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Comment by tolbish

6 years ago

The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.

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tolbish

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saurik  6 years ago

I know many such developers who work at these companies helping build these products and who hate these policies; they don't work on whatever feels most direct like the evil feature itself, but they don't seem to have an issue working for the company helping build parts of the UI or networking or whatever.

xmprt  6 years ago

Moreover, even if they were the same devs, they're all working on such small parts of a bigger product that no one person or team is responsible for any of the compounding decisions that lead to this.

idrios  6 years ago

Or, quite possibly, they have no other choice. Some devs have the freedom to walk away from a job that they find morally detestable. But many can't refuse or leave because they're under contract and can't afford the break-contract fee, or they're visa holders whose visa is tied to their employment, or they have a family to take care of and can't afford the time spent job searching. It's unfortunately not hard these days for any sufficiently funded business to find developers for morally questionable or outright unethical business models

  • tolbish  6 years ago

    The cases where people actually have no options (H-1B who had no idea what kind of business social media is and thus needs the job to stay in the US) are pretty rare.

    Yes there are people who think they need a big house in the bay area or need a Tesla, but that doesn't mean they have no other options but to work at Twitter or Facebook.

    • idrios  6 years ago

      It's not that rare.

      I was talking less about people who are Facebook employees and more about people who are Accenture / Cognizant / Infosys / etc employees or contractors, who get subcontracted to do work at Facebook or wherever else. They just have to convince a fresh college grad or visa applicant to sign say a 2-year contract, and that person may not realize quite what they're signing until they're put on a project

      Edit: I wasn't trying to disagree with you if it sounded like I was. I meant this as "in addition to what you said" not "instead of what you said"