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Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

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Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#171
post #58

Meta must really be paying a lot!

Indeed → https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries • Engineer (E3, entry level) $248.2K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... • Engineer (E5, senior level) $629.8K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... • Engineer (E7, principal) $1.69M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... • Engineer (E9, distinguished) $6.09M avg…

Currently living in the UK where average principal salaries are less than entry level. Even better working for a US corp and having to deal with the complete lack of understand about why we aren't nearly as motivated as our US counterparts

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#172
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React made front end suck. Sorry.

I think you might be forgetting how much it sucked before React.

I vastly prefer plain JS over React, but I will admit that React probably was instrumental in helping create frontend frameworks that are actually good, like Svelte. So I will give Facebook credit for that.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#173
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where should we work instead? I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire. I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.

Your options are: 1. Find another job 2. Don’t find another job You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day. You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.

> there are plenty of places that pay less

This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#174
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc. It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response

> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc. You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”. It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they a…

> It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military.

If the motivation is 'improving the defence of the west', it's more equivalent to joining a fringe paramilitary organisation; the dogwhistle is clear.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#175
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you ignore is the thing that with meta’s salary you can retire in 10 years back to Europe. With silly wages in Germany you can retire on your 75th birthday. Feel the difference? Germany’s economy is stagnating, there will be no higher salaries anymore. Just higher taxes. If I were younger I would pick SF and hordes of homeless over declining Germany. If you follow political discussions it will not get better: pl…

I think this reduces to a simple question of preference, but you understand that in order to get those salaries you work around the clock in a work environment so toxic, that there’s several books written about it. There’s a reason why they dev’s can order food and have free laundry service there, and it’s not zuck just loving his employees more. So yeah if you don’t get ill or burnout you get to retire earlier, and…

Not a German. Coming from authoritarian state and following democratic processes in Germany very closely. Love to talk with older neighbors occasionally. From my personal observation I can differentiate 4 time lines. First one is West Germany after WW2 living under the skirt of Americans. This laid foundation for rapid growth in second phase and prosperity. Arrogance came in with “Made in Germany”. Third phase started with unification and millions of new citizens from former eastern states. While being Germans they had really skewed worldview (I lived there many years). And the decline started in episode 4 with Merkel and zero interest era. While pragmatic leaders would push for using interest free debt to improve infrastructure nothing happened. Instead of that she opened borders and closed nuclear power plants. This decision lead for huge tensions in the society overloading social system. Dumb right orientation parties were elected. Electricity’s definitely not cheap.

We pay more than 30000€ a year for mandatory public health insurance and more for modern treatments not covered by insurance. That’s not different than in US, except the funny salaries in Germany.

Society is not homogeneous. There are more and more elderly who will vote who promises them heaven. The young ones are ignored. There are many conflicts: young vs. old. The riches against rest 95%. The ones born on German soil and the ones arrived later mixing illiterate refugees and PhD expats together.

Interesting times. It’s nice to believe, that Germany can put the shit together. But there are too many forces at play. Let’s see. I am too old to move elsewhere.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have like 5 companies in my rolodex who would hire me to be fully remote tomorrow get with the times

Knock it off. Nobody wants to read your braggadocio, and it’s insulting to people who are having real challenges finding work.

Someone working at Meta is not someone who has real challenges finding work.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#177
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one. Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize,…

They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.

It's both. We can point to individuals who make terrible decisions and also acknowledge that there will always be such people as long as the system incentivizes them.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React definitely didn't make frontend _great_ in a lot of cases, but jQuery, mootools, prototype, knockout, ember, angular, and a whole lot more JS frameworks that have come and gone predate React. If React hadn't been invented there'd be just as many poorly developed browser apps as there are today. You can't really pin that on React.

What I can pin on react is that it is very inefficient with resources using much more cpu power than needed to render some text and images on a webpage. Imagine all the electricity that was wasted because of react and the negative impact on the environment it has had because of that.

React doesn't do anything unless the DOM needs to to be updated.

Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed.

Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop.

We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shameful to work for As bad as Meta products are for society, I'd say Palantir is far more shameful to work for.

I disagree. Many Palantir FDEs work on morally benign or even positive projects, for example helping hospitals during COVID. (Of course, many also do unethical work). At Meta, almost everyone is contributing to unethical ends.

Like saying you were a medic in the SS. You're still in the SS.

Re: Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

#180
post #125
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.

In 2001 France had Copains d'avant https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copains_d%27avant for school based networking. So not a new idea

We just had a thing that would export MSN messenger contact list, you'd add your email there and everyone would add you on MSN. Way less creepy than the stalking fb was doing.
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