Comment by procaryote
15 days ago
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency
If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.
Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing
Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.
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The best way to serve humanity in your professional life is serve humanity in your professional life.
In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.
The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.
If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.
If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.
I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
So you mean like buying moral offsets, kind of like how people buy carbon offsets, to achieve morality-neutral jobs? Sounds like a brilliant idea - I'd definitely want to know I'm saving at least as many lives as my company's product is killing. Have you considered recording the morality offsets on a blockchain? Could be a great startup.
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A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.
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That’s an extremely reductive view.
Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech.
There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.
> tangentially related to social media like VR
This is in no way tangential.
VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way.
And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".
Advertising has existed and powered tv and radio before the internet. That’s great / grandfather territory for some
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What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?
It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR.
If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.
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In my experience, the metaverse offerings are a boring ghost town.
The core product is somewhat relevant though
That you can get paid and have fun doing it, doesn't make the product better.
"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"
Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.
But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.
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I'd take zstd any time while I have facebook and friends blocked. The world is not black and white.
zstd can't really be attributed to Facebook. Yann Collet started work on it before joining Facebook, so it was kind of imported.
I am sure it made developing and standardizing the algorithm easier, but what makes it such a good (performant) algorithm is the design of the original creator.
On the other hand, the patent licensing kerfuffle (which I don't think was about any existing patents, just "standard policy") through the relicensing by Facebook was a drag on zstd's momentum.
Quite pessimistic view, but hard to argue against based on available data samples.
But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things.
Problem is systemic.
There are lots of profit motivated big companies that cause much less collateral damage. Facebook ranges from individualised harm like showing kids makeup ads when they delete a selfie, to macro scale harm like election interference
You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale
Nokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around.
> But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company?
So I suppose not really, no.
Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.
I remember, nokia about to release the first smartphone, full linux with a clean plain and simple C written OS/platform... and... then nothing happened. I recall the user groups being puzzled on what was waiting nokia, they were ready, had it all super open source and LEAN open source, and the iphone happened and they were bought by msft... ??????????
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> Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.
Interesting exemple because the biggest investors in renewable by far are big oil companies.
So what should people do? Go or not go? Sadly, the world is never black and white.
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Nokia Siemens Networks provided the Iranian Revolution with their lawful intercept equipment under a special contract. They may have a good overall ethical track record but they don’t have a clean sheet.
I think I can say that this wasn't the case with Sun Microsystems. I never worked there but everything I read on tht company was positive. I gate the fact that Oracle (one of the worst) bought them.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Depending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away.
Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.
> its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing
> it only went down after you know who passed away.
I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc.
So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.
But Meta’s connecting the world… by keeping them inside doomscrolling.
Providing a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow
What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them?
Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient?
Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?
Providing fentanyl to addicts is doing God's work then I imagine?
As we all know. People regularly overdose on Facebook and die.
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Facebook seems to have strange relationship with most Americans while the rest of the world is quite happy with it. Including both WhatsApp and Instagram.
Hmm? What value? And for whom?
I find this kind of comment revolting - if I owe something, I owe it to my family and my parents, so if Meta comes to make me an offer and I accept it, it's my business and no one else's. Strangers on the internet, instead of judging people based on the company they work for, and divide them into "good" and "bad", should get off their high horses and join these companies, if they are capable, and change them from the inside if they think they are doing bad things.
Or take almost any other job.
If you can get a well paying job at meta, you have other options.
john carmack maybe old but his competency/talent is 100x times bigger than you OP
dont shit talk my goat like that
Ah, the Europeans woke up.