[maeil]

Their contribution to the genocide in Myanmar has said everything about Meta you'll ever need to know. It's a tragedy that working for Meta is generally seen as neutral whereas working at any defense-related companies is often met with scorn, despite the overwhelmingly greater negative impact that working at the former has.

And this doesn't even touch upon Instagram.

I guess that they pay too much and employ too much of our industry, greatly reducing criticism because we all have a friend who has worked at Meta or we may even have applied ourselves at some point. Whereas we don't know anyone who has been at e.g. Anduril at the likes.

[dagmx]

I have several extremely talented friends at Meta, and the one constant is they left any attachment to the output product when they entered the workplace. Whereas they previously (at other top tech companies) did take pride in their employees output. Meta is “success at all costs” and heavily metrics driven.

I think that’s what contributes to things like Myanmar and other countries hate speech proliferation. When you don’t care about how your product is used, and can focus on just the technical aspect, you lose any sense of responsibility.

Conversely, we’ve hired many ex meta people, and they’ve always almost all unanimously said how much they NOW like having pride in the products they create, after jumping ship.

Imho it’s an issue of top down culture from Zuckerberg, and previously Thiel.

[ryandrake]

> Conversely, we’ve hired many ex meta people, and they’ve always almost all unanimously said how much they NOW like having pride in the products they create, after jumping ship.

Just curious, did the ethics of their prior projects ever come up during the interview? I think I would have a problem hiring someone who worked on a product despite having ethical misgivings about how the product affected end users. Unless they could explain the extenuating circumstances that forced them to work on that product (sick family to care for, work visa being held hostage, and so on). If their response was simply, "I made metric X go up and got paid Y to do it," I don't think I could hire them in good conscience.

[dagmx]

It’s a very easy question to dodge so doesn’t add much value.

Most of them just bury their heads in the sand and say that the negative effects weren’t made known to them, and they started looking for new work after they found out. Short of interrogating them, you can’t really suss out of its true.

Instead we ask what they’d do in hypothetical scenarios around our own products.