I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.

>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.

> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React

People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.

Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.

I agree that Meta is not uniformly bad, but I would not consider React to be a great tool. Every React project I worked on has turned into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti.

>I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

Oh yes, I would color Meta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...

"Company over country!" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.yahoo.com/news/book-zuckerberg-called-company-ov...

Organizations that are overall bad can have people who have done some good things, or at least technically impressive things.

That’s a choice. This isn’t a story about someone poor who needs to work at McDonalds to make ends meet to feed their family. We are talking about the top earners in the world who made a decision to make more money than working at a competitor (Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc) where they would still be in the top 1% of earners.

If you worked at Meta and couldn't find a job for a year, its not because of Meta.

> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there

I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.

Never understood why Facebook hasn't implemented the 'Explain this post' type feature that you see on X (@grok).

Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.

>Threads ... rage bait

The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.

No kidding, the damage react has done to front end engineering will be felt for decades. Bloated, slow applications that don’t conform to system conventions and burn power like crazy have been the norm ever since React caught on.

What alternatives to React do you propose? I found Angular even worse…

React is an overcomplicated mess made popular by manufactured consent.

There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.

The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.

[dead]

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.

You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?

You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.

> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.

I mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself.

I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.

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".

>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.

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

Almost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol

> 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.

it's not a perfect exampe of scape-goating of the goat is still alive

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious:

  The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]

> The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.

True, none of us are innocent.

> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

WTF?