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Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

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

#201

Post by dcole2929 »

BRAlNlAC wrote: post #139
mabbo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries. Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say. These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all…

>These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'? I've understood that Facebook…

I mean that's good for you and I tend to agree. But it's incredibly naive to think that any significant percentage of the working population is using that criteria to determine where and on what they should work. We tend to think of tech people as being incredibly bright but at the end of the day they are human and FB is a very cool place to work. If you don't take a minute to evaluate the ethics of the work you're doing which might not on the surface be all that questionable it's easy to fool yourself into thinking, you're doing nothing wrong. It's a much easier realization that working for Defense Contractors making missile guidance systems is bad than it is to think hey all this data i'm collecting for my social network features could be put to some very bad uses

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

#202

Post by rytor718 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #179
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 "…

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.

This. We rarely realize that we idolize the wrong historical actors which contributes to our inaccurate evaluation of their deeds. In this case, pointing out Feynman or any other "brilliant minds" behind horrific events and technologies fails to acknowledge that they had detractors in during their time who pointed out these things to them. And they ignored them.

I usually try to keep that in mind now. In the back of my mind I'm saying "they knew, someone told them" and lo and behold, if I go looking for said detractors I can usually find them in spades.

I'm not defending or excusing anyone. Just pointing out that its unlikely these employees were unaware.

But it just doesn't seem likely.

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

#203

Post by draw_down »

taurath wrote: post #5

I wonder how many new hires pass up Facebook because of ethical concerns. Whats scary is if even internally people are moving departments because of ethics, that basically filters so that the least ethical people are on the teams with the most ethical concerns. If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of course, n…

I doubt the volume of people passing on because of these concerns is high, at least for the moment. I could be wrong, but I suspect this will mostly blow over pretty soon, and I don't think Facebook will be joining the likes of Comcast in terms of reputation any time soon, whether or not I think they deserve it.

But also a lot more companies are collecting a lot more data than gets noticed, so in a real sense I think many of us are fooling ourselves with regard to these ethical concerns. We're reacting to news coverage, not ethics.

For example I can think of a YC company that's fairly well beloved here, which is hoovering up way more data on the web than people are paying attention to. Perhaps they are doing this to somewhat less nefarious ends than Facebook, but the point is that our industry is only going to continue doing more and more of this, and switching to the devtools team or whatever isn't going to affect that very much.

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

#204

Post by ballooney »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #178
teachrdan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it."

-- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer

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

#205

Post by JoshMnem »

mmrezaie wrote: post #155
droidist2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what age you take the test though? Like I was very smart for my age as a child and I tested very high. Later in life I'm probably not much higher than my peers.

I think the whole point of IQ test is being stable independent of age.

It seems like a goal of IQ is to assign a single, unchanging score to someone's cognitive ability, but it is a severely flawed concept. The test should not be called "intelligence quotient" but something like "cognitive battery" instead.

You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without careful definition) can't be reduced to a single number.

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

#206

Post by stevenwoo »

taurath wrote: post #5

I wonder how many new hires pass up Facebook because of ethical concerns. Whats scary is if even internally people are moving departments because of ethics, that basically filters so that the least ethical people are on the teams with the most ethical concerns. If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of course, n…

Remember being contacted by the Oculus recruiter, but the association with a white supremacist founder, Palmer Luckey, felt really wrong to me personally. Even after he left it feels tainted.

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

#207

Post by gaius »

peoplewindow wrote: post #86
saagarjha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't be flippant. You know the what we mean here: the perception that those who work at Facebook are lacking in ethics or moral fiber. This isn't about politics.

Yeah, but what drives that perception? It doesn't seem to be rooted in any coherent theory of ethics. After all, users happily agreed to their data being used, they weren't forced to sign up to social networks en-masse, they weren't forced to install tons of crappy apps or agree to grant them permission to their friends data. They weren't denied any information or lied to. So the normal rules of ethics that would lea…

After all, users happily agreed to their data being used, they weren't forced to sign up to social networks en-masse, they weren't forced to install tons of crappy apps or agree to grant them permission to their friends data.

The modern understanding of consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time. Sometimes even retrospectively

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

#208

Post by stale2002 »

verandaguy_alt wrote: post #195
stale2002 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whistle blowing laws also exist, though. So if they are doing something illegal, and therefore one is protected from prosecution, they should absolutely "leak" it to the authorities. Doesnt matter if you are unemployable if you recieve millions in a whistle blowing reward from the government.

Not all countries have whistleblowing protections, and even fewer will offer fiscal rewards for the act.

But the US has them. And anyone who is working for a major tech company is "probably" working in the US and therefore covered by them.

And yes, the US offers rewards as well. Specifically, it is something like 10% of the monetary judgment against the company, in many cases.

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

#209

Post by username223 »

raverbashing wrote: post #185
username223 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep -- Los Alamos. You should read "Surely You're Joking," by the way. It's worth it just for the story about finding a hole in the fence, then walking in the guard gate and out the hole again and again until someone noticed.

I have the book, but I don't think I got to the Los Alamos part ;)

Thank you for wasting my time ;-). That story was in "Los Alamos from Below," which may not have been part of "Surely You're Joking." Feynman was a fascinating guy and an excellent writer, even if he was a bit too young to be a serious player in the Manhattan Project. By the way, if you're interested in physics, these are about as good as it gets: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

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

#210

Post by kevindqc »

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…

If you don't like it, ignore it? It has 366 points and 203 comments, so I'm sure some people are interested in this?
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