wageslave99a year ago
Yes, for sure. I would be there some years, get some experience and skills and get out.
Money isn't everything.
So which is worse? Refusing to get some personal gain from an evil corporation with an evil leader? Or accepting the reality of it, taking a job from them, and using some of the resulting wealth to create positive impact in other areas of our world?
There is no right answer to that question, BTW. Everyone has their own ethics. But there is more depth to be considered than just "Meta is evil, so reject job."
(For the record, I don't know anyone in leadership at Meta, so I cannot say if they are actually evil or not, that statement is just for the sake of argument.)
Working for a company that brings such a net negative to society is not a matter of "most corporations are evil at some level".
Facebook/Instagram/Meta (and Google) have such a negative influence in the minds of billions of people that honestly, they both already rival or might surpass how big and influential Nazi Germany ever was.
If Meta was a company like others, this kind of Ask HN wouldn't be so common.
So, what do you do?
I don't think a hypothetical bigger evil in the future is worse than current big evil tho and what's going to come from AI is still up to grab, at least much more than social media or search.
The reality is most of the biggest tech companies work with defense. Some of it is actually defense. I think we should come up with a "Are we the baddies?" checklist.
1. Do we justify killing 10 innocents to save one life?
2. Are the enemies not given proper burials, i.e. are body parts kept as trophies or mounted on sticks? Mass graves and cremations are still okay.
3. Do our commanders show joy at killing an unarmed civilian?
4. Do we perform experiments on live prisoners?
5. Do we rape or kill anyone under the age of 9?
6. Do we use starvation as a weapon?
I would wager that no tech company scores anywhere near 5 like Nazis. But some may be complicit on at least 1, like human trafficking or enabling serial killers.
Honestly, what gets me up in the morning is knowing that my work is meaningful to the modern world and that the quality of people's lives would be negatively impacted if I didn't do what I do. Meaningful work, no matter how small the impact, does a lot for your mental health.
Just making money? It's not fulfilling and won't sustain your soul. But if you don't have a job at all, sure, I'd take it - let's be realistic, you need money to survive.
While I do appreciate some of their products (React which I use, Quest which I don't have), I think by and large their revenue makers (Facebook, Instagram, I don't know what else they have) are a net negative to society. The commodification of community for profit was a bad move and will eventually result, IMO, in the worldwide downfall of democracies. I think our kids will have it pretty rough in no small part because of Meta, but hey, at least we got to share vacation photos and cat videos.
I'd be going there do to software engineering. As a software engineering firm I rate them highly. Their products are solid. Video chat is reliable for example, far more reliable than say Teams, and I suspect works at much larger scale. They operate at massive scale, yet outages are rare. They grok open source, and they make numerous contributions to the area. Most recently llama 2 has given open source tinkers a leg up with AI. Thank you Meta.
I have no idea what their culture is like internally, but hey working with people who are among the best at what they do is always attractive. If their engineering culture isn't unpleasant I'd don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to work there as a software engineer.
Would you work in a weapons manufacturer when your country is invading a poor country?
That's what Meta is doing, but worldwide, with people's brains, abusing people's weaknesses and changing the fabric of society.
I'm surprised EU and other countries haven't just blocked that spyware crap. Look what it's doing to kids and the younger generation. Leave it to Americans.
Besides all of the negative attention the company has drawn, they've also done a lot of good for the world that mostly goes unrecognized. I wouldn't be with my wife and have my family if it weren't for Facebook.
They're also invested in future tech which has great potential to be a net good for humanity. A lot of their open source and research gets released for public use.
I rejected a down-level offer from Meta a couple of years ago and I sometimes wonder if that was the wrong move.
But I wouldn't rule out working for the company. Look, I am old enough to remember the time when Microsoft was the antithesis (and sworn enemy) of the open source movement. Yet today, they are a completely different company.
So, even if there are some things I don't like about Meta, I would still seriously consider any particular offer, and decide whether to accept it based on the details of the position, not the reputation of the company.