Like most state employees, I am in a union and while there are MANY things I do not like about my union, from its high dues, to its constant forays into politics, to the supine pose it takes to contract negotiations, there is one thing that it does very well, and that is stands up against BS like this in a very meaningful way. Tech workers need a union or some union-like organization that stands up for basic worker rights.
It won’t happen, the last few generations have been brainwashed and have forgotten the past history of when people united together to give us the rights we have today which haven’t been added to since the 90s (the family leave act - which doesn’t even pay you it just keeps from losing a job)
There’s a reason they keep us fighting each other over race, culture wars, and other bs, because they know united our country would look so much different and they wouldn’t be able to make as much money
My union is excellent but we are the exception to the rules. Our contracts always net better pay and retirement benefits. Sometimes I’m in disbelief what they sometimes get on paper. It wasn’t always like that but the protection unions bring are a huge benefit. Like them or hate them this would be something that would be a line item in a contract with protections.
Unfortunately too many tech workers think they're special little snowflakes and deserve the highest pay possible and think that unions will interfere with that. Because if you aren't getting the highest pay or the highest job title, you just aren't good enough and why should I be associated with those that aren't good enough? You will never get tech workers to come together for the common good. It's always about only what's best for me. The amount of greedy self-centeredness and backstabbing I've seen in this industry across multiple companies is unreal.
In my EU country the national tech(IT) union is useless because they are simply toothless. Unions of teachers, airport, road, rail, etc workers are strong and always get what they want regardless of economic performance, because they can grind the country to a halt by simply not showing up to work for a day, but tech workers are under constant pressure of outsourcing and offshoring due to the globally distributed nature of work, so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against employers because they just have no leverage, when their workload can be taken over by someone from another country if they go on strike.
The local company union/workers council (Betriebsraat) si also equally toothless and didn't do much at the mass layoffs.
Unions are only as powerful as their impact to the comfort of the citizens and to the votes of the politicians.
>so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against >employers because they just have no leverage, when their >workload can be taken over by someone from another country if >they go on strike.
Are there mitigation policies in place in your org in case your union decides to take a sabbatical? What would happen if you all called in sick? It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions. Spirit Airlines in the states just shut down, but everyone just yawned, "oh, so sorry too bad". If your employer does have that plan B, then why are you still employed? Won't they want your union to strike and off with your heads?
I never got my head around the unions. They start idealistic but end up as corrupt as the source of their angst as they mature and it's a constant push/pull and the civilians' bank accounts suffer regardless. I am not saying "give in". So, close the borders, physical or digital?
No. I am not paying $1,000s in dues for them to spend it on a rally to "End Child Poverty" (to use an example currently in my inbox; and it's a good cause, just not a good use of my dues). My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.
How about the career of the bosses of that union? You are not paying to advance them to the next step but suppo3End Child Poverty is probably well received by the people that will support them in their next job.
That's it, the union: every union for themselves, no cause no solidarity, just cold hard mercenary cause of money for you! That's the true spirit of labor, I'm sure.
It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it.
You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.
The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?
The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.
Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."
I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).
This is really a "hoisted by your own petard" situation. I hope they don't think people are going to be sympathetic towards them when they're guilty of doing the same type of things (and far worse) to billions of people.
I'm sympathetic to this view, which has merit. I'm also happy to accept any new advocates for privacy and liberty. Purity tests are counterproductive to a movement's goals. Effort should be directed toward activities that advance the agenda of the movement, directly or indirectly.
Here's a better statement "I'm glad they're seeing the light, even if they had to become victimized themselves to finally care."
Fair point, but I'd have to see something more concrete than just them complaining about this situation specifically to believe they've actually seen the light. If they just continue to work there as usual and make no efforts to even find a job elsewhere, it doesn't seem like they've yet opened their eyes to the light.
There's something to be said about being an internal advocate for the right thing. Better to be fired for repeatedly advocating for privacy than to resign. Adding friction to wrongdoing is good.
I will never blame the non-management workers in this situation. Most of us are forced by modern society to work for someone else and there are a limited number of jobs available.
Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
This woukd be like saying the person scanning your ticket at the concert condones Ticketmaster as a monopoly. No, they’re just trying to feed their family.
Meta employees aren’t DoorDash gig workers trying to feed families. These are well compensated workers. It’s okay to have the opinion that most white collar jobs do some harm somewhere, but pretending these are poor souls forced to work for meta because of lack of options is not a great take.
Furthermore the guy scanning the tickets doesn’t work for Ticketmaster, Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta. Big difference.
That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs. Think about departments like support, graphic design, marketing, etc.
Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated.
Also, it’s not like you have a wildly great choice of ethical companies to work for as an employee. What percentage of corporations are truly ethical? What companies that compete with Meta are highly ethical? If I quit Meta who am I working for that has no ethical issues?
> There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs
With very few exceptions, Meta employees are generally making more money within their domain as compared to what they would make working at other companies, which is always an option.
> Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated
It’s a false dichotomy: work for meta or be unemployed. Millions of white collar workers are doing fine not working for Meta.
And questioning if any corporation is free from ethical problems does not absolve you from the responsibility of the outcomes of what you build. Some corporations are objectively worse than others. A corporation building systems to pay gig workers less than the minimum wage is going to be probably worse than a corporation that builds a design collaboration tool when it comes to ethics. You can choose to work for either and be well compensated for your work, but let’s not pretend you’re some poor soul trapped in a job that you can’t escape.
Yes, all those people Meta just laid off due to whistleblowing on the Glass privacy violations, and their content moderators and data labelers and so on have my full support.
No sympathies for anyone doing SW engineering or similar. Anyone working there can definitely get a different programming gig. It likely doesn't pay as much but that's how it goes when you sell your soul.
I still have sympathies for any individual contributors even if they are high paid.
No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.
Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?
Oh come on, It is very well known that the Facebook bar to get hired is ruthless and very high, it requires studying for weeks to pass the leetcode interviews. They just decided to get the extra 20k$/year to be at Meta because this is what they wanted to optimize for.
I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.
Working at Facebook means you optimized ruthlessly for $$$$$ only, absolutely nothing else.
Working at Facebook means you are a leetcode monkey and could as well pass other interviews somewhere else and get paid 10% less. But to you, destroying democracy and killing teenager was worth those extra 10%
Working at Facebook means you became a millionaire, even if you joined mid-career a couple years ago because of the stock inflation.
No they are not just trying to feed their family. 99% of them are ruthlessly optimizing to make the most money possible to live in the top 1%, while completely dismissing all the bad Facebook, Meta and Instagram do in the world. No sympathy.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster for minimum wage.
At those income levels, who you work for DOES matter.
> Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors.
You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income.
Exactly. Working at Meta means you studied for 4 weeks for the leetcode interviews. That type of dedication means you could very easily get any job anywhere else.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster.
How am I doing that? I'm talking about people who have very valid options elsewhere.
"I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about.
I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff.
And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person".
It's hilariously fucked up. They pay us O($1M)/yr and treat us like we're working on an assembly line producing Jira story points. And if they don't surveil us carefully enough we might steal a point from them! Or something? Who knows. It's not just Facebook, although what they're doing here is particularly bad, but this ethos permeates the entire American tech industry. With very few exceptions, it's like this at every company.
I work at Meta (though after next Wednesday, maybe not).
I signed the petition.
Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so.
I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal.
Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent.
------
In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.
People here are making some warranted snarky comments. I ended working at Meta for a few quarters and quit. I will say many employees are so abstracted away that you sort of forget that you work for Facebook to some extent. I also noticed that people really believe that what Facebook works on is a net good. I don't agree and maybe we don't agree, but saying "haha now it's happening to you" isn't the gotcha you think it is to those people if those people believe the products are a net good.
I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid
Yup. I worked for Flock for a bit. During recruitment and onboarding, it was all big on ethics and morality and slippery slopes and responsible data stewardship.
After HR pats you on the back and you met with your team and org? Mask off.
"No, we won't build controls that allow us to block [data sharing that is illegal for agencies in state] for those agencies. That's not our concern. Oh, they want training on how to do that data sharing? Sure."
Garrett would talk regularly at all hands about a very Minority Report-esque future that was driven and made possible by Flock, and he was very clear it wasn't exaggerated for example or aspirational but an organizational goal.
Anyone who stayed there more than a few months knows exactly what they're doing.
Instead of signing petitions to enact change, which obviously won't happen because you're under a dictatorship, erode the company from the inside out.
Your platforms are already enshittified, enshittify your workplace, make a game out of making your workplace America's #1 toxic workspace. Quiet Quit, Gaslight your superiors, have AI write all your code & workplace communications, hit accept on all, while sludging up communications & the codebase. Make everything harder to do work while claiming all the productivity gains.
This sentiment continues endlessly up the chain.
Ultimately, deploying endless adtech, surveillance and data scraping techniques puts you only one or two steps away from a Palantir employee.
hopefully they push back successfully. even if the most nefarious use is "we're training computer use AI", they should shell out for dedicated labs, not piggyback off the employees. gross.
sidebar but I've never aspired to work for faang and as the years go on it seems more and more like the right choice. vampire culture.
Seriously. This goes for all kinds of analytics. We've normalized surveillance, and if you dare suggest opt-in analytics rather than forced or opt-out you get hit with "but then we won't get enough data to improve our product." That's your problem. Do a UX study, interview people, make a focused effort to make good software. That's how we got the best interface design of all time. Now we're drowning in data and our software is fucking garbage that constantly frustrates and confuses its users. Clearly the issue is not a lack of usage data. It may even do you some good to fly blind if this is your alternative.
Really you should do the lab, though. Take this field seriously and cut out the live A/B testing.
The employees were all fine with tracking the entire globe and surveilling on Meta's family of apps, but when that is used against them by tracking their own mouse movements and their computers, it is now all too much?
Why are you still at Meta then? Clearly Zuckerberg does not care and can easily (and will) lay them off.
If they were serious they would just walk out. They don't like the mouse tracking tech but I'll bet they like that sweet salary and cushy office job. How are the lunch options? I bet they're great. Oh what's that? You work from home? Must be nice.
Why not protest the mouse tracking they do for the rest of the world? Oh wait because they only give a shit about themselves, that is why they still work for facebook.
They should be supported, but they did choose to work for a boss whose entire career has followed the path of collecting sensitive personal data from people for personal gain.
What does this mean? I thought Meta has something like 80,000 employees. Meta had about 1,400 H-1B employee petitions last year. Even if we assume that number held for Meta's entire existence, that's less than 25,000 H-1B employees. Less than a third of Meta are presumably immigrants.
Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?
I don’t know why you think Meta accumulated most of its Chinese engineers through H1B. It’s top tier pay so most people move up to them from elsewhere.
rather bootlick Billionaires than Unions (the greediest cohort of them all).
Irony is of course lost that none of the HN 'Union' supporters voluntarily patronize goods/services from Union shops
Like most state employees, I am in a union and while there are MANY things I do not like about my union, from its high dues, to its constant forays into politics, to the supine pose it takes to contract negotiations, there is one thing that it does very well, and that is stands up against BS like this in a very meaningful way. Tech workers need a union or some union-like organization that stands up for basic worker rights.
It won’t happen, the last few generations have been brainwashed and have forgotten the past history of when people united together to give us the rights we have today which haven’t been added to since the 90s (the family leave act - which doesn’t even pay you it just keeps from losing a job)
There’s a reason they keep us fighting each other over race, culture wars, and other bs, because they know united our country would look so much different and they wouldn’t be able to make as much money
My union is excellent but we are the exception to the rules. Our contracts always net better pay and retirement benefits. Sometimes I’m in disbelief what they sometimes get on paper. It wasn’t always like that but the protection unions bring are a huge benefit. Like them or hate them this would be something that would be a line item in a contract with protections.
Probably going to get downvoted for this, but..
Unfortunately too many tech workers think they're special little snowflakes and deserve the highest pay possible and think that unions will interfere with that. Because if you aren't getting the highest pay or the highest job title, you just aren't good enough and why should I be associated with those that aren't good enough? You will never get tech workers to come together for the common good. It's always about only what's best for me. The amount of greedy self-centeredness and backstabbing I've seen in this industry across multiple companies is unreal.
Stuff like that should be regulated at a much higher level than unions.
Unions are historically how that kind of policy becomes policy.
In my EU country the national tech(IT) union is useless because they are simply toothless. Unions of teachers, airport, road, rail, etc workers are strong and always get what they want regardless of economic performance, because they can grind the country to a halt by simply not showing up to work for a day, but tech workers are under constant pressure of outsourcing and offshoring due to the globally distributed nature of work, so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against employers because they just have no leverage, when their workload can be taken over by someone from another country if they go on strike.
The local company union/workers council (Betriebsraat) si also equally toothless and didn't do much at the mass layoffs.
Unions are only as powerful as their impact to the comfort of the citizens and to the votes of the politicians.
>so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against >employers because they just have no leverage, when their >workload can be taken over by someone from another country if >they go on strike.
Are there mitigation policies in place in your org in case your union decides to take a sabbatical? What would happen if you all called in sick? It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions. Spirit Airlines in the states just shut down, but everyone just yawned, "oh, so sorry too bad". If your employer does have that plan B, then why are you still employed? Won't they want your union to strike and off with your heads?
I never got my head around the unions. They start idealistic but end up as corrupt as the source of their angst as they mature and it's a constant push/pull and the civilians' bank accounts suffer regardless. I am not saying "give in". So, close the borders, physical or digital?
Just musing, apologies for the ramble.
Forays into politics? Isn’t a union inherently political?
No. I am not paying $1,000s in dues for them to spend it on a rally to "End Child Poverty" (to use an example currently in my inbox; and it's a good cause, just not a good use of my dues). My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.
How about the career of the bosses of that union? You are not paying to advance them to the next step but suppo3End Child Poverty is probably well received by the people that will support them in their next job.
That's it, the union: every union for themselves, no cause no solidarity, just cold hard mercenary cause of money for you! That's the true spirit of labor, I'm sure.
>My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.
This is a political issue. Your rights as a worker only make sense within a countries political apparatus.
No it isn't. It's a collective negotiation between workers and their employer.
With rules created and enforced by a legislative body called a…
Which are only upheld through political structures ...
It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it. You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.
This is all literally politics.
The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?
The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.
Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."
I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).
This is really a "hoisted by your own petard" situation. I hope they don't think people are going to be sympathetic towards them when they're guilty of doing the same type of things (and far worse) to billions of people.
I'm sympathetic to this view, which has merit. I'm also happy to accept any new advocates for privacy and liberty. Purity tests are counterproductive to a movement's goals. Effort should be directed toward activities that advance the agenda of the movement, directly or indirectly.
Here's a better statement "I'm glad they're seeing the light, even if they had to become victimized themselves to finally care."
Fair point, but I'd have to see something more concrete than just them complaining about this situation specifically to believe they've actually seen the light. If they just continue to work there as usual and make no efforts to even find a job elsewhere, it doesn't seem like they've yet opened their eyes to the light.
There's something to be said about being an internal advocate for the right thing. Better to be fired for repeatedly advocating for privacy than to resign. Adding friction to wrongdoing is good.
I will never blame the non-management workers in this situation. Most of us are forced by modern society to work for someone else and there are a limited number of jobs available.
Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
This woukd be like saying the person scanning your ticket at the concert condones Ticketmaster as a monopoly. No, they’re just trying to feed their family.
Meta employees aren’t DoorDash gig workers trying to feed families. These are well compensated workers. It’s okay to have the opinion that most white collar jobs do some harm somewhere, but pretending these are poor souls forced to work for meta because of lack of options is not a great take.
Furthermore the guy scanning the tickets doesn’t work for Ticketmaster, Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta. Big difference.
That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
> I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
Meta's business model is to treat people as a resource to be exploited. It's fundamentally how the business works.
Meta regards its users as cattle, as livestock. It's why Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are "dumb fucks":
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs. Think about departments like support, graphic design, marketing, etc.
Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated.
Also, it’s not like you have a wildly great choice of ethical companies to work for as an employee. What percentage of corporations are truly ethical? What companies that compete with Meta are highly ethical? If I quit Meta who am I working for that has no ethical issues?
> There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs
With very few exceptions, Meta employees are generally making more money within their domain as compared to what they would make working at other companies, which is always an option.
> Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated
It’s a false dichotomy: work for meta or be unemployed. Millions of white collar workers are doing fine not working for Meta.
And questioning if any corporation is free from ethical problems does not absolve you from the responsibility of the outcomes of what you build. Some corporations are objectively worse than others. A corporation building systems to pay gig workers less than the minimum wage is going to be probably worse than a corporation that builds a design collaboration tool when it comes to ethics. You can choose to work for either and be well compensated for your work, but let’s not pretend you’re some poor soul trapped in a job that you can’t escape.
Yes, all those people Meta just laid off due to whistleblowing on the Glass privacy violations, and their content moderators and data labelers and so on have my full support.
No sympathies for anyone doing SW engineering or similar. Anyone working there can definitely get a different programming gig. It likely doesn't pay as much but that's how it goes when you sell your soul.
I still have sympathies for any individual contributors even if they are high paid.
No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.
Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?
Oh come on, It is very well known that the Facebook bar to get hired is ruthless and very high, it requires studying for weeks to pass the leetcode interviews. They just decided to get the extra 20k$/year to be at Meta because this is what they wanted to optimize for.
I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.
Oh I will blame them.
Working at Facebook means you optimized ruthlessly for $$$$$ only, absolutely nothing else.
Working at Facebook means you are a leetcode monkey and could as well pass other interviews somewhere else and get paid 10% less. But to you, destroying democracy and killing teenager was worth those extra 10%
Working at Facebook means you became a millionaire, even if you joined mid-career a couple years ago because of the stock inflation.
No they are not just trying to feed their family. 99% of them are ruthlessly optimizing to make the most money possible to live in the top 1%, while completely dismissing all the bad Facebook, Meta and Instagram do in the world. No sympathy.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster for minimum wage. At those income levels, who you work for DOES matter.
> Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors.
You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income.
Exactly. Working at Meta means you studied for 4 weeks for the leetcode interviews. That type of dedication means you could very easily get any job anywhere else.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster.
How am I doing that? I'm talking about people who have very valid options elsewhere.
"I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about.
I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff.
And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person".
You misread my comment. I'm in agreement with you all the way.
American work culture is so damn toxic.
If you hire someone you trust them. Otherwise don't.
I fail to see how treating everyone like a miserable inmate at a Siberian gulag is going to help innovation.
I don't think it's about trust, but they're using employees behavior for training their replacement.
It's hilariously fucked up. They pay us O($1M)/yr and treat us like we're working on an assembly line producing Jira story points. And if they don't surveil us carefully enough we might steal a point from them! Or something? Who knows. It's not just Facebook, although what they're doing here is particularly bad, but this ethos permeates the entire American tech industry. With very few exceptions, it's like this at every company.
I work at Meta (though after next Wednesday, maybe not).
I signed the petition.
Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so.
I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal.
Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent.
------
In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.
Stunning hypocrisy.
The irony is indeed absolutely blinding
People here are making some warranted snarky comments. I ended working at Meta for a few quarters and quit. I will say many employees are so abstracted away that you sort of forget that you work for Facebook to some extent. I also noticed that people really believe that what Facebook works on is a net good. I don't agree and maybe we don't agree, but saying "haha now it's happening to you" isn't the gotcha you think it is to those people if those people believe the products are a net good.
I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid
Yup. I worked for Flock for a bit. During recruitment and onboarding, it was all big on ethics and morality and slippery slopes and responsible data stewardship.
After HR pats you on the back and you met with your team and org? Mask off.
"No, we won't build controls that allow us to block [data sharing that is illegal for agencies in state] for those agencies. That's not our concern. Oh, they want training on how to do that data sharing? Sure."
Garrett would talk regularly at all hands about a very Minority Report-esque future that was driven and made possible by Flock, and he was very clear it wasn't exaggerated for example or aspirational but an organizational goal.
Anyone who stayed there more than a few months knows exactly what they're doing.
[dead]
Hey Meta Employees,
Instead of signing petitions to enact change, which obviously won't happen because you're under a dictatorship, erode the company from the inside out.
Your platforms are already enshittified, enshittify your workplace, make a game out of making your workplace America's #1 toxic workspace. Quiet Quit, Gaslight your superiors, have AI write all your code & workplace communications, hit accept on all, while sludging up communications & the codebase. Make everything harder to do work while claiming all the productivity gains.
You'll be doing humanity a service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual
But these protesting employees were perfectly fine with mouse tracking their users for adtech purposes?
Rules for thee but not for me.
This sentiment continues endlessly up the chain. Ultimately, deploying endless adtech, surveillance and data scraping techniques puts you only one or two steps away from a Palantir employee.
hopefully they push back successfully. even if the most nefarious use is "we're training computer use AI", they should shell out for dedicated labs, not piggyback off the employees. gross.
sidebar but I've never aspired to work for faang and as the years go on it seems more and more like the right choice. vampire culture.
> they should shell out for dedicated labs
Seriously. This goes for all kinds of analytics. We've normalized surveillance, and if you dare suggest opt-in analytics rather than forced or opt-out you get hit with "but then we won't get enough data to improve our product." That's your problem. Do a UX study, interview people, make a focused effort to make good software. That's how we got the best interface design of all time. Now we're drowning in data and our software is fucking garbage that constantly frustrates and confuses its users. Clearly the issue is not a lack of usage data. It may even do you some good to fly blind if this is your alternative.
Really you should do the lab, though. Take this field seriously and cut out the live A/B testing.
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I see...
The employees were all fine with tracking the entire globe and surveilling on Meta's family of apps, but when that is used against them by tracking their own mouse movements and their computers, it is now all too much?
Why are you still at Meta then? Clearly Zuckerberg does not care and can easily (and will) lay them off.
Just leave.
When such technologies are used to track masses, Meta employees just shrug, when it’s used to track them, it’s unacceptable.
“The ox does not mind the yoke until it is on his own neck.”
Oh poor Meta employees! So sad!
If they were serious they would just walk out. They don't like the mouse tracking tech but I'll bet they like that sweet salary and cushy office job. How are the lunch options? I bet they're great. Oh what's that? You work from home? Must be nice.
Why not protest the mouse tracking they do for the rest of the world? Oh wait because they only give a shit about themselves, that is why they still work for facebook.
Proud of them—it's scary to stand up to the boss, but we set the floor for eachother.
They should be supported, but they did choose to work for a boss whose entire career has followed the path of collecting sensitive personal data from people for personal gain.
Everybody starts somewhere. They've taken maybe their first step in the right direction.
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The 5 Americans left at Meta have had enough
What does this mean? I thought Meta has something like 80,000 employees. Meta had about 1,400 H-1B employee petitions last year. Even if we assume that number held for Meta's entire existence, that's less than 25,000 H-1B employees. Less than a third of Meta are presumably immigrants.
Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?
I don’t know why you think Meta accumulated most of its Chinese engineers through H1B. It’s top tier pay so most people move up to them from elsewhere.
Zuck should fire all of them. There are plenty who are smarter and willing to take their spot in this market
Bootlicker mentality.
They should unionize. Then, replacing the individual employees doesn’t work.
(Much easier said than done of course)
rather bootlick Billionaires than Unions (the greediest cohort of them all). Irony is of course lost that none of the HN 'Union' supporters voluntarily patronize goods/services from Union shops
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