[lelanthran]

> You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet.

One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.

There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

[swatcoder]

Regardless of what their hiring process screens for, it's safe to say that people able to pass screening for Meta are able to get work elsewhere. It is never an engineers only option, although it may be the only one in a certain luxurious compensation tier.

And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.

In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".

[Godelization]

You might be surprised. I sent out approximately 1200 applications in 2024 while unemployed for nine months, and with over thirty interviews, I only got a single offer, which was Meta.

[serf]

>One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.

people say this as if having principles will leave you jobless inevitably, but there is so much evidence to the contrary that this rings more hollow the older I get.

I agree with your overall concept of empathy towards others, I disagree with the premise that all organizations are unethical and that there isn't room for the morally principal'd and employed in this world.

contrarily I believe that a morally principal'd and skilled engineer is so rare in this world that there are a few organizations that would snap up every single one they could find if the network was there to find them.

[Hamuko]

I imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".

[serf]

yeah except that isn't how it's presented.

social media boards don't go creating slides and mission statements that mentions those second order effects.

most go something like: "Connecting people and souls through the technologies that empower every day life."

rather than

"Let's get Susie to jump off a bridge for yuks."

[Hamuko]

>“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

>“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

>Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

I don’t know, seems like they do go around creating slides that mention them.

[duped]

> There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.

[kevincrane]

Almost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol