the smear. Which is it?
> Lastly we wanted to address the issue of Definers, who we ended our contract with last night. The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf – or to spread misinformation. Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf. Definers did encourage members of the press to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook,” an anti-Facebook organization. The intention was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue.
- https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-update/
It clearly plays into the modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories being pushed in right wing media and Republican campaign ads.
Someone senior at Facebook needs to take responsibility for this.
Good to see Facebook's message is evolving in Sheryl Sandberg's post. No longer attempting to defend the indefensible. (Edit, on a second closer reading it does still attempt to defend it, just in more finessed language. It does not acknowledge that it was smearing critics with an antisemitic trope.)
> I also want to address the issue that has been raised about a PR firm, Definers. We’re no longer working with them but at the time, they were trying to show that some of the activity against us that appeared to be grassroots also had major organizations behind them. I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing, but I should have. I have great respect for George Soros – and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against him are abhorrent. - https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10160967443525177
Few comments on this because I think about this quite a bit.
1) I always read these articles and sigh. Seems like they only focus on 2 elite tech companies at the expense of all the others while only interviewing students at the #1 CS school in the country. I feel like a 2nd class citizen in the industry because of it. When will the normal people be heard?
2) I'm kind of surprised they listed a $140k starting pay. That's pretty low for new grads in the industry and very low for Facebook.
3) I think it requires an immense amount of privilege to say no to a company for relatively trivial reasons (you're probably not going to be working on product code if you don't want to) that pays as much as Facebook does, especially given the $75k signing bonus on the table for interns. I think any discussion about this on the student level has to start with this. Any comparison to the defense industry is silly because defense pays significantly less than big tech.
140k including equity is not unheard of. 90k-120k base salary plus a few tens of thousands in equity is a typical range for a new grad in SV. Chances are they'll still live with room mates, though because housing costs are high. Not to mention the 10-20k that is paid in California income taxes. So it probably balances out.
Total compensation obviously because FB stock is liquid. New grad salary is in the $110-115k range at FB. I know a few companies that do pay it or more base (2Sigma, Snowflake Computing and Jane Street come to mind).
I had offers for $130k base, $130k base + equity and $130k base + bonus and those were considered to be below average by most of my peers.
This "Valley bubble" probably goes a long way to explain a lot of these attitudes too.
Would the average joe/jane, given the offer of a "low" 140K salary at a FAANG, turn it down on ethical grounds?
I doubt it. The median US household income appears to be about 60K (1), so at 140K you'd be single-handedly over double the median houshold income before taking into consideration any partner's income. Thats a big deal.
This almost flippant attitude to employment and high salaries in silicon valley is somewhat worrying. I feel like people are growing increasingly disconnected from reality of life that the average person on the street has to deal with.
>Would the average joe/jane, given the offer of a "low" 140K salary at a FAANG, turn it down on ethical grounds?
I mean, I'm pretty average but I did that for a tiny bit more money considering equity at a startup. I think it's not an unreasonable assumption to make if your competing offers are similar, which a lot of people in this position do. I don't think there are many people who only get Facebook offers.
The calculus is different for interns though, on account of the massive signing bonus.
Where outside the Valley (and maybe NYC) where new grads are routinely getting total comp packages significantly greater than $140k? All the names you dropped in your other post are top companies that the typical new grad has very little chance of getting in to.
> I think it requires an immense amount of privilege to say no to a company for relatively trivial reasons
I'm reminded of a line in Roger Ebert's review of American Splendor: "We don't fight over trivial things, because nothing worth fighting over is trivial. As Harvey might say, Hey, it's important to me!"
Why is this even a story? Most computer science student don't want to work period. They don't want to work for any company.
Most CS grads would like to win the lottery and spend their days pursuing their own interests, contribute to open source or starting their own companies. I know that was my dream and my classmates' dream.
But when graduation comes and the offers come, they'll work for any company that'll pay well.
There are journalist students who don't want to work for the nytimes. Is that a news story?
I'm failing to see what is newsworthy about this story. Where is the line between creating news and reporting on it?
The nytimes could manufacture the exact same story about itself or microsoft or google or any company in the US. Go to any campus and you'll find someone who doesn't want to work for microsoft or google or apple or [insert company name here].
How do I remind my bosses of the company mission statement?
If someone asked that question at an interview I would honestly be stunned. Like, either you're the biggest suck-up in the world, or the biggest fool. Either way, no hire.
Anyway, Facebook's actual mission seems to be to reimplement MySpace and they are honestly getting pretty close. Not all the features--but almost. So, at some point the need for Caltech engineers will drop off, and if more of them want to work on jet engines or whatever, maybe that's for their best.
This describes my what I've observed perfectly. There are very few companies that make new grad offers comparable to Facebook's, and career advancement opportunities and working conditions at Facebook tend to be better than the other 'Big-n companies'. So it's hard for a new grad to say no to a Facebook offer, even if they're morally opposed to its products.