541–550 of 560 posts
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They're good companies, but not as nice to work for as Google and Facebook.
Would you think less of me as an employee of Apple instead of an employee of Facebook?
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As a Googler, Facebook would certainly be a place I would consider if I wasn’t at google. You’re right, of course, that it is a better than fine employer.
I seriously don't get why Google and Facebook got that brand name. 95% of engineers there are part of the pack and do mainly mindless jobs with very little impact. They are the mot "Sheep-ish" people I know, convinced that working for Google/Facebook give them something to brag at dinner parties. The top 5 rockstars % (the ones they really want to attract with big money) are the ones taking all decisions.
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As a Googler, Facebook would certainly be a place I would consider if I wasn’t at google. You’re right, of course, that it is a better than fine employer.
That doesn't prove anything though: employee at biggest surveillance machine in the world considers working at the 2nd biggest surveillance machine in the world. A lot of us software engineering types lack integrity and are perfectly happy to work on socially harmful projects as long as the pay's right and there's opportunity to grow one's skills.
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I am not going to argue that mission statements are not bullshit, but I don't think your argument is persuasive. Just because you will compromise some values when push comes to shove doesn't mean those values were completely meaningless... it just means they were not as important as another value that they came into conflict with. For example, I value pacifism. I think non-violence is almost always the right choice,…
If the mission statement is superceded by other implicit values, like creating shareholder value, it's not much of a mission statement. The whole point of a mission statement is to make your primary values explicit.
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> Where is it ethical to work? Working at Netflix, Apple, Salesforce, Oracle, or Microsoft seems to be a category more ethical than Facebook/Google, wouldn't you say? Isn't that a good place to start? At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes)
Oracle? With their approach to IP? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they care about anything but money in the least.
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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…
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage... Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation. > On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage. Medical licenses are controlled by the govern…
Yes. Thankfully. Somewhat irrelevant though.
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Mission statements are always bullshit. The reason being that I have never seen a case where, when push comes to shove, that a company would forgo needed revenue if it contradicted their mission statement. Instead what happens is that leaders go through mental gymnastics trying to show "No, it still aligns with our mission statement, you just have to twist the meaning of the words in the mission statement beyond any…
I am not going to argue that mission statements are not bullshit, but I don't think your argument is persuasive. Just because you will compromise some values when push comes to shove doesn't mean those values were completely meaningless... it just means they were not as important as another value that they came into conflict with. For example, I value pacifism. I think non-violence is almost always the right choice,…
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This is called a "compensating differential" (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential ). There's a decent body of literature in economics on this. This falls under labor economics.
Interesting. In the same vein, video game companies have a negative compensating differential. Lots of kids want to grow up to program video games, so they don't have to pay them as much under worse work environments.
> Ms. Brown said a lot of students criticize Facebook and talk about how they would not work there, but ultimately join. “Everyone cares about ethics in tech before they get a contract,” she said. This describes my what I've observed perfectly. There are very few companies that make new grad offers comparable to Facebook's, and career advancement opportunities and working conditions at Facebook tend to be better than…
I loved this quote: > “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.” I call these anodyne missi…
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Interesting. In the same vein, video game companies have a negative compensating differential. Lots of kids want to grow up to program video games, so they don't have to pay them as much under worse work environments.
After taking graphics programming in college, I don't ever want to work in video games.