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Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

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Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#341

Post by Jtarii »

jkl5xx wrote: post #266
yojo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption. If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately. Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix. Amazon has ho…

This is a pretty uncharitable perspective. Most folks I know working at Meta or Amazon aren’t morally bankrupt. They just have kids, debt, poor parents with health problems, etc. They work at Meta to support their loved ones. And it’s not like you can walk onto the street and just wave down a morally superior job with similar pay and benefits. Blame the tech oligarchs, not the workers.

When you are paid $500,000+ a year you lose the right to use the "I'm just supporting my family" excuse.

You sold your morals for a wheelbarrow of money, that is the end of the story.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#342

Post by jjulius »

bloggie wrote: post #316
jjulius wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many, many ways to provide for one's family, Meta is but one. And I say this as a father providing for mine. Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.

After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger…

When the entire world has been built around requiring you to use petroleum to go places and build certain things, and requires you to use certain software to interact with everyone, I have sympathy for users whose hands are often tied from the get-go. I can't blame them when "the system" (a reductive phrase, but it works for this response) is setup as such.

That there's demand isn't necessarily the fault of the user, in many cases it's the fault of industry. At this point, at least for petroleum, it's a feedback loop - we built infrastructure around it, people became dependent upon it because alternatives are limited, the dependence creates demand, and that demand is used to justify continued production.

The petroluem industry then just has to work hard to squash alternatives, as it very much has, thereby leaving the user with little to no choice.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#343

Post by Bnjoroge »

spicyusername wrote: post #253
Bnjoroge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere

This is the kind of attitude that keeps the world the way it is.

That makes no sense. They didnt provide any specific reasons they dont like the tech industry. All of their reasons can be applied to just about any industry lmao. The core issue is and always will be capitalism

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#344

Post by crystal_revenge »

veber-alex wrote: post #87
p0w3n3d wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?

Yep. One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff. When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.

> When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks

I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this. It's not surprising you don't get officially dedicated "study time". The vast majority of programmers aren't hourly anyway, so officially sanctioned study hours doesn't even fit in with how work is prioritized. Not to mention the optics look terrible if your team is ever behind your manager is now in the awkward position have having "non-work" on record as part of what you're getting paid for.

Just bring your book with you and read during slow period, when a job is running, model training etc. You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.

I've never had official permission to study at work about I've also never had any problem studying at work. If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#345

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

LucidLynx wrote: post #22

I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!? Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand... Let just Meta die!

Median pay at Meta is $380k. Median. I'm sure it's high variance but I would put up with a lot for that kind of money

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#346

Post by Bnjoroge »

coldtea wrote: post #139
Bnjoroge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere

When it comes to the shit imposed to the rest of society, and the shit imposed on office workers, it's worse in this industry.

No it’s not unless you’ve never interacted with people in other industries. It’s just as bad there, unless you have specific reasons for tech

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#347

Post by jlarocco »

caymanjim wrote: post #142
stingraycharles wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the keyword is “can”. It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.

Yeah, I know they can. I just can't believe it's normalized and that people simply accept it. Good on the EU for pushing back.

I'm surprised you can't believe it.

Most companies large enough to have their own IT have monitoring and know what's going through their network. The larger the company, the more likely they're watching. I've personally never seen that information used against anybody unless they were looking at shady stuff (porn, hacking websites, etc.), but I'm sure they're monitoring.

Even outsourced IT for small companies will often put "security" software like Sentinel One or Sophos on machines they manage, and those can track and block web traffic, report everything being installed, and even MITM HTTPS traffic.

Personally I don't see the big deal. If I don't want my employer watching something, I don't do it on their network. I monitor what's going on in my tiny home network, and I expect anybody administrating larger networks does the same thing.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#348

Post by siren2026 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #129
baggachipz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.

I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60. Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.

Why does everyone absolutely need insurance?

Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.

I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.

Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that. But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?

I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#349

Post by dehrmann »

wl wrote: post #281
macNchz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve…

I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.

There are also individual-level risks. If you capture everything, you might capture bank account numbers when setting up direct deposit or credit card numbers from corporate purchases (these are clearly valid uses of company equipment). In a only slightly less valid use, you might submit a medical claim (using a company benefit), and surveillance software gets part of your medical record.

There are underappreciated liabilities companies take on with this monitoring.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#350

Post by pjmlp »

ryandrake wrote: post #292
crispyambulance wrote: post #20

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing l…

I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams. Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much ea…

I fully agree with you.

I think large majority on HN works in cool startups without IT rules that could even cost their job when failing security assessments.

Another one, there is no cowboy instalation of dependencies, the CI/CD servers can only talk to internal nexus, jfrog,...

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