I have a 40 something friend who started working there a few years a go. He has a family. He mostly went for stability, good pay, good benefits, predictable long term outlook. Not working insane hours. He loves it. Actually said he feels valued as an engineer.
I work in a country where engineers are paid like factory workers.. if FB offered me a job i would be happy to take it even they sold unapproved drugs.
Morally questioning a company with that kind of salary and benefits requires a position of incredible privilege.
I'd like to see that. I'd be more interested to see the ethical case for working for any startup that is based on user's being the product, or takes VC money so that it can destroy existing businesses through predatory pricing. Fact is, the sub-industry this forum relates to is a breeding ground for ethically-challenged business plans.
Sure all these companies have their share of evil doings, but FB is probably the one that tends to affect people on a much more personal level (resulting in bullying, depression, anxiety, etc)
Depends what you mean by "us." If it means any engineer, engineers build everything shitty in tech.
If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it just means that they have to pay more. There's always hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and designing a distributed facial recognition network to track the movements and contacts of political dissidents.
i.e. there's no useful "us" except when we're talking about craft.
Exactly. Plenty of engineers work on making military equipment better at killing people too. Some of them are software engineers. Facebook might seem like a moral blackhole to some but they are barely grey or neutral on the world stage of evil empires. An blind and bumbling giant perhaps, but not a purposefully evil one.
Algorithms is where the attention needs to go. The regulation probably needs to target the techniques Facebook and others are using rather than the organisations. It's the same crap as lootboxes in games training people to gamble. Newsfeeds and engagement optimization leads to attention grabbing and rage baiting posts. Just give us back the simple date based feed like Instagram has. Cut the algorithm weighted ordering. That's not everything solved but a lot of the overt manipulation of people is based on that.
