> I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place

zstd

I’m torn about React :)

Meta is a golden jail for one teenager who cannot grow up no matter what he does. Shame.

Facebook, for instance, made a lot of money for shareholders, which we know is the same thing as making the world a better place.

Back in the day... 2004-2005 facebook was amazing. Spread like wildfire, and lots of fun to use. Just you and your college friends, and their friends.

What are these "thoughtful" frontier labs you speak of? I see Meta folks going to the big ones all the time. Ton of former PyTorch/Inductor folks now are at Ant/TM etc.

Everyone I know in the GPU compiler/GPGPU space seems to be either going to meta or leaving meta for NV or some AI lab. My anecdotal observations don't align with "bin meta applicants straight to the trash."

Portal was pretty good and an originalish product

I hope there’s a day where collectively the money is no longer enough and reason and good will prevails so that Meta can crumble to dust while I am alive; but doubtful that day will ever come.

Where should we work instead?

I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.

I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.

They dont need frontier labs. Meta's dashboard jockeys get paid the same

WhatsApp

Binning applications for working at Meta seems hilarious and over the top. The ‘thoughtful’ labs are vacuuming up everyone’s chat logs and prompts to train the next model as well.

For context, Zuckerberg once said about early Facebook users, “They trust me. Dumb fucks.”

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-foun...

That sounds like a brilliant idea.

I wonder whether they already thought of that, and are exempting from monitoring the roles most likely to generate "smoking gun" evidence.

Indeed → https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries

• Software Engineer (E3, entry level) $248.2K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

> Doesn't it sound reasonable?

If you were hired with this as an explicit expectation, yes. It's one thing to know that your actions can be audited in case there's some sort of incident but imposing unlimited surveillance and using that information for the purpose of eliminating your job could be argued to be intimidation (ie. "we can't afford mass layoffs but aggressively monitoring employees will force the undesirables to quit").

No one likes the terms of their employment being changed against their will no matter how legal it might be. Why not make it opt-in in exchange for some other perks? If the data is valuable then compensate employees for the added burden/liability of total telemetry.

As it turns out, they did watch porn: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/meta-says-porn-d...

> I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal?

This is the cost of losing consumer trust over two decades of untrustworthy acts.

Nope. Nope nope nope NOPE. No part of this is remotely reasonable. Stop normalising mass surveillance. It is not okay. Not even your own employees, to this degree. Employees are humans too (maybe not the ones at Meta, but I'm speaking in general). Just because somebody is receiving a paycheck for something does not make them fair game for anything and everything to be done to them.

> there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?

Yes. Every time these analogies to normalise mass surveillance are brought up, they mistake "another human or two can see you doing something in real time" with "a permanent record of every single action you ever take in your entire life, micromanaged down to the millisecond, accessible to many people over a period of years". That is, in fact, very different at all.