| A good way to look at this is to consider someone working for RJ Reynolds in the 70s. The pay is good, you are working on a product that people just seem to _love_, and everyone at the company seems pretty enthusiastic and committed. There is a little thrill to tell people where you work and have them tell you that they use your company's product. Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them. Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things. Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right? Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...) At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do? (Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.) |