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Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

businessinsider.com

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Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#171

Post by zemo »

jiveturkey wrote: post #125
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for FB itself during this controversy won't tarnish your resume anyway.

related: does having uber on your resume tarnish it? At $JOB-1, my boss (only good boss in the whole company, TBH) got fired soon after I left. As a knee-jerk reaction by upper mgmt. (poorly run company.) His replacement knows 1/10 of what he knows, and hails from Uber.

> does having uber on your resume tarnish it?

depends who's evaluating it and what their values are. If their values are aligned with Uber's values, then no. If their values are opposed to Uber's values, then yes. I'm squarely of the latter. Uber would be a major negative to me. But everyone is different. Some people might view it positively.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#172

Post by dsacco »

paulie_a wrote: post #32
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for FB itself during this controversy won't tarnish your resume anyway.

I will pass on a resume that includes Facebook.

You'll pass on a potentially excellent hire simply because of the name on their resume? You won't even expend a modicum of effort to interview the candidate or see if they're at all involved in the specific work you despise? Are over 20,000 employees guilty in your view?

If this isn't irrational behavior, what would it take for you to be acting irrationally?

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#173

Post by njarboe »

sametmax wrote: post #73
raverbashing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bomb was initially built against the Nazis, and with the understanding that they would be building something similar. Japan came later. Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.

If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later. But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity. And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi. That the bomb was a good decision o…

Oppenheimer recalling the Trinity test:

It brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

I'm sure those scientists thought about it and discussed it among themselves, but they were in a super top secret lab in the middle of nowhere. Not much opportunity to leave an historical record of what they thought (letters highly censored, etc).

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#174

Post by zemo »

quest88 wrote: post #46

Can we stop feeding these accounts? The submitter is a new account whose submissions are mainly facebook articles. It's not contributing anything useful to HN. Why is this account posting so many FB related articles? Do they have some other motive that HN is falling for? At this point I feel like HN has turned into a FB news dump since it makes the people who "quit facebook and never looked back" feel good. Where are…

> At this point I feel like HN has turned into a FB news dump

Zuckerberg is testifying to congress right now. That's the news. You're not mad at HN, you're mad at the present.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#175

Post by Freestyler_3 »

Ethics are only important to the workforce when the company is shows to have bad ethics, thus just having the company on your C.V. makes it look bad.

I saw the same things at school, studying for forensic IT. Whole classes of people who think they learned to be an ethical person. The thing is, sure they makke ethical decisions at times. But in a pinch they might not consider ethics as much. Like when they really need a job. I myself don't consider myself to be the most ethical, but my morals are strong... don't do evil!

Knowing what is evil and not evil, is a big part of doing the right thing, can't expect the whole workforce to know where the line is or that there is a line.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#176

Post by tzakrajs »

eric_b wrote: post #33
ThemalSpan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this issue much more pressing in the defense industry. I (thankfully) have the freedom to choose where I work. I will never willingly work on weapon systems. There are those that do though. Engineers who design things to kill other people. What the actual fuck.

That's great that you've got a set of principles that you live by, and are able to stick to them. However, your principles are not everyone's principles, and what you consider moral and ethical is not universal. Grellas had a great comment on working for the military industrial complex a few days ago, that I think is worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759324

Read the comments in reply to that unnecessarily verbose comment. The follow-up comments destroy the original comment quickly.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#177

Post by [deleted] »

dsacco wrote: post #159
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to summarize FB employees, from @numair from 8 months ago: > Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it work…

This is an exceptionally poor way to "summarize" the employees of any large company, including Facebook. Your personal ethics aside, whenever you're about to describe an entire company's staff using phrases like, "these sorts of people" and "mind-virus", you should stop and reconsider what you think you know about the world. You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#178

Post by IAmEveryone »

teachrdan wrote: post #51
sametmax wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

—- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#179

Post by pmoriarty »

sametmax wrote: post #39
leggomylibro wrote: post #7

This is sort of surprising information, from my view. The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.…

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

Contrast Feynman's attitude to that of Wolfgang Pauli, who refused to work on the Manhattan Project, saying "it's not the business of science to engineer mass destruction."

There have been plenty of other highly intelligent people who acted ethically, often at great danger to themselves, rejecting many financial and social incentives to act unethically.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#180

Post by Lewton »

alasdair_ wrote: post #117
sametmax wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "…

>While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume. (He scored 125 on his test at school). See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein...

Feynman had a higher IQ than 125

Tests are not perfect, he could have had a bad day

Maybe he didn’t care

Maybe he misremembers taking an actual IQ test etc

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