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‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

nytimes.com

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Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#191

Post by lynal »

gpm wrote: post #28
yaacov wrote: post #9

> 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…

My theory is that pay and working conditions at Facebook are as good as they are precisely because of people feeling like this. They are having to pay a premium to attract engineers as a result of the moral opposition.

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.

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#192

Post by manfredo »

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #146
manfredo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm kind of surprised they listed a $140k starting pay. That's pretty low for new grads in the industry and very low for Facebook. If it's just salary, not including equity, that's by no means "very low". Where are you finding that new grads are typically getting more?

I'm assuming this is a California thing? That's like beyond senior level pay over here in the mid west, lol.

140k including equity is not unheard of. 90k-120k base salary plus a few tens of thousands in equity is a typical range for a new grad in SV. Chances are they'll still live with room mates, though because housing costs are high. Not to mention the 10-20k that is paid in California income taxes. So it probably balances out.

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#193

Post by eksemplar »

avinium wrote: post #175
eksemplar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system that won the bidding is called DUBU. https://www.kombit.dk/dubu The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys. It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 millio…

> I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is. Enterprise software companies know exactly what they're doing - fleecing the government for every single dime they can. You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders. Blame the government for its ridiculously bloated pr…

I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money.

They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff.

I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that.

You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range.

The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#194

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

gpm wrote: post #28
yaacov wrote: post #9

> 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…

My theory is that pay and working conditions at Facebook are as good as they are precisely because of people feeling like this. They are having to pay a premium to attract engineers as a result of the moral opposition.

Why do you think working conditions are good at Facebook. Facebook’s style of open-plan office & surveillance culture is one of the unhealthiest, anti-human work environments around. Even if the company had ethical self-awareness, I’d stillstay away just due to the physical health degradation that results from that type of open-plan office, and to help reduce the cargo-cult copying that leads other companies to mistakenly adopt that type of open-plan layout just because Facebook does.

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#195

Post by leroy_masochist »

dionidium wrote: post #97
leroy_masochist wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an issue of human rights but rather of journalistic ethics. See my other comments on this thread.

It's not unethical to accurately quote 19 year olds. This is an eccentric position you've staked out.

If you had to bet $5 on whether or not the reporter sat these kids down before interviewing them for the record and said something like, "Be advised, what you say in this article is going to be seen by every potential employer for the next 5+ years, are you ready to drop some truth bombs?" how would you bet?

I would bet that she did not...

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#196

Post by sailingparrot »

eksemplar wrote: post #180
sailingparrot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that these peoples in the article have leverage. Companies are competing for them not the other way around, so it's natural for them to consider ethics because it will not affect their standard of living. If I have the choice between working for Palantir or Facebook, I choose Facebook. If have to choose to between Facebook and Apple I choose Apple. Whatever I choose I will still live extremely comfortabl…

Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us. You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred publ…

"Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us."

That is my point. Many of them move to the SV because they can get better conditions (caused by more leverage) there than if they stay in Denmark because there is a magnitude more tech companies there than in DK. I'm pretty sure they don't just move to avoid the rain :)

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#197

Post by RandomInteger4 »

Falling3 wrote: post #6
minimaxir wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame HN's 80 character limit on titles.

Dropping "so" instead of "some" keeps the intent of the headline and still manages to stay under 80 characters.

Alternatively we can just use camel case: "ISoSaySomeComputerScienceStudents"

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#198

Post by fizwhiz »

Animats wrote: post #49

...the head of the start-up incubator and investment firm, Y Combinator, gave opening remarks, recommending that young people avoid jobs in big tech. “You get to program your life on a totally different scale.... The worst thing that can happen to you is you get a job at Google.” He called those jobs “$100,000 a year welfare” — meaning, he said, that workers can get tethered to the paycheck and avoid taking risks. Wh…

... only that in 2018, it's anything but $100k. New grads would scoff at that; they're easily clearing $200k if not more[1]

And I wholeheartedly agree with your statement. YC's stance is convenient since they have a vested interest in getting talent for your startup. I see it as more desperation in the face of the current reality that most people can comfortably earn for their future while working at a big co and then choose to move to a startup (in whatever capacity) further down the line once they're more "woke" so to speak.

[1] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#199

Post by anoncake »

eksemplar wrote: post #180
sailingparrot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that these peoples in the article have leverage. Companies are competing for them not the other way around, so it's natural for them to consider ethics because it will not affect their standard of living. If I have the choice between working for Palantir or Facebook, I choose Facebook. If have to choose to between Facebook and Apple I choose Apple. Whatever I choose I will still live extremely comfortabl…

Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us. You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred publ…

Yukihiro Matsumoto is Danish?

Re: ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

#200

Post by sjg007 »

nemild wrote: post #169
yaacov wrote: post #9

> 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…

Chomsky talks about this.
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