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Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

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Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#51

This is sort of surprising information, from my view. The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.…

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible.

What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How sure are you about that?

Because there are plenty of sociopaths in positions of power at companies all over the world that would probably gladly hire skilled coders that either have no moral compass or are fine with their moral compass spinning wildly while they cash their paychecks?

> there are plenty of sociopaths

I think that's too strong of a word. It doesn't take a "sociopath" for a company to get to a bad place; merely the efforts of many engineers each doing something slightly immoral. Hopefully there are less of these now that they see what can happen to a company where such engineers work.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#53
post #5

I wonder how many new hires pass up Facebook because of ethical concerns. Whats scary is if even internally people are moving departments because of ethics, that basically filters so that the least ethical people are on the teams with the most ethical concerns. If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of course, n…

I find this issue much more pressing in the defense industry. I (thankfully) have the freedom to choose where I work. I will never willingly work on weapon systems. There are those that do though. Engineers who design things to kill other people. What the actual fuck.

I also used to work in defense, and thankfully not on weapons systems. I would like to point out some mild hilarity in your comment though:

Engineer used to (hundreds of years ago) literally mean someone who worked on designing weapons of war and/or defensive structures. How times have changed, hah.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#54
I have a lot of respect for someone who chooses to not work at a place because that place is doing bad things.

There are so many things that go into that decision, how "important" is it to be employed, how "bad" is the business behavior, how "costly" to a reputation is it to leave or to stay. It is the kind of question that puts a persons character and self image on trial, and in my experience few people emerge on the other side unchanged.

Faulkner said, "... the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. This was one of my High School English teacher's favorite quotes. But in the late 90's I met people who were being ripped apart by working at a dot.com company, knowing it was all smoke and mirrors, but staying to that they could vest their stock and sell it before the rest of the world figured it out. Being in a position where your personal wealth will benefit because you are participating in, although not directly responsible for, a fraud that is being perpetuated on the investors. How tainted is that silver?

A couple of years ago I was having lunch with an ex-Googler who was coming to grips with their loss of innocence. They had worked in AdWords and were part of a group that was increasing the average 'spend' of an AdWords customer with targeted messaging that was designed to appeal to their use of the system. This person had recognized that the goal of the program was to essentially "trick" the customer into spending more money when all the statistics said that doing so would not give them a commensurate growth in business or traffic. And as bad as they felt about participating, they continued to do so as the program manager stressed that nobody was "forcing" them to spend more money, just offering them a way to think about where they would "want" to spend more. This person was dealing with the realization that a younger version of themselves would be disgusted with the older version of themselves for "giving in."

It seems that people will talk about honor, character, and integrity in the abstract with one set of views and then find their real character (or lack thereof) when confronted with a test of their values.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for FB itself during this controversy won't tarnish your resume anyway.

I will pass on a resume that includes Facebook.

Bias: I've refused to work on any adtech revenue business, and I've passed on opportunities at Uber multiple times due to ... moral and ethical concerns.

I wouldn't hold experience at Uber or FB against any applicant.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#56
post #5

I wonder how many new hires pass up Facebook because of ethical concerns. Whats scary is if even internally people are moving departments because of ethics, that basically filters so that the least ethical people are on the teams with the most ethical concerns. If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of course, n…

Count me as one. Who can say if I'd have passed their interview process, but I was recruited by them and immediately said "no thanks", and told their recruiter I didn't like that they subjected their users to psychological experiments without their knowledge[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As sure as it's still a developer's market and FB controversy doesn't erase technological accomplishments of individuals. Those accomplishments are easily untied from the politics of the situation. You may lose a small amount of jobs that would come your way, but you'd still likely have dozens of offers to choose from from companies that don't view you as 'tainted'. Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical…

> FB controversy doesn't erase technological accomplishments of individuals It doesn't, but it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society. Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume? > Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense t…

>Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?

The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.

>Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done.

Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then. You're arguing correctly on a moral ground, but you don't have good industry ethics without good legal precedents.

Otherwise the best chance you've got is to get media attention and now you're fighting the company's PR.

When you can point to "Defendant can no longer work in software development because of an ethical failure" cases, you will have a much stronger argument to get engineers to follow ethical guidelines (we're assuming those have been written down on something other than a Github-feelgood repo for that case).

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)

Exactly. There is no war/enemy here. Only ideals, whose ethics are now openly questioned.

I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#59

This is sort of surprising information, from my view. The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.…

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

The bomb was initially built against the Nazis, and with the understanding that they would be building something similar.

Japan came later.

Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#60
What an incredibly first-world problem to have... Actually, it's worse than that. It's a top 1% of the first world problem. Most companies, in the broader world, are unethical, and do shady shit on a regular basis, but most rank-and-file people aren't lucky enough to have been making the kind of salary Facebookers can, nor do they have in-demand skills that let them hit the ground running if they decide they don't like it for merely ethical, rather than existential, reasons.
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