141–150 of 560 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm twice their age and I don't either. What consequences do you refer to?
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…
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…
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.
The headline is actually So Say Some Computer Science Students , which I think is a non-trivial difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I don’t blame them. Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other roles). In the Bay, it’s the difference between living comfortably+saving for their future and just making ends meet. It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
> 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 scient…
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. Th…
> 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. If it's just salary, not including equity, that's by no means "very low". Where are you finding that new grads are typically getting more?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very similar to when you hear people say "I love my job but they don't pay a living wage!" It's because you love your job, you have to pay for that.
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 visionar…
If it weren't for the money you'd have a heck of a time recruiting VPs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I don’t blame them. Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other roles). In the Bay, it’s the difference between living comfortably+saving for their future and just making ends meet. It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
Aaaaaaand gone is the moral. Great.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very similar to when you hear people say "I love my job but they don't pay a living wage!" It's because you love your job, you have to pay for that.
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 visionar…
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.