| YES! This is particularly important for young professionals! It's super important for fresh graduates, who enrolled in CS/CompEng because of how enthusiastic they are about technology to hear this stuff! Why? Because, while we're wondering whether or not ethics is even something that we should bring up in a discussion like this, Facebook has PR and recruiting departments full of smart people who are actively working on getting these folks on board. And when you've spent the last four years of your life studying a highly-competitive field, in which there's barely any room for the study of philosophy, ethics and humanities, it's pretty hard to figure out this stuff on your own. So damn right tell friends/students their next job is at an unethical company. I mentor interns every year, and whenever one of them asks me about companies like Facebook or Google, I absolutely tell them that I would never work there. I tell their recruiters the same thing. I tell my friends from outside the tech world the same thing. > Also, people generally believe it's quite possible to work on good things in a company that also does bad things. The problem isn't that you can't do good things, the problem is that these companies use them to whatabout the media away from the bad things they do. You think Facebook worked on those "Mark yourself as safe" thing out of the goodness of their heart? As if it brings them any kind of money? No -- they do it to capture a little bit more of their attention, and to point out to any reporter that questions their morale that they're totally on the Light Side of the Force, just look at how many users rely on us to let their friends know they're fine. |