Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
They author thousands of open-source. Nobody would consider those 'products' (though feel free to play pedantic). And many would argue React did far more harm than good.
We would still have a framework of the week like we do today. There was a new framework weekly before React and there are frameworks of the week after React. React just gave us one more way of showing text on a screen.
Corporate open-source (Open Source) is done for free labor and PR, it shouldn't be bonus points for any company that does it, unless they commit to it and pay their contributors, have no CLAs that allow them to relicense the work, or adopt practices and licenses that are clearly more in line with the actual spirit of free software. Real free software that should be considered a public good is produced by people, for people.
There are sometimes well meaning people in corporations that do their best to at least get something out there and kudos to them, but corporations running Open Source projects should receive no goodwill for it, it's basically a scam.
Well yeah, you shouldn't give much credit to the corporation, but neither should you backlist all applicants who ever worked for them (as OP says some frontier labs do)
I'm not really commenting on that, I just want to remind people that Open Source is highly overrated and should not be looked at as a point in favor of a company.
While I agree with your point I don't agree that open source is overrated. This movement is one of the greatest developments in modern history, and the fact that corporations have exploited it for their own gain should in no way diminish its significance.
Open Source is the company takeover of the good that Free Software represents, I don't really see it as a "movement" by people. It's set up precisely to exploit the people for free labor and look good doing it.
React definitely didn't make frontend _great_ in a lot of cases, but jQuery, mootools, prototype, knockout, ember, angular, and a whole lot more JS frameworks that have come and gone predate React. If React hadn't been invented there'd be just as many poorly developed browser apps as there are today. You can't really pin that on React.
What I can pin on react is that it is very inefficient with resources using much more cpu power than needed to render some text and images on a webpage. Imagine all the electricity that was wasted because of react and the negative impact on the environment it has had because of that.
React doesn't do anything unless the DOM needs to to be updated.
Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed.
Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop.
We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.
I vastly prefer plain JS over React, but I will admit that React probably was instrumental in helping create frontend frameworks that are actually good, like Svelte. So I will give Facebook credit for that.
I've avoided react as much as I could. Maintained a high paying frontend career without react until a year or so ago, when I was forced by management to start using it. Thankfully AI was able to touch it for me while I pinched my nose.
Go look at Messenger on the App Store and look at the “data linked to you” section. An app with that much surveillance baked in is surely not improving the world.
I disagree. Many Palantir FDEs work on morally benign or even positive projects, for example helping hospitals during COVID. (Of course, many also do unethical work).
At Meta, almost everyone is contributing to unethical ends.
It was US only as you had to have a .edu email address to join, which most universities around the world did not get as it was mostly a US thing. It took forever for them to open up to non-US universities.
Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.
We just had a thing that would export MSN messenger contact list, you'd add your email there and everyone would add you on MSN. Way less creepy than the stalking fb was doing.
I don't think you can say that the idea was "copied". It was a very obvious idea. I had the same idea before I heard of the Facebook. Do you know why it's called the face book?
You may as well say Bezos copied the idea of Amazon from book shops.
Really, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord? facebook was ripped off. most meta companies were acquired. it could be argued that propagandizing the entire world was productive relative to vested interests but that was done on the behest of those interests, not zuck himself. the only thing im aware of zuck actually spearheading was the metaverse, a conclusively unproductive pursuit costing tens of billions to achieve literally nothing. it isnt objective to unilaterally behave with vitriol ... still this person seems more comparable to cancer itself than any actual human. i guess you could collapse productivity to 'making money' in which case clearly he is productive, im more referring to accomplishing anything useful for humanity. i also dont consider mass surveillance to be useful for humanity as bad actors will always get away with it whether they are on or off camera.
Depends on what you consider theirs I guess. The pytorch ecosystem and initial push to open weight models, I consider a pretty good thing for the world all things considered. Lots of great code from FAIR.
Why did they discontinue that? It was a very good product; we got them for all the grandparents and they worked really well at bringing the family together across distance. Could have fit in so well with WhatsApp too. But then they just killed it.
Shareholders didn't like it. At the end of the day Meta is an advertising company so everything they do must be in service of increasing revenue from advertising.
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.
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."
Not yet they haven't. They've basically left it alone, with very minor UI/UX improvements.
They have very recently shown signs of making it worse (the AI button), but overall I've been surprised how careful they've been about doing it slowly. We've probably got another 5-10 years of it being great before they turn it to shit.
How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.
I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.
From an infrastructure PoV, I seem to recall that WhatsApp was one of the few major companies that used Erlang, and were famous for being able to run the entirety of WhatsApp on only a few servers, each of which was serving millions of concurrent connections, mostly thanks to Erlang/BEAM (at least, from what I read). When it got acquired by Facebook, they then proceeded to rewrite the entirety of the backend in C++. Seems kind of baffling to me.
That last one’s going to need some substantiation.
“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)
No. It's a special arrangement between Google and WhatsApp which makes a file only visible to WhatsApp, and not appear in your regular drive so you can't do normal cloud file operations like generating public links.
Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.
> You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.
No need for the attitude. Op asked you for a source, which is customary for one to back up their initial claim; an onus on you and not for someone else to validate your claims.
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.
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.
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
The key point here is the “pay less” part. I know people that have turned down offers from meta that would 5x their salary and their personal situation would notably improve from at least some of that extra cash.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.
Is there any place you look or way of looking that has you in that job? I'm currently happy with my ethical and remote job myself, but I question if it will be around in 10 years, and I especially hate job hunting.
I don't blame someone for working at facebook, but I don't think most of you realize how cash money a FANG company looks on your resume to IT managers at the lowly normal companies. Go work in financial services, insurance, retail, go be a contractor and work/travel until you find what you like.
In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.
It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.
People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
> donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?
This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.
I think there would be more empathy if Meta were the only company in the world where it was possible to work. That's "stuck." This is not.
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.
It's both. We can point to individuals who make terrible decisions and also acknowledge that there will always be such people as long as the system incentivizes them.
But I also think all of the people criticizing Meta should post where they work. I'm sure plenty of people here work for ethically dubious companies, and make the same excuses.
If they're willing to do this to their own employees that they pay and supposedly wanted to keep around, what are they willing to do with your data? What are they willing to do with the systems they connect to your systems? "Dumb f*cks" has truly been the ethos of this company from day 1.
I'm increasingly convinced that these kind of leaks are the only effective resistance to this surveillance society we're entering. Meta will keep doing this, and other employers will probably follow, and then of course governments will use "appropriate legal processes" to add the data to their dossiers, etc. We are watching in real time the expansion of surveillance cameras, chat control, deanonymization, etc.
Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?
Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?
The harm may be greater when it's not leaked. In other words, it can be used to blackmail people in power. They may not even be doing anything particularly illegal - just making a controversial statement or having an unusual sexual preference - and there you go. Or of course illegal stuff, you know. Or ultimately if nothing illegal, enough to assemble a parallel construction case.
If you read the linked article it says the leaked data screenshot of some employees private conversation in plain text and other performance information.
It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.
For all those saying “if you’re not breaking the rules you have nothing to fear” consider that most firms regard “working to rule” to be a form of protest.
If you just follow their rules this surveillance will be used to identify and sanction you.
Note that those are total comp numbers. Something like 60% of that is dependent on performance review, which is fed in large part by automatically collected metrics like number of commits, number of code reviews ticked off, the LLM token usage leaderboards etc; creating all the perverse incentives you'd expect.
So you can rely on income to precisely the extent you are willing to destroy your soul.
However when you join you are given a bunch of shares that are paid out every quarter.
The wage is tied explicitly to your level, the number of shares is a bit more flexible. dpeending on what area you work in, and how in demand your role was, your shares make up between 10and 70% of your take home wage.
Every year you get "refreshers", again calculated centrally by level. For example an "E5" (the lowest level of senior engineer) may get a refresher of $150k of shares at january prices. Your performance grade is then used as a multiplier (ie bad == 0, ok == .75 good == *1.0 etc etc etc)
so even if youre not that successful you can amass a large amount of shares.
Currently living in the UK where average principal salaries are less than entry level. Even better working for a US corp and having to deal with the complete lack of understand about why we aren't nearly as motivated as our US counterparts
Yeah, but you don’t have to have to pay SF mortgage prices, have a working public healthcare, no hordes of homeless on your doorstep etc. etc.
One might argue that we get more for our sille euro wages. Also if we decide to leave the company, we are not completely f_ckd, since our families don ’t suddenly drop out of healthcare and other services.
What you ignore is the thing that with meta’s salary you can retire in 10 years back to Europe. With silly wages in Germany you can retire on your 75th birthday. Feel the difference? Germany’s economy is stagnating, there will be no higher salaries anymore. Just higher taxes. If I were younger I would pick SF and hordes of homeless over declining Germany. If you follow political discussions it will not get better: planed VAT increase, retiremeNt and health insurance getting continuously more expensive. Even if I can get 3% yearly salary increase it will be eaten up by rising taxes and inflation making my poorer every year.
I think this reduces to a simple question of preference, but you understand that in order to get those salaries you work around the clock in a work environment so toxic, that there’s several books written about it. There’s a reason why they dev’s can order food and have free laundry service there, and it’s not zuck just loving his employees more. So yeah if you don’t get ill or burnout you get to retire earlier, and then move back to Europe. I’d rather stay in Europe, have spare time, live my life in nicer society and perhaps even make products that help society, or somebody, some way.
As of Germany, I don’t follow currenct politics over there (not a German here, Finnish), but you guys have time and time again show that you can produce pretty much anything for the global markets as well or better than anyone else. Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.
Not a German. Coming from authoritarian state and following democratic processes in Germany very closely. Love to talk with older neighbors occasionally. From my personal observation I can differentiate 4 time lines. First one is West Germany after WW2 living under the skirt of Americans. This laid foundation for rapid growth in second phase and prosperity. Arrogance came in with “Made in Germany”. Third phase started with unification and millions of new citizens from former eastern states. While being Germans they had really skewed worldview (I lived there many years). And the decline started in episode 4 with Merkel and zero interest era. While pragmatic leaders would push for using interest free debt to improve infrastructure nothing happened. Instead of that she opened borders and closed nuclear power plants. This decision lead for huge tensions in the society overloading social system. Dumb right orientation parties were elected. Electricity’s definitely not cheap.
We pay more than 30000€ a year for mandatory public health insurance and more for modern treatments not covered by insurance. That’s not different than in US, except the funny salaries in Germany.
Society is not homogeneous. There are more and more elderly who will vote who promises them heaven. The young ones are ignored. There are many conflicts: young vs. old. The riches against rest 95%. The ones born on German soil and the ones arrived later mixing illiterate refugees and PhD expats together.
Interesting times. It’s nice to believe, that Germany can put the shit together. But there are too many forces at play. Let’s see. I am too old to move elsewhere.
London (where Meta offices are) isn't cheap, many UK companies offer private healthcare as public isn't fast enough, lots of homeless, entire 'tent cities'.
Compared to say seattleLA/Newyork, the number obviously homeless is vanishingly small. Yes, tubes will have a beggar, but there won't be more than one of them. They also are rarely aggressive.
Even in Soho, where one of the main london hostels are for homeless people its not that bad.
Facebook doesn't pay an average US salary, either (which is presumably why anyone stays). Based on levels.fyi, you'd be looking at 300-400k eur for an E5 in Berlin all-in.
Not sure I'd recommend it; there are less cartoonishly evil companies who still pay silly money in Europe available.
I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever. Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
> I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever.
There are a small number of FAANG-ish companies who pay very high salaries in Berlin, London, Dublin, etc etc.
(And of course Zurich, but Zurich is Zurich.)
> Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
I assure you that they pay more than that for halfway senior roles. Note that a lot of it would be in equity; the base salary would likely be in the 100-150k range, but one might get that again in equity.
It might be a buyout, or someone/some people moving to berlin from america.
if you are moving countries you keep your RSU allocation, but your wage is adjusted down/up based on local levels. (ie for london its .85 or something)
How? Any world wide company will have local offices for local operations. They are big enough that they have whole data centers there. Of course they'll hire some locals.
The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.
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? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.
The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.
Imagine if this were a construction company, and 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?
So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.
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.
I’m not sure the terms of their employment changed; being subject to monitoring has been in practically every employment agreement written in the past few decades.
What did change is the culture and environment. While that term was always in the agreement, it was largely dormant, activated on an as-needed basis to troubleshoot issues, collect evidence for disciplinary actions or security investigations, etc. Now, it’s on 24x7.
> 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.
They’re different because of the job they do, who’s doing the monitoring and who has access to the records.
In all the examples you’ve given the monitoring is used to reduce the power imbalance between the public and vested interests with their own agenda.
For example, so the bank teller doesn’t steal from account holders.
For child care workers it’s to protect children in care. If it was used solely to gather information to fire potential whistleblowers people would have a problem with it too.
Considering that, for example, Meta management have a record of encouraging their staff to break copyright laws and lie about it, this surveillance probably isn’t designed to help society as a whole.
I often feel people make hand wavy comparisons as if everything in the world were equal, hoping the other party can’t clearly articulate why they are clearly not equivalent
That’s not what this was about. It was in response to a dramatic hysterical exhortation that we shouldn’t “normalize...surveillance” as though it’s not already normal and well tolerated in our society, particularly in the context of employment.
It’s not, though. Arguing that it is completely normal because a few kinds of jobs may have it is pretty disingenuous. And a lot of jobs on your list don’t actually have the kinds of controls on offer here, so you’re kind of making stuff up here.
Certain activities, for certain highly restricted purposes, yes. Blanket data collection for a purpose unrelated to safeguarding, which can be trivially leaked, as above, no.
It should be an unpleasant necessity, highly regulated. Not just something that you do on a blanket basis because you suffer under the delusion that you might create the next magic robot (I assume the driving force here is that Facebook is very, very behind in LLM-land.)
Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
I know people who married after meeting thanks to facebook dating.
Facebook, for instance, made a lot of money for shareholders, which we know is the same thing as making the world a better place.
For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for the shareholders…
> 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 and PyTorch :)
They author thousands of open-source. Nobody would consider those 'products' (though feel free to play pedantic). And many would argue React did far more harm than good.
Without React we might not have had the JavaScript framework explosion, we'd all be programming in Angular JS.
Maybe I'm exaggerating slightly, but I think we should judge frameworks compared to what other things existed at the time.
It's, by the way, another example of how the only good thing Facebook did was deny Google complete dominance.
React was a godsend vs dealing with the Angular $digest loop
We would still have a framework of the week like we do today. There was a new framework weekly before React and there are frameworks of the week after React. React just gave us one more way of showing text on a screen.
> React just gave us one more way of showing text on a screen.
Well, yes, but... its popularity is not completely accidental. It's good - even by today's standards, but certainly by the standards of the time.
Corporate open-source (Open Source) is done for free labor and PR, it shouldn't be bonus points for any company that does it, unless they commit to it and pay their contributors, have no CLAs that allow them to relicense the work, or adopt practices and licenses that are clearly more in line with the actual spirit of free software. Real free software that should be considered a public good is produced by people, for people.
There are sometimes well meaning people in corporations that do their best to at least get something out there and kudos to them, but corporations running Open Source projects should receive no goodwill for it, it's basically a scam.
Well yeah, you shouldn't give much credit to the corporation, but neither should you backlist all applicants who ever worked for them (as OP says some frontier labs do)
I'm not really commenting on that, I just want to remind people that Open Source is highly overrated and should not be looked at as a point in favor of a company.
While I agree with your point I don't agree that open source is overrated. This movement is one of the greatest developments in modern history, and the fact that corporations have exploited it for their own gain should in no way diminish its significance.
Open Source is the company takeover of the good that Free Software represents, I don't really see it as a "movement" by people. It's set up precisely to exploit the people for free labor and look good doing it.
Just see how the open source initiative runs their "elections"… https://lwn.net/Articles/1014603/
React made front end suck. Sorry.
React definitely didn't make frontend _great_ in a lot of cases, but jQuery, mootools, prototype, knockout, ember, angular, and a whole lot more JS frameworks that have come and gone predate React. If React hadn't been invented there'd be just as many poorly developed browser apps as there are today. You can't really pin that on React.
What I can pin on react is that it is very inefficient with resources using much more cpu power than needed to render some text and images on a webpage. Imagine all the electricity that was wasted because of react and the negative impact on the environment it has had because of that.
React doesn't do anything unless the DOM needs to to be updated.
Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed.
Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop.
We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.
I think you might be forgetting how much it sucked before React.
I vastly prefer plain JS over React, but I will admit that React probably was instrumental in helping create frontend frameworks that are actually good, like Svelte. So I will give Facebook credit for that.
zstd was created outside FB, it's an acquihire.
> zstd
Yes, but also “damning with faint praise” immediately comes to mind
I've avoided react as much as I could. Maintained a high paying frontend career without react until a year or so ago, when I was forced by management to start using it. Thankfully AI was able to touch it for me while I pinched my nose.
What was your framework of choice if not react, if you don't mind me asking
I will blow your mind: you don’t necessarily need one
> I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place.
I feel I have to ask... how do you feel Messenger made the world a worse place?
Go look at Messenger on the App Store and look at the “data linked to you” section. An app with that much surveillance baked in is surely not improving the world.
> shameful to work for
As bad as Meta products are for society, I'd say Palantir is far more shameful to work for.
I disagree. Many Palantir FDEs work on morally benign or even positive projects, for example helping hospitals during COVID. (Of course, many also do unethical work).
At Meta, almost everyone is contributing to unethical ends.
Like saying you were a medic in the SS. You're still in the SS.
Meta is a golden jail for one teenager who cannot grow up no matter what he does. Shame.
Not to defend him, but there are actually quite a lot of people who can’t or won’t grow up.
Sure, most of them don't have the body count Zuck's wracking up, though.
What’s your point? There’s a lot of people who can’t or won’t do a lot of things.
Seeing how much damage he does as it is, I don't want to know the grown-up version.
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.
It was US only as you had to have a .edu email address to join, which most universities around the world did not get as it was mostly a US thing. It took forever for them to open up to non-US universities.
Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.
In 2001 France had Copains d'avant https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copains_d%27avant for school based networking. So not a new idea
Lol I was working on a social network site when FB came out and there were many sites like it (MySpace). Some of them even still exist like VK.
We just had a thing that would export MSN messenger contact list, you'd add your email there and everyone would add you on MSN. Way less creepy than the stalking fb was doing.
I don't think you can say that the idea was "copied". It was a very obvious idea. I had the same idea before I heard of the Facebook. Do you know why it's called the face book?
You may as well say Bezos copied the idea of Amazon from book shops.
Really, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord? facebook was ripped off. most meta companies were acquired. it could be argued that propagandizing the entire world was productive relative to vested interests but that was done on the behest of those interests, not zuck himself. the only thing im aware of zuck actually spearheading was the metaverse, a conclusively unproductive pursuit costing tens of billions to achieve literally nothing. it isnt objective to unilaterally behave with vitriol ... still this person seems more comparable to cancer itself than any actual human. i guess you could collapse productivity to 'making money' in which case clearly he is productive, im more referring to accomplishing anything useful for humanity. i also dont consider mass surveillance to be useful for humanity as bad actors will always get away with it whether they are on or off camera.
> has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord?
It probably will surprise no one to learn his "next big thing" is a prediction market app.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-predictio...
Hits the Meta product trifecta perfectly:
* Derivative
* Late to market
* Harmful to society
Zuck is Equally Excited about all things, as noted by Demis. Zuck is that kid who wants his hand in all cookies jars.
Or he’s backed by the CIA?
Any resemblance to a voluntary mass surveillance and personalised sentiment profiling network is entirely accidental.
Or maybe you are backed by the CIA?
Unlikely, since he is extremely hated by the Democratic party establishment. He's treated like a scorned ex.
Depends on what you consider theirs I guess. The pytorch ecosystem and initial push to open weight models, I consider a pretty good thing for the world all things considered. Lots of great code from FAIR.
> initial push to open weight models
...Push? Did you forget about the leak and the takedown requests?
Portal was pretty good and an originalish product
Spy on your grand parents from the convenience of your kitchen counter top!
now in arctic white!
Why did they discontinue that? It was a very good product; we got them for all the grandparents and they worked really well at bringing the family together across distance. Could have fit in so well with WhatsApp too. But then they just killed it.
Shareholders didn't like it. At the end of the day Meta is an advertising company so everything they do must be in service of increasing revenue from advertising.
Valve is a different company.
Meta's Portal is different from Valve's Portal.
https://www.meta.com/ca/portal/
> Meta Portal devices and accessories are no longer available
lol
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.
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."
I guess having an insecure creep as CEO could play a role in all that.
WhatsApp
Nitpick: Facebook bought WhatsApp, it didn't make it.
They've also largely made WhatsApp worse.
Not yet they haven't. They've basically left it alone, with very minor UI/UX improvements.
They have very recently shown signs of making it worse (the AI button), but overall I've been surprised how careful they've been about doing it slowly. We've probably got another 5-10 years of it being great before they turn it to shit.
How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.
I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.
From an infrastructure PoV, I seem to recall that WhatsApp was one of the few major companies that used Erlang, and were famous for being able to run the entirety of WhatsApp on only a few servers, each of which was serving millions of concurrent connections, mostly thanks to Erlang/BEAM (at least, from what I read). When it got acquired by Facebook, they then proceeded to rewrite the entirety of the backend in C++. Seems kind of baffling to me.
They added ads, an "AI companion", and backdoor logging of all chat messages
That last one’s going to need some substantiation.
“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)
I believe it was the automatic unencrypted weekly data upload to Google Drive
Can you post a link?
No. It's a special arrangement between Google and WhatsApp which makes a file only visible to WhatsApp, and not appear in your regular drive so you can't do normal cloud file operations like generating public links.
Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.
How's this? Not sure if it's the same issue but it's much more damning than the one I knew about. https://www.techspot.com/news/112232-federal-agent-whatsapp-...
You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.
> You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.
No need for the attitude. Op asked you for a source, which is customary for one to back up their initial claim; an onus on you and not for someone else to validate your claims.
Reconning. We made it so Zuck had plausible deniability for all the bad shit happening on WA as a direct result of anticipated regulatory pressure.
There is no “make things harder for the dictator” at Meta/Fb and never has been.
I think OP’s point is that it was bought not made similar to Instagram.
They dont need frontier labs. Meta's dashboard jockeys get paid the same
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.
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.
Your options are:
1. Find another job 2. Don’t find another job
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
The key point here is the “pay less” part. I know people that have turned down offers from meta that would 5x their salary and their personal situation would notably improve from at least some of that extra cash.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
> there are plenty of places that pay less
This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.
Is there any place you look or way of looking that has you in that job? I'm currently happy with my ethical and remote job myself, but I question if it will be around in 10 years, and I especially hate job hunting.
Small B2B/B2G software companies. Look at companies that answer RFPs from your local governments.
I don't blame someone for working at facebook, but I don't think most of you realize how cash money a FANG company looks on your resume to IT managers at the lowly normal companies. Go work in financial services, insurance, retail, go be a contractor and work/travel until you find what you like.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe a little preachy, but the gist of the point isn't incorrect
In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.
It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.
> It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military.
If the motivation is 'improving the defence of the west', it's more equivalent to joining a fringe paramilitary organisation; the dogwhistle is clear.
People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
> donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?
This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.
I think there would be more empathy if Meta were the only company in the world where it was possible to work. That's "stuck." This is not.
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.
It's both. We can point to individuals who make terrible decisions and also acknowledge that there will always be such people as long as the system incentivizes them.
I might agree with this.
But I also think all of the people criticizing Meta should post where they work. I'm sure plenty of people here work for ethically dubious companies, and make the same excuses.
Glass houses and all that.
Ahh the olde Nuremberg Defense - Befehl ist Befehl ... “an order is an order”
i have like 5 companies in my rolodex who would hire me to be fully remote tomorrow
get with the times
Knock it off. Nobody wants to read your braggadocio, and it’s insulting to people who are having real challenges finding work.
Someone working at Meta is not someone who has real challenges finding work.
There's some kind of irony using outdated terminology like "rolodex" and telling someone else to get with the times. :)
It’s almost as if they were making a joke.
If they're willing to do this to their own employees that they pay and supposedly wanted to keep around, what are they willing to do with your data? What are they willing to do with the systems they connect to your systems? "Dumb f*cks" has truly been the ethos of this company from day 1.
For context, Zuckerberg once said about early Facebook users, “They trust me. Dumb fucks.”
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-foun...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
I'm increasingly convinced that these kind of leaks are the only effective resistance to this surveillance society we're entering. Meta will keep doing this, and other employers will probably follow, and then of course governments will use "appropriate legal processes" to add the data to their dossiers, etc. We are watching in real time the expansion of surveillance cameras, chat control, deanonymization, etc.
Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?
Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?
The harm may be greater when it's not leaked. In other words, it can be used to blackmail people in power. They may not even be doing anything particularly illegal - just making a controversial statement or having an unusual sexual preference - and there you go. Or of course illegal stuff, you know. Or ultimately if nothing illegal, enough to assemble a parallel construction case.
If you read the linked article it says the leaked data screenshot of some employees private conversation in plain text and other performance information.
It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.
For all those saying “if you’re not breaking the rules you have nothing to fear” consider that most firms regard “working to rule” to be a form of protest.
If you just follow their rules this surveillance will be used to identify and sanction you.
That system is going to be a nightmare in discovery
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.
Garbage company going into a death spiral.
Unfortunately the amount of cash they have saved up plus the golden goose of FB means they'll be around for a while yet.
They paused it, but they fully intend to restart it.
Edit: I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted. Quite literally from the article:
> “We will only re-enable MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls,” Kasriel said.
Meta must really be paying a lot!
Indeed → https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries
• Engineer (E3, entry level) $248.2K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E5, senior level) $629.8K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E7, principal) $1.69M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E9, distinguished) $6.09M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
And so on with other roles, as you can see on that page.
Note that those are total comp numbers. Something like 60% of that is dependent on performance review, which is fed in large part by automatically collected metrics like number of commits, number of code reviews ticked off, the LLM token usage leaderboards etc; creating all the perverse incentives you'd expect.
So you can rely on income to precisely the extent you are willing to destroy your soul.
its a bit more complex than that.
However when you join you are given a bunch of shares that are paid out every quarter.
The wage is tied explicitly to your level, the number of shares is a bit more flexible. dpeending on what area you work in, and how in demand your role was, your shares make up between 10and 70% of your take home wage.
Every year you get "refreshers", again calculated centrally by level. For example an "E5" (the lowest level of senior engineer) may get a refresher of $150k of shares at january prices. Your performance grade is then used as a multiplier (ie bad == 0, ok == .75 good == *1.0 etc etc etc)
so even if youre not that successful you can amass a large amount of shares.
Currently living in the UK where average principal salaries are less than entry level. Even better working for a US corp and having to deal with the complete lack of understand about why we aren't nearly as motivated as our US counterparts
Crying in Germany with 60-85k average SW engineer salary.
Yeah, but you don’t have to have to pay SF mortgage prices, have a working public healthcare, no hordes of homeless on your doorstep etc. etc.
One might argue that we get more for our sille euro wages. Also if we decide to leave the company, we are not completely f_ckd, since our families don ’t suddenly drop out of healthcare and other services.
What you ignore is the thing that with meta’s salary you can retire in 10 years back to Europe. With silly wages in Germany you can retire on your 75th birthday. Feel the difference? Germany’s economy is stagnating, there will be no higher salaries anymore. Just higher taxes. If I were younger I would pick SF and hordes of homeless over declining Germany. If you follow political discussions it will not get better: planed VAT increase, retiremeNt and health insurance getting continuously more expensive. Even if I can get 3% yearly salary increase it will be eaten up by rising taxes and inflation making my poorer every year.
I think this reduces to a simple question of preference, but you understand that in order to get those salaries you work around the clock in a work environment so toxic, that there’s several books written about it. There’s a reason why they dev’s can order food and have free laundry service there, and it’s not zuck just loving his employees more. So yeah if you don’t get ill or burnout you get to retire earlier, and then move back to Europe. I’d rather stay in Europe, have spare time, live my life in nicer society and perhaps even make products that help society, or somebody, some way.
As of Germany, I don’t follow currenct politics over there (not a German here, Finnish), but you guys have time and time again show that you can produce pretty much anything for the global markets as well or better than anyone else. Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.
Not a German. Coming from authoritarian state and following democratic processes in Germany very closely. Love to talk with older neighbors occasionally. From my personal observation I can differentiate 4 time lines. First one is West Germany after WW2 living under the skirt of Americans. This laid foundation for rapid growth in second phase and prosperity. Arrogance came in with “Made in Germany”. Third phase started with unification and millions of new citizens from former eastern states. While being Germans they had really skewed worldview (I lived there many years). And the decline started in episode 4 with Merkel and zero interest era. While pragmatic leaders would push for using interest free debt to improve infrastructure nothing happened. Instead of that she opened borders and closed nuclear power plants. This decision lead for huge tensions in the society overloading social system. Dumb right orientation parties were elected. Electricity’s definitely not cheap.
We pay more than 30000€ a year for mandatory public health insurance and more for modern treatments not covered by insurance. That’s not different than in US, except the funny salaries in Germany.
Society is not homogeneous. There are more and more elderly who will vote who promises them heaven. The young ones are ignored. There are many conflicts: young vs. old. The riches against rest 95%. The ones born on German soil and the ones arrived later mixing illiterate refugees and PhD expats together.
Interesting times. It’s nice to believe, that Germany can put the shit together. But there are too many forces at play. Let’s see. I am too old to move elsewhere.
But you would have gotten to live in Germany for those ten years.
SF and Meta make sense if you are going to try to be the cutting edge of conversations and tech.
If you just want to live your life?
I have family there and have stayed with them for several weeks at a time. Why do you think Germany is automatically better?
London (where Meta offices are) isn't cheap, many UK companies offer private healthcare as public isn't fast enough, lots of homeless, entire 'tent cities'.
> lots of homeless, entire 'tent cities'.
Not for any length of time there aren't
Compared to say seattleLA/Newyork, the number obviously homeless is vanishingly small. Yes, tubes will have a beggar, but there won't be more than one of them. They also are rarely aggressive.
Even in Soho, where one of the main london hostels are for homeless people its not that bad.
Even though SF mortgage prices are high, they aren't that high. You're still very well off on those salaries.
There are countries with universal healthcare and SV comparable wages
Facebook doesn't pay an average US salary, either (which is presumably why anyone stays). Based on levels.fyi, you'd be looking at 300-400k eur for an E5 in Berlin all-in.
Not sure I'd recommend it; there are less cartoonishly evil companies who still pay silly money in Europe available.
I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever. Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
> I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever.
There are a small number of FAANG-ish companies who pay very high salaries in Berlin, London, Dublin, etc etc.
(And of course Zurich, but Zurich is Zurich.)
> Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
I assure you that they pay more than that for halfway senior roles. Note that a lot of it would be in equity; the base salary would likely be in the 100-150k range, but one might get that again in equity.
They pay £271k at E5 for London according to levels.fyi so I presume that Berlin number is wonky.
It might be a buyout, or someone/some people moving to berlin from america.
if you are moving countries you keep your RSU allocation, but your wage is adjusted down/up based on local levels. (ie for london its .85 or something)
Hey, if you can handle a dystopian Kafka inspired shit show all major tech companies have an office in Berlin.
How? Any world wide company will have local offices for local operations. They are big enough that they have whole data centers there. Of course they'll hire some locals.
Wait- wut!?
If you need to track you employee so hard and invesive, there is something wrong with your company
They did a lot of the spy infra to try and track down/stop who keeps leaking stuff.
They probably wrote the utility with AI - it's not that big a surprise that AI can't secure stuff.
panopticon for me and for thee!
seems fair enough
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636632
just wait for Microsoft to productize and commoditize employee tracking - see the CEO's recent "learning loops" idea - what could possibly go wrong?
I'm making popcorn, anybody want some?
Zuck is so washed as a CEO.
The revenue keeps rising though...
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636632
The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
I'll be the contrarian here.
I think the program was legal and morally fine.
Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.
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? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.
The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.
Imagine if this were a construction company, and 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?
So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.
> 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.
I’m not sure the terms of their employment changed; being subject to monitoring has been in practically every employment agreement written in the past few decades.
What did change is the culture and environment. While that term was always in the agreement, it was largely dormant, activated on an as-needed basis to troubleshoot issues, collect evidence for disciplinary actions or security investigations, etc. Now, it’s on 24x7.
Make it opt-in in exchange for more working from home time, then they can disprove the "people are unproductive when working from home" BS.
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.
Do you believe that police should have their activities monitored at work? How about child care workers? Nuclear power plant operators? Bank tellers?
And if those are ok, what makes them different?
They’re different because of the job they do, who’s doing the monitoring and who has access to the records.
In all the examples you’ve given the monitoring is used to reduce the power imbalance between the public and vested interests with their own agenda.
For example, so the bank teller doesn’t steal from account holders.
For child care workers it’s to protect children in care. If it was used solely to gather information to fire potential whistleblowers people would have a problem with it too.
Considering that, for example, Meta management have a record of encouraging their staff to break copyright laws and lie about it, this surveillance probably isn’t designed to help society as a whole.
But the job that facebook employees might be surveilling people. Shouldn't they be surveilled so that they don't surveil ilegitimately?
that is the most outlandish comparison ive ever seen
I often feel people make hand wavy comparisons as if everything in the world were equal, hoping the other party can’t clearly articulate why they are clearly not equivalent
That’s not what this was about. It was in response to a dramatic hysterical exhortation that we shouldn’t “normalize...surveillance” as though it’s not already normal and well tolerated in our society, particularly in the context of employment.
It’s not, though. Arguing that it is completely normal because a few kinds of jobs may have it is pretty disingenuous. And a lot of jobs on your list don’t actually have the kinds of controls on offer here, so you’re kind of making stuff up here.
Somehow I don’t believe that is true.
Certain activities, for certain highly restricted purposes, yes. Blanket data collection for a purpose unrelated to safeguarding, which can be trivially leaked, as above, no.
It should be an unpleasant necessity, highly regulated. Not just something that you do on a blanket basis because you suffer under the delusion that you might create the next magic robot (I assume the driving force here is that Facebook is very, very behind in LLM-land.)
Hats off to you for sticking your neck out. Regardless if I agree, or anyone agrees - it is great to see a willing contrarian.
To all outraged HN readers considering a downvote:
Downvote is for non-constructive comments, not stuff you disagree with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560543