[dangus]

I still have sympathies for any individual contributors even if they are high paid.

No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.

Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?

[siren2026]

Oh come on, It is very well known that the Facebook bar to get hired is ruthless and very high, it requires studying for weeks to pass the leetcode interviews. They just decided to get the extra 20k$/year to be at Meta because this is what they wanted to optimize for.

I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.

[dangus]

Here’s a data center job in Ohio that pays under $100k:

https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/795179610064...

Another Ohio job that pays barely over $100k:

https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/831663409504...

South Carolina job that barely pays over $100k:

https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/606551888496...

Another of the same:

https://www.metacareers.com/profile/job_details/120167957873...

[siren2026]

we are obviously talking about the majority of employees that are SWE. You are very obviously nitpicking the lowest paid employees you could find.

https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Meta

[dangus]

Tell me how your argument is different than “deep sea oil rig welders make more money than their more ethical alternative of welding for a small local shop.”

Are we going to blame those people for “enabling the oil industry” as well? Or are we going to accept that they are working a pretty serious high pressure job for top pay to set themselves up financially? It’s not like being an engineer at Meta is easy. I couldn’t even pass the screening interview. They aren’t paying for candidates to drop their morals, they’re paying for top talent.

And I would also ask you, which lower paying companies can I work for if I’m a software or hardware engineer that:

1. Don’t collect user data in similar ways to Meta (no tracking cookies, no use of Meta analytics or advertising platforms, no Google analytics, etc.

2. Voluntarily follow more strict privacy rules than mandated by the United States or CCPA.

3. Have zero employee behavior tracking

4. Don’t use any AI for HR issues like hiring or performance.

5. They also have to have enough headcount to replace all the people who are going to quit working at Meta for moral reasons (e.g., if you tell me that Craigslist is a great place to work that’s cool and all but they have like 50 employees).

This idea that Meta is far more moral than anyone else and I can sacrifice pay to work for a more ethical company is a false choice.

This is an industry with almost no unionization or worker protections. IT workers are specifically exempted from overtime. Yes, it’s high paid, but that is not relevant to the issue of worker power and power distance.

When we get caught up in blaming the upper middle class we are fighting the wrong class war.