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| ▲ | darth_avocado 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Meta employees aren’t DoorDash gig workers trying to feed families. These are well compensated workers. It’s okay to have the opinion that most white collar jobs do some harm somewhere, but pretending these are poor souls forced to work for meta because of lack of options is not a great take. Furthermore the guy scanning the tickets doesn’t work for Ticketmaster, Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta. Big difference. That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited. |
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| ▲ | breve 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited. Meta's business model is to treat people as a resource to be exploited. It's fundamentally how the business works. Meta regards its users as cattle, as livestock. It's why Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are "dumb fucks": https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im... | |
| ▲ | dangus 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs. Think about departments like support, graphic design, marketing, etc. Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated. Also, it’s not like you have a wildly great choice of ethical companies to work for as an employee. What percentage of corporations are truly ethical? What companies that compete with Meta are highly ethical? If I quit Meta who am I working for that has no ethical issues? | | |
| ▲ | darth_avocado 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs With very few exceptions, Meta employees are generally making more money within their domain as compared to what they would make working at other companies, which is always an option. > Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated It’s a false dichotomy: work for meta or be unemployed. Millions of white collar workers are doing fine not working for Meta. And questioning if any corporation is free from ethical problems does not absolve you from the responsibility of the outcomes of what you build. Some corporations are objectively worse than others. A corporation building systems to pay gig workers less than the minimum wage is going to be probably worse than a corporation that builds a design collaboration tool when it comes to ethics. You can choose to work for either and be well compensated for your work, but let’s not pretend you’re some poor soul trapped in a job that you can’t escape. |
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| ▲ | justacrow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, all those people Meta just laid off due to whistleblowing on the Glass privacy violations, and their content moderators and data labelers and so on have my full support. No sympathies for anyone doing SW engineering or similar. Anyone working there can definitely get a different programming gig. It likely doesn't pay as much but that's how it goes when you sell your soul. |
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| ▲ | dangus 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | siren2026 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Oh I will blame them. Working at Facebook means you optimized ruthlessly for $$$$$ only, absolutely nothing else. Working at Facebook means you are a leetcode monkey and could as well pass other interviews somewhere else and get paid 10% less. But to you, destroying democracy and killing teenager was worth those extra 10% Working at Facebook means you became a millionaire, even if you joined mid-career a couple years ago because of the stock inflation. No they are not just trying to feed their family. 99% of them are ruthlessly optimizing to make the most money possible to live in the top 1%, while completely dismissing all the bad Facebook, Meta and Instagram do in the world. No sympathy. And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster for minimum wage.
At those income levels, who you work for DOES matter. |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option. Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors. You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income. |
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| ▲ | siren2026 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. Working at Meta means you studied for 4 weeks for the leetcode interviews. That type of dedication means you could very easily get any job anywhere else. And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster. | | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | How am I doing that? I'm talking about people who have very valid options elsewhere. "I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about. I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff. And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person". | | |
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