Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 655 posts

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#221

Post by simoncion »

ergocoder wrote: post #97
marssaxman wrote: post #92

"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?" Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.

People act surprised when they are tracked on a corporate machine lmao. Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?

I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat.

So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#222

Post by ben_w »

slibhb wrote: post #198
ben_w wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious: The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the…

You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee. It's just absurd, a clueless way of thinking about moral responsibility.

Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.

The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.

Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.

If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#223

Post by ActorNightly »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

And you would be stupid not to.

One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.

On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).

The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#225

Post by solid_fuel »

slibhb wrote: post #198
ben_w wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious: The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the…

You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee. It's just absurd, a clueless way of thinking about moral responsibility.

> You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee.

You clearly don’t understand this, and maybe you never will (it seems beyond some people), but moral responsibility is assigned here because of the actions facebook and their employees took.

It is not assigned to Tim Berners-Lee because, again this is important, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t spend years spreading targeted genocidal propaganda in a country with a violent history and fragile peace.

Hope that helps. If you still can’t understand it, I can recommend some philosophy books on morality and our responsibilities to our fellow humans.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#227

Post by tommyogod »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86
shimman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should…

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

"If I didn't cheat on you then someone else would" good lord

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#228

Post by spencerflem »

ActorNightly wrote: post #223
jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it And you would be stupid not to. One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and…

I mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself.

I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#229

Post by not_a_bot_4sho »

gulugawa wrote: post #206
nine_k wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React. I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

I agree that Meta is not uniformly bad, but I would not consider React to be a great tool. Every React project I worked on has turned into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti.

I was going to say, isn't React something to hold against Meta? Being intimately familiar with it, I don't consider it a positive contribution to the world.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#230

Post by spinningslate »

ActorNightly wrote: post #223
jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it And you would be stupid not to. One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and…

> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.

Post reply on HN