I work at Meta (for now…)

I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.

So my motivations were: - Working on something I care about - Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company

My aspirations: - Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky

I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.

My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.

I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth

I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers

Thanks for the honest assessment. I'm certain it took guts to open up about this, especially to the hostile crowd on HN. This comment is a good counter to the no-nuance "Everyone who works at Company X are terrible people!" narratives. Also, it brings up a point that often gets overlooked: These companies are absolutely enormous, and there are very likely small pockets within each of them with people who are at least trying to do good and stay out of the evil lanes. Not everyone working in BigTech is actively churning through Torment Nexus JIRA tickets, and at the very least, if you're working at one of these places, finding a team that is not actively harming the world is a good compromise.

I used to work at a company that had a client that was... let's call them morally dubious, because if I start typing out what I really think of them, there'll just be a paragraph of profanity that dang will probably remove.

Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.

But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.

Rather than donating 5-6 figures, what about saving enough cash to live on? Roughly speaking you can "make" ~$200k/year on $5M in T-bills. You could live comfortably in the US or Europe, or basically like a king anywhere else in the world. You could work on the software you want, even pro-bono, and walk away any time. I believe this is called "F U money".

If everyone who works at META is a bit like this, then it will be an overflow of good when y'all find your new place. Thank you for doing your part. Gratefulness

Donating to charities or NGOs might be more harmful than anything you've ever done.