Give me a break. Most of us aren't dropping everything to go join the Peace Corps, we want to live a comfortable life, and by no coincidence, most of us work for assholes. Nearly any sufficiently old company has its share of controversies (this includes startups, they're just smaller so they're not as publicized).
I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).
Have you read Solzhenitsyn's "From Under the Rubble?"
It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.
This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.
The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.
I mean, I said in a sister thread that I do think there could be an argument that me working for an awful corporation does enable them and I am at some level responsible for their actions, but I don't know that it's realistic to expect someone in the corporate world right now to drop everything and only work for ethical people right now...our entire society is somewhat based around us working for evil corporations.
But that's just an easy argument that keeps the status quo. In a western society today may be impossible to escape some big "evil" corporation, but there's a major difference between having no choice to participate in the system and willingly choosing to work for said corporation. In the case of Facebook someone who works there may not be directly responsible for its actions if they're not at a very high level but they are directly condoning them by working for Facebook and helping further its mission.
I would absolutely give you a break if you don't join the Peace Corps. I won't give you a break if you choose to take a lucrative job at Facebook. This is not a black-and-white issue.
>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most
So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.
>I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.
I knew this was going to come up because this is the internet, but I don't think this line of reasoning applies to every arbitrary Facebook engineer.
The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.
Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.
>did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
Isn't that what they are doing? There was a story not long ago about a lady in her 90s who was a secretary at a death camp at 18. She's being dragged to court.
I appreciate the personal evaluation. I worked at Google for about 6 years, and left to make half as much money working on open source software. I can't find a single thing that HN would disapprove of, except maybe banning all the cryptominers that appeared all at once after our product was discussed here ;)
This is not much of a hardship for me personally, because half of a lot is still a lot. It wasn't HN that factored into my decision to leave, though, that's all I'm saying.
I'll add that the majority of my colleagues at Google actively opposed the things that HN thinks is evil, and still do. You can steer things in the right direction from the inside perhaps more effectively than from the outside. You know the tradeoffs and can suggest a reasonable compromise. That's engineering in a nutshell. No doubt, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that think just like the average HN reader, and are working hard every day to steer the company in that direction. Maybe you're not satisfied with the results, but at least they're doing something about it more impactful than typing screeds and sending them into the ether.
You're missing the point... completely. Until unethical behavior doesn't pay dividends, people will engage in that unethical behavior. Ostracizing them to any degree less than the sex offender list offers fails at 'making it not pay dividends'.
Snide comments are useless, and posting a snide comment in response to a post literally saying that snide comments are useless is hilarious and ironic.
As long as a lack of money is able to present a serious danger to one's quality of life, health and well-being, money will always win over not having/getting money.
> money will always win over not having/getting money
This statement could benefit from less certainty. According to Stoics, a non-virtuous life is not worth living. They would prefer to die rather than earning money in a non-virtuous manner.
You might want to reference the Cynics instead, since it's a bit easier to be stoical when you already have money, power and status, as another poster pointed out.
