[ineedasername]

Working for Facebook doesn't have quit the social capital it used to. Besides there's a such thing as enjoying my and believing the work you do is valuable. If ultimately you can only trave your effort back to ad clicks, that's not very enticing.

[symlinkk]

You live in a bubble. 95% of the American public would hear that their son “got a job at Facebook” and think he made it. 95% of companies hiring developers would see “worked at Facebook” and move that resume to the top of the pile.

[Answerawake]

Finally someone with some perspective. Is it just me or is it just baffling at the amount of hubris there is in this thread? Its like there are two worlds, this small group of people who have no perspective whatsoever and the rest of the country having to deal with reality.

[ineedasername]

The rest of the country also has little positive sentiment for Facebook. They don't go so far as not to use it, but their opinion of it is not good.

Maybe it's because I don't live in an SV or other techie bubble that I see this, that I give more credit to the average person. Because I'm not stuck I'm an echo chamber of "general public are naive and don't care". They do care, they are more aware of some of these issues than you think. Assuming the only people who care or think about these issues are techies is an extremely condescending & patronizing view towards the average person.

Perhaps it helps broaden my view that live in a densely populated but not very techie/tech-company area and I have a large social circle of non techies. It shows me that your so-called bubble where hn/sv/techies make sweeping generalizations about the average person is often based in stereotypical fiction instead of reality. My age 65+ parents and in-laws couldn't tell you the difference between tcp & udp, setup a WiFi router, or understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database or know what Full Stack means. But they have opinions on Facebook, and they aren't good. My few dozen coworkers of all ages are the same.

[ineedasername]

No, I live in a mostly non-techie social group with both Democrats and Republicans: they all view facebook negatively primarily through the lens of their political party.

Your own self-satisfied bubble of congratulatory "we techies are special and have a special perspective" bubble is blinding you. Ask anyone with a moderate interest in politics how they feel about facebook and the answer is mostly going to be "not great".

Most don't care enough to quit facebook, but as per the point of my original comment, facebook isn't going to have any sort of easy time whipping up public support against Apple for privacy issues they mostly don't care about one way or another.

[na85]

A person would have to drink an awful lot of kool aid to think their work at Facebook is valuable to anyone but the Facebook shareholders.

[novok]

Hey if your work on OSS infrastructure, it's not really that bad.

[ineedasername]

I honestly don't know the answer to this: How much are people able to choose to work on OSS projects vs. being told "This is the project you're working on."

Also, OSS tech that's in service to ad tech may still not be enticing. Even if it's not directly used for ad tech, everything you would do for facebook would ultimately be for the purpose of ad tech. Rationalizing that your particular work has non ad-tech related applications seems like just that: a rationalization. Other companies offer OSS work opportunities, as well as the opportunity to carve out, say, 5-10 hours a month to the project of your choice regardless of your day job.

I'm not coming down on one side or the other of such a moral choice. I don't think things are that simple. I think it's a spectrum, and people should weight these things when making a decision, if they have the luxury of doing so.

And I have to say, at this point ad tech is probably only one of a few major problems with Facebook content. News feeds, memes, etc. that are rewarded with shared & likes for being the most inflammatory/emotionally manipulative are at this point at least as bad as micro-targeting of ads, and I personally think are much much worse.

[Shared404]

This is the thing. I don't like facebook, and they do a lot of bad things.

They also have some amount of good they do.

[ineedasername]

Very few things are purely good or purely bad, which should be a caution against all-or-nothing judgements. For example I think Apple is bad for inching its way towards an ever more restrictive MacOS. But I think Apple is good for its efforts to protect user privacy and give users more control over it. And as a FAANG, it's example puts pressure on other companies to compete on privacy as well. (Though I think we know Google will never go that way, unlike Apple their business model isn't based on hardware or software sales, but on the very private information Apple wants users to have control over)

[novok]

So does the US govt. Does that mean you will reject a grant from them for your cancer cure or solar panel research? Less evil USians will die from cancer as a result potentially, along with the rest of the world.

[Shared404]

That was the point of what I was saying.

Despite Facebooks evil, there is good that comes out of it.