In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.
On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.
Spying on employees is not free. If you want to spend serious resources doing it, there has to be an upside.
E.g. their anti-virus or firewall system may ignore URLs related to banking, medical, or political affiliation and chose not to log or decrypt that traffic
In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher productivity (perceived, as whats measured no longer ends up being a useful metric) and control and urge people to do more of what they desire.
And my curiosity is: does what Facebook desire align with what the humans who work for Facebook desire? I think with AI, that's a no. The company desires as low a labor/workforce/compensation cost as possible, while the humans desire as much compensation as possible.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as much as possible.
It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
Perhaps it's the lack of proper authoritarian regime in the US' past that drives this. I believe the temporal proximity of such makes people aware of, and angry against, the many traps that such systems leave in their "law", so you can be imprisoned anytime for anything. EU has a bunch of countries with varying degree of such past.
Additionally, don't use personal devices for work, but that is because of other reasons.
Its allows in most of the EU apart from germany where there are strict limits.
however you can still record what your users are doing for purposes of detecting fraud. This is where it differs from the USA, where they can do anything because they have no data protection laws.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.
Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.
There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.
I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.
Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.
Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.
Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.
It's not inconvenient to bring a phone, but it is very inconvenient to have to conduct personal business on a phone rather than on a laptop.
Nonetheless, I agree that it's a bad idea to conduct personal business on an employer-owned machine.
But I don't want to pretend that it's super convenient to have to carry a second laptop, either.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this. It's not surprising you don't get officially dedicated "study time". The vast majority of programmers aren't hourly anyway, so officially sanctioned study hours doesn't even fit in with how work is prioritized. Not to mention the optics look terrible if your team is ever behind your manager is now in the awkward position have having "non-work" on record as part of what you're getting paid for.
Just bring your book with you and read during slow period, when a job is running, model training etc. You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.
I've never had official permission to study at work about I've also never had any problem studying at work. If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
I think, like noncompetes, there's limits to how far the company can actually enforce it, but they bank on the fact that they have lawyers on permanent retainer, and you don't. Even standing up for your rights, against blatant corporate overreach, is expensive.
The legal term to search is "work for hire".
(Just kidding, I know what happens... they will fire you and hire someone who doesn't have kids.)
And then the boss will blame young people for collapsing the demography and endangering the country.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
[1] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping
[2] bhmt.dev/blog/ctf
[3] bhmt.dev/blog/feeds
You know, don't forget the details.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
(This is from Office Space for those who don’t know. Hilarious scene with Jennifer Aniston)
>>"How's THIS for expression?!? I'm sick and TIRED of this ... job!"
----
I will never go above&beyond again – for any corporate entity – ever again. You can blame past corporate bullies, not yourselves.
(If you don't desire to grow your career, that's a viewpoint I can entirely understand.)
Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.
We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.
Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.
Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.
My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.
Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.
This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.
Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.
Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.
The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.
How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.
This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.
Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...
In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?
We’re in weird times.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.
Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.
In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.
I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.
If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?
Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!
Great post but this is what it reduces to.
99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.
This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
It consists of two broad strategies:
1. Consumer Non-Cooperation (Boycott): Boycott of stuff sold, or given by these companies, irrespective of how attractive it is.
2. The Constructive Program (Self-Reliance): Building and supporting alternatives, even if they cost you a little bit more.
All it needs is little self-discipline and a very very tiny bit of sacrifice on daily basis.
IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers
Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
I don't strive for 996. Is this really the bar we want to meet?
This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians.
Tons of evidence out there, especially in EU.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.
And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.
It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
> experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table.
Sorry for the dark humor, but I'm imagining you meant collecting the pocket change that fell out on the operating table.
Very apt description of "Big Tech". That's why I decided to leave as well. This combination just creates a lot of stress and it was negatively impacting my health.
If people don't like building tech that's one thing.
But the problems most of this thread are discussing are just people and organizational problems.
If you want to live and make money you're probably going to have to put up with some level of bullshit.
Find the company with the least of it and enjoy the rest.
Should’ve learned to program. At least writing python scripts with Claude has automated a lot of my job away.
Anyway, there’s a support group for your shitty job, it’s called the bar, and we meet daily.
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...
Let just Meta die!
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.
Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
> Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
Really? It's like me complaining that my pot and smoking habits were due to evil designs of their vendors. I take full responsibility for taking those initial puffs knowing full well that they were addictive and not good for me.
p.s. my general point is this: The entire industry was pushing developers to think nothing of 'ethical concerns' and 'just move fast and break things'.
And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
(Anyone working for "AI" companies here complaining about Meta? ...)
This particular discussion is about Meta, hence the focus in these comments. My views (and I'm sure the views of many others here) do, however, apply broadly to much of what you refer to.
That comment about me sleeping through the past 26 years? I'd say the same about all of the companies you cited.
Edit: Further, the marijuana comparison is a bit weak (as an aside, I'm a former pothead myself, who made the choice to start and stop). The world hasn't structured itself to the point where most people are required to smoke pot to do everything they need to do. The world has structured itself to require Meta products be used in many instances, lest you lose access to information from certain sources or the ability to communicate with others.
We barely know the damage social media does yet, it's not comparable to taking the first hit of drugs at all.
Agreed that tech workers need to take a look at themselves too, but also it's the execs and governments more too blame.
Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!
There is no limit to human greed
Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.
Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement
You sold your morals for a wheelbarrow of money, that is the end of the story.
History's littered with people trotting out this line when they've valued luxury and status over morals.
The more you interact with something, the more you are part of it and help it prosper. "Blame the kings!" is a little bit too simple, imo.
“I work for one of the most evil institutions on the planet today because it is the only way I can support my sick parents” is an absurd excuse.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
There's no mental gymnastics here. I draw the line differently than you, that's all. I'm not a big fan of Meta and their products, I would be happy to work there anyway for the reasons I mentioned. But I wouldn't work for let say Marlboro.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/
Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.
This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you
This is also a really extreme version of the prisoners dilemma. In the standard formula, there are 2 prisoners, so it's somewhat practical to not defect, but there are hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates for working at Meta in these roles, so your personal decision to defect or not has likely no effect on the ultimate outcome. I.e. for the second option to work, you actually need to organize a unified labor movement with no defectors, which is probably impossible.
Most big enterprises get really good at paying you just enough to live comfortably, but not enough to give you financial autonomy. This makes the "why do you still work there" question land as naive most of the time.
I’d probably still be in that job and would have a few million in the bank (instead of $10,000) if I had taken it, but I would have sold out my principles.
So yes some of us live by principles
Edit: lolol you've served in the military but Google is a step too far Jesus Christ poster child for irony.
A few years on a salary like that and you may find that you can live fairly comfortably for a long time… in a place where the cost of living and housing are inexpensive.
I have an aunt who is quite old, who has been living for decades in a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. I suspect few people reading this will think that's any kind of an "escape plan", but I have been jealous of her seemingly contented and relaxed retirement for a long time now.
Perhaps you have to weigh it against, "working in the industry you hate for an other decade or two." Could you enjoy yourself in your retirement in your trailer? Is there something more you need to enjoy your retirement?
Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.
Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.
Pick your poison.
Make them fear for their professional and personal reputations.
Make them embarassed to show their face or state their place of employment.
We need to treat these people like Nazis.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like: engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
We need to make engineers who work in surveillance or advertising ashamed enough to avoid putting that work on their resume.
I think that's a pretty big difference.
You think people raised in such a culture will save you? More likely they’ll be hooked by the next moneybag or hoodwinked by some insane philosophy (Libertarianism, AI Singularity, Effective Altruism...).
So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.
Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)
These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.
I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.
Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???
I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...
All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.
And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...
If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...
If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...
If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...
Etc...
I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.
53 minutes per week.
53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.
This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.
Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.
I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.
Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!
Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
This is the United States, land of the free and home of the slaves. Workers are subhuman here.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.