Posted by jjgreen 6 hours ago
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
Bingo. Tale as old as time. The elites have always stayed in power by paying half the poor people to oppress the other half for them. And if you're thinking about the French revolution as a counter example, then I need to remind you that the wealthy elites didn't lose their heads there, the monarchy did, the rich people got away just fine.
Today the elites got the peasantry to be arguing whether something is "woke" or DEI, and to riot and burn down cities whenever a repeat felon gets killed by police, while the Epstein criminals get away with it while laughing all the way to the bank and nobody rioting.
> It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics
Nothing to do with globalism here. It's still exclusively up to US citizens to implement their destruction. US national security and surveillance tech isn't outsourced to India for them to worry about labor competition from abroad.
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
OK, and so what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what? Evil doesn't do gender discrimination.
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Most of those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files in ambiguous terms, which isn't enough of strong evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to slam dunk jail them on the spot like Maxwell.
Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
For 5 years everyone was happy, but I kind of knew what I was doing was wrong.
Not that I think I could have automated $16M/yr, but I def knew I was billing for doing dishes.
Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Labor unions.
Techies believed they didn't need unions because their compensation is high, and "meritocracy" yadda yadda. But unions were never just about compensation. Crucially, they also collectively negotiate working conditions.
You quitting your job is not necessarily much of a threat to your employer. But a union going on strike, effectively everyone quitting simlultaneously, is a major threat.
You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.
The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?
This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?
I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
This is a "being a part of an extremely large group of people, some entirely separate members of the group are doing bad stuff"
Are there no groups you are a part of where members have done bad things? are you sure?
Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen? I find that extremely hard to understand. Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
You can’t choose where you’re born, you can choose who you work for.
How does that even remotely make sense?
Also Meta isn’t a nation state.
I'm no debate lord, merely expressed my dislike of the baying for blood people clearly have here, pointed at everyone seemingly except the actual people responsible
When their governments are democratically elected, sometimes, ya. I don't want to give you any spoilers, but there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late.
There are also cultural beefs that have existed for longer than I've been alive that are not even all that rational, but continue to persist. Whole cultures hating each other.
> Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen?
I think someone from Aldereen might have a hard time grabbing a beer with a death star technician. Most people probably understand that blame is not equally shared, but that those technicians were on the wrong side of history. Exceptions might include people forcefully enslaved to work on the death star - and, from a distance, an external observer still would not know the difference at first glance between forceful participation, passive participation, and active participation.
It often takes time/generations to heal from the pain of their parents choices - whether those choices were active or passive. Sins of the father and all that (though I think it's unfair to put parental misdeeds onto their kids, it also historically happens a lot).
I understand THAT its happening, but do you think that's right? moral?
would you be happy about it if you were a random american? one who had voted against whatever is happening there? What about one who couldn't vote at all?
Not that I agree with the idea of blaming all Meta employees (e.g. janitors, drivers etc don't deserve the blame), but I do think the ones doing the computer work deserve some blame.
I can agree that the teams working on the specific features have quite a lot of blame. Those asked to implement immoral ads/algorithm stuff. But how many are those people as a proportion of the entire staff?
They all chose to work at Meta. And for the vast majority of them (especially programmers) there were other choices.
If people are supposed to stop working at meta if they want to keep being a "good person" then they go work somewhere else.
Can they work at any of the largest employers? can they be sure?
The people worked and kept working at Facebook after these huge and small issues
- after Myanmar genocide
- after paying teenagers to spy on them through VPN
- after falsifying its ad metrics that ended up negatively affecting and outright destroying multiple publishers and creators
- after billions in dollars of fines paid over multiple breaches of user privacy, and misleading users about their privacy
And that's just off the top of my head.
- and (irony is dead) after Facebook unconditionally opted every single user, and their data, and their content on their platform into AI training
So don't give me the righteous indignant spiel about innocent workers who are just doing their jobs and are really really good at heart. Most of them chose to work for Meta despite all these things (and despite significantly more NDA things discussed inside the company that we don't know about). Many of those also chose to work on and contribute to ads, tracking, AI, surveillance etc. and all the infrastructure for it and have no moral qualms doing so. Spare me the sanctimoniousness.
Yes, many companies are morally gray. But, again, especially developers have their pick of companies they can go to. Including companies that are less morally gray. They chose Facebook.
I think expecting everyone else (which is, I believe, almost everyone working at facebook) not involved with any of these things to take a large personal sacrifice or be condemned is unlikely to result in many resignations. You're asking people to be hurt for the actions of others.
The best argument you have here is the moment someone starts working at facebook, after these things happen. I don't know that they should be condemned, but I can understand looking at them with some suspicion. Still, its hard to say its the worst thing in the world to do, accept employment under a shitty person. Who hasn't complained about their boss?
When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions of others together with those committing acts of evil, you are making a totalizing statement. There is nothing they can do to redeem themselves. They are morally equivalent to the people doing the terrible things. Which is absurd.
To claim that my analogies to countries are "non-working" is ridiculous. This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government" or "are citizens of the usa" or "are citizens of palestine" or "are citizens of iran". If anything, I feel citizens of a country have far more potential to change the course of what those countries do than an employee at a company like facebook. (they still have almost no power at all, so the point is essentially moot. But at least democracies are outwardly meant to follow the will of their citizens, and coordination is encouraged) What power workers may have, only works when they coordinate action (which I think should be encouraged. These people are your friend).
We need more rational, sober judgement in the world, not mob justice.
Ah yes. All those horrible things happened overnight, right? So that's why we don't expect people to take a large personal sacrifice of ... knowing about this shit for years, and still working for the company. Or knowing about all this shit, and still choosing to work for this company.
> When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions
Never once did I ask them to stop the actions of others. However, they chose to work for a company which is complicit in all of this.
> This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government"
You keep pretending that being born in a country is exactly the same as actively choosing to work, and keep working for a company especially when there are plenty of other options. "But where else will I find a 300k salary" is not a moral choice.
"Oh no, I know everything about this company, so I actively chose to work for it and keep working for it while all this is happening. But I did nothing wrong. I only work here, making sure this company continues to work and exist".
> A single person leaving for moral reasons at this point will be replaced by the next guy.
So, out of thousands that keep working at Facebook, there will be just one person leaving? And you don't see it as a problem?
> They will not run out of guys.
Indeed. And you still don't see it as a problem and keep claiming that "but they did nothing wrong". They actively chose to work for this company. I can't make it more clear than it is.
In an ideal world more and more people leave and Facebook ends up scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find replacements. In this world tens of thousands of "we did nothing wrong" people have no qualms working on all of Facebook's systems and you keep pretending that they "did nothing wrong because it's the same as being born in a country or something".
1a) Life's not fair sometimes and talking about the morality of life not being fair isn't going to change how people perceive you when you vote a certain way or happen to live in a country where the majority of the country voted a certain way. Once your country is shitting on other countries, y'all end up being painted by the same broad strokes. Reputational damage does not discriminate and the long term consequences of such damage won't, either. Not all that different than how when bombs are launched during war, the bombs are not checking the voting records of the civilians in their paths. If people don't like this reality and they did not vote for it, they should actively try harder to fix that reality - even if this is a hard thing to ask.
2) I'll repeat - once you're working on the death star, no matter why, people and history are not going to look at you favourably. At some later point in time, this might even become a shame you try to hide from the world.
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
This also reminded of a personal anecdote:
I had a colleague who was fresh out of college. He disagreed with whatever our company was doing at the time, but he said "at this point, fresh out of college, this ended up being the only company that hired me. I'm here for my CV only". The moment he could find a job elsewhere, he quit.
That all being said, I think its worth noting that the reason that coal miners have historically had quite outsized political power and effect on politics was precisely because they required education, which helped them work together as a unit and demand better conditions and wages, as well as the camaraderie generated by experiencing bad conditions together. There are some great books about this, but the coal miners in the uk where im familiar with were much more educated than the average person, due to the engineering understanding involved. Yes it was bad conditions, but you can't have untrained workers using equations to figure out how deep into a rock face you need to put dynamite, and how much explosive of what kind, based on rock samples and tables from books. Same for what kind of supports and where, taking geological surveys etc. It was a high skill job, and also paid relatively well compared to manufacturing workers (not least due to said organization between miners)
The difference between then and now is that there is very little solidarity between software engineers. This is a state of affairs that I believe has been deliberately engineered. I do not think shaming people for where they work will improve things. I think one can assuage ones own guilt by choosing where to work, as you or I do. But I don't see how the solution can be to ask everyone in society to just not take a better life, better income etc for themselves. Especially when the harms are very indirect.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.
But most of the people working in technology positions at Meta and Facebook are not in that sort of position, they're usually well paid already, and could easily change jobs if they had a tiny bit of spine and could sacrifice getting paid less. Internally they'll reason and justify why they can't just leave, but from the outside it's embarrassingly obvious they don't really care in the end.
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.