It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.
I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.
On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.
I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.
Yeah, many companies don't want the liability issues. Like what happens if I open my bank account on my work computer? You could argue I can expect someone to be watching but I have no warning that someone is? Here in the EU that would probably be an easy lawsuit.
Isn't Facebook training their AIs on their finest engineer's computer use so the AIs can become better computer users?
In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher productivity (perceived, as whats measured no longer ends up being a useful metric) and control and urge people to do more of what they desire.
And my curiosity is: does what Facebook desire align with what the humans who work for Facebook desire? I think with AI, that's a no. The company desires as low a labor/workforce/compensation cost as possible, while the humans desire as much compensation as possible.
I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.
There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.
> I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Interestingly, I have a similar career and I have never ever split personal and work businesses on different notebooks/phones. On the other hand I would never even consider working with a company that monitors my screen or has insight into the computer I'm working on.
I do the same. Its very easy today with portable devices and plentiful mobile data. I have my personal phone and personal laptop, connected to mobile data, for lunch breaks or the odd search I need to do during the workday. My work laptop and associated accounts are strictly for work activities and information.
Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.
I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.
Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.
Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.
In the years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, I was writing code at a massive bank. Didn’t have an iPhone yet and Gmail was blocked on the work computers, so I’d step across the street during the middle of the workday to sign into a law school library and use their computers to check my personal email. A lot of friends still didn’t want to spend money on per-message SMS fees so I could find out if anyone was inviting me to do something after work in my Gmail inbox (a lot of us used Gchat in those days but the only way I could access it was on a desktop/laptop, no mobile yet).
I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.
I’d note that my concern with Meta tracking my keystrokes isn’t that I’m mixing work with personal but that Meta is an intensely metrics driven culture with KPI optimization fixation (iRev is the heart of all their decisions, even at the cost of doing things that are clearly wrong, likely illegal, or immoral). The place is a pressure cooker of performance management and while this data likely is used for model training, there’s zero chance it’s not also going to be used to measure your relative performance and determine when to fire you because you aren’t conformant enough with whatever bizarrely poorly thought out metrics some VP pushed some director pushed some M2 to conceive of then everyone nods and signs off on as long as they can wave a data scientist at it to say “statsig,” with the ultimate goal of producing a classifier that can automate the process of end to end reviews (how do you really do a 50:1 IC:Manager ratio without performance review automation?)
They’ve already structured the model to be a binary classifier - every six months they’re going to let go 10% for performance, and they are flattening the performance range in the upside to show no signal. They billed this as a great thing for ICs because they won’t have to compete for classification and there’s no bubble zone of impeding doom, but they gloss over the top grading range went from 10->15% per year (in 2025) to 21% (as the 10 percent twice a year compounds) performance cuts, and they try to hide the fact LLMs will be doing the reviews for managers (not to mention a 50:1 IC to manager compression implies letting go 80% of managers - so the managers are now in full on squid game mode using ICs as meat shields).
So I think the “will they see my personal stuff” is not at all what is going on inside the mind of meta employees. It’s the fact they’re being fed into a stochastic parrot wood chipper.
I'm the exact same way. If it's a work device, I'll literally never use it for something personal. Why give them any ammunition? Plus, laptops are so thin these days it's not really a burden to pack two, or use a phone like you said. It's one of those things where it almost certainly doesn't matter... until it does.
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
You can rest assured a company firing you for what they saw while surveilling your work computer will not be so stupid as to reveil this fact. That would indeed be a liability for them. They will simply invent a different reason for firing.
Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as much as possible.
I always assume it is the case that my company will spy on my work computer. It’s naive to assume otherwise; there are just too many incentives/externalities for it to not happen given enough time and a reasonably funded infosec department.
Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
This is the fruition of Microsoft's dream, since it's the most obvious way to drive copilot usage in a way that A) burns mad tokens, B) is actually useful to paying customers.
Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
One time my manager messaged me panicking about a big nextjs vulnerability. I told him, no worries, I saw it on HN and we patched weeks ago. He told me to use HN at work as much as I want.
No. You should grow professionally outside of work by also following the work-mandated professional development plan. And you will be punished if you don't do it, or you do it at a pace that doesn't match expectations.
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
I don't think AI introduces anything new. In theory, manager could pull the reports of their 4-12 people to see which programs are active and what websites they are using for how long once a month, targeting individuals that they are looking for a reason to bump. No AI needed.
In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.
When AI takes all the jobs, it will also need to take care of supplying all the demand/customers, as humans will no longer have the resources for that.
> It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.
We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.
Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.
Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.
My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.
> With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing
Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.
This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.
Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.
Why would you do that on the employer-provided device? I just use another laptop and my smartphone. I am even using headphones if I want to listen to something for privacy, no idea if my company would go as far as recording from my microphone but I am not willing to take the risk.
And employees will employ robots to do hyper realistic work like activities to game the system. Here's an idea...... find good leaders who understand team building and culture and let the score take care of itself.
Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.
What you’re concerned about doesn’t stop at the employer.
Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.
Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.
The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.
How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.
This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.
Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...
In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?
Well, at the risk implying intention and thus anthropomorphizing Larry... you know sharks don't eat, they simply consume food, like a fire consumes wood, this is what Larry Ellison advocates for:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
That smart TV you just got has ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), which takes a screenshot of what you're watching, twice a second, and sends it off to data brokers.
With companies enrolling AI to help look over the shoulder of their employees, I wonder how hard it would be to do some prompt injection just changing what is displayed in the surveiled screen for it to see. Potential for a new vulnerability vector?
Other than adding buzzwords to a features list, I don't see AI really moving the needle here. As you've said, it's always been the expectation that employers are watching over their networks.
There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.
> (IT pros tend to not talk about it much)
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.
In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.
> however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines
I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.
If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
There are tons of good reasons to work for Meta. You can work on interesting projects, build your resume and network, work on interesting engineering problems, learn from other people, and of course, they pay very well. People do need to support their family, secure their retirement and so on...
Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.
Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...
Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
This an ad company that proveably, willingly targeted insecure children. You could write the same things about Northrop Grumman or Palantir. I mean corporations were never angels, but how software engineers can work anywhere else with similar features... just why.
Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is.
Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.
This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!
People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you
After 5 years, you'll have an extra $1M in savings, and you can safely pay yourself 4% or $40k each year in perpetuity without doing any work.
This is also a really extreme version of the prisoners dilemma. In the standard formula, there are 2 prisoners, so it's somewhat practical to not defect, but there are hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates for working at Meta in these roles, so your personal decision to defect or not has likely no effect on the ultimate outcome. I.e. for the second option to work, you actually need to organize a unified labor movement with no defectors, which is probably impossible.
Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels.
Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?
This seems like rhetorical question where you know the answer.
Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.
Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.
In the US, if you quit your job, you lose access to many benefits, including affordable health care. It might be hard to get a loan for a car, to find an apartment, etc. This is systemically set up this way, including making sure employment doesn't get too low, which would give more power to employees.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like:
engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
Nazis or not, I’m pretty fed up with that glaze of a quote that goes something like the most brilliant minds of my generation are occupied with optimizing ads. There’s no condemnation, just a wistful yearning for the big brains to be unfettered from their big wage enslavement to save us. It speaks to a craven culture where intelligence is the only praiseworthy trait and character is not even a concept.
You think people raised in such a culture will save you? More likely they’ll be hooked by the next moneybag or hoodwinked by some insane philosophy (Libertarianism, AI Singularity, Effective Altruism...).
Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.
I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.
These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.
I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.
Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???
I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...
All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.
And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...
If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...
If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...
If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...
Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.
If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.
So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.
Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)
This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.
I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.
By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
I have a friend that worked in NYC in part of the DOE (not a teacher, but something adjacent). Its a union position, so during COVID when everyone was getting remote, her profession got remote too.
53 minutes per week.
53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.
> Now, according to Reuters, external, new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!
Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
If your company provides a phone or computer, you should never use it for anything other than work. Not because of any moral obligation, but because it's a big security risk for you.
Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.
These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.
They should just create a leaderboard of how many minutes opted out this week/month...
Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!
Is Metas tracking more obscene than the traditional tracking suites at large corps like Crowdstrike?
In 2017 I recall on launching a tor browser and in 15 mins physical security came to me that something fishy was going on.
Meta isn't alone in the strategy, but are probably the most effective in implementation. JPMC has extensive monitoring and I don't think they have any restriction.
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department
So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.
> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.
It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.
I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.
On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.
I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.
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Yeah, many companies don't want the liability issues. Like what happens if I open my bank account on my work computer? You could argue I can expect someone to be watching but I have no warning that someone is? Here in the EU that would probably be an easy lawsuit.
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Isn't Facebook training their AIs on their finest engineer's computer use so the AIs can become better computer users?
In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher productivity (perceived, as whats measured no longer ends up being a useful metric) and control and urge people to do more of what they desire.
And my curiosity is: does what Facebook desire align with what the humans who work for Facebook desire? I think with AI, that's a no. The company desires as low a labor/workforce/compensation cost as possible, while the humans desire as much compensation as possible.
I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.
There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.
> I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Interestingly, I have a similar career and I have never ever split personal and work businesses on different notebooks/phones. On the other hand I would never even consider working with a company that monitors my screen or has insight into the computer I'm working on.
I do the same. Its very easy today with portable devices and plentiful mobile data. I have my personal phone and personal laptop, connected to mobile data, for lunch breaks or the odd search I need to do during the workday. My work laptop and associated accounts are strictly for work activities and information.
Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.
I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.
Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.
Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.
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> like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work
It's not inconvenient to bring a phone, but it is very inconvenient to have to conduct personal business on a phone rather than on a laptop.
Nonetheless, I agree that it's a bad idea to conduct personal business on an employer-owned machine.
But I don't want to pretend that it's super convenient to have to carry a second laptop, either.
In the years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, I was writing code at a massive bank. Didn’t have an iPhone yet and Gmail was blocked on the work computers, so I’d step across the street during the middle of the workday to sign into a law school library and use their computers to check my personal email. A lot of friends still didn’t want to spend money on per-message SMS fees so I could find out if anyone was inviting me to do something after work in my Gmail inbox (a lot of us used Gchat in those days but the only way I could access it was on a desktop/laptop, no mobile yet).
I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.
I’d note that my concern with Meta tracking my keystrokes isn’t that I’m mixing work with personal but that Meta is an intensely metrics driven culture with KPI optimization fixation (iRev is the heart of all their decisions, even at the cost of doing things that are clearly wrong, likely illegal, or immoral). The place is a pressure cooker of performance management and while this data likely is used for model training, there’s zero chance it’s not also going to be used to measure your relative performance and determine when to fire you because you aren’t conformant enough with whatever bizarrely poorly thought out metrics some VP pushed some director pushed some M2 to conceive of then everyone nods and signs off on as long as they can wave a data scientist at it to say “statsig,” with the ultimate goal of producing a classifier that can automate the process of end to end reviews (how do you really do a 50:1 IC:Manager ratio without performance review automation?)
They’ve already structured the model to be a binary classifier - every six months they’re going to let go 10% for performance, and they are flattening the performance range in the upside to show no signal. They billed this as a great thing for ICs because they won’t have to compete for classification and there’s no bubble zone of impeding doom, but they gloss over the top grading range went from 10->15% per year (in 2025) to 21% (as the 10 percent twice a year compounds) performance cuts, and they try to hide the fact LLMs will be doing the reviews for managers (not to mention a 50:1 IC to manager compression implies letting go 80% of managers - so the managers are now in full on squid game mode using ICs as meat shields).
So I think the “will they see my personal stuff” is not at all what is going on inside the mind of meta employees. It’s the fact they’re being fed into a stochastic parrot wood chipper.
I fully agree with you.
I think large majority on HN works in cool startups without IT rules that could even cost their job when failing security assessments.
Another one, there is no cowboy instalation of dependencies, the CI/CD servers can only talk to internal nexus, jfrog,...
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I'm the exact same way. If it's a work device, I'll literally never use it for something personal. Why give them any ammunition? Plus, laptops are so thin these days it's not really a burden to pack two, or use a phone like you said. It's one of those things where it almost certainly doesn't matter... until it does.
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
You can rest assured a company firing you for what they saw while surveilling your work computer will not be so stupid as to reveil this fact. That would indeed be a liability for them. They will simply invent a different reason for firing.
Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as much as possible.
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I think the keyword is “can”.
It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
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I always assume it is the case that my company will spy on my work computer. It’s naive to assume otherwise; there are just too many incentives/externalities for it to not happen given enough time and a reasonably funded infosec department.
if it's a device provided by your company, it's very likely it'll have some spyware on it.
Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
This is the fruition of Microsoft's dream, since it's the most obvious way to drive copilot usage in a way that A) burns mad tokens, B) is actually useful to paying customers.
Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.
Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?
Yep.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
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Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
[1] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping
[2] bhmt.dev/blog/ctf
[3] bhmt.dev/blog/feeds
One time my manager messaged me panicking about a big nextjs vulnerability. I told him, no worries, I saw it on HN and we patched weeks ago. He told me to use HN at work as much as I want.
No. You should grow professionally outside of work by also following the work-mandated professional development plan. And you will be punished if you don't do it, or you do it at a pace that doesn't match expectations.
You know, don't forget the details.
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
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Or grow professionally during work hours using a personal device.
You're 100% supposed to grow professionally outside of work.
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Maybe? And yes.
I don't think AI introduces anything new. In theory, manager could pull the reports of their 4-12 people to see which programs are active and what websites they are using for how long once a month, targeting individuals that they are looking for a reason to bump. No AI needed.
In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.
When AI takes all the jobs, it will also need to take care of supplying all the demand/customers, as humans will no longer have the resources for that.
> It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.
We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.
Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.
Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.
My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.
I wonder if the AI's that replace us will be periodically web surfing and checking HN as part of their daily work flow?
Only on their 30-minute breaks, perhaps.
> With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing
Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.
This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.
Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.
Why would you do that on the employer-provided device? I just use another laptop and my smartphone. I am even using headphones if I want to listen to something for privacy, no idea if my company would go as far as recording from my microphone but I am not willing to take the risk.
You bring a personal laptop to work with you?
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And employees will employ robots to do hyper realistic work like activities to game the system. Here's an idea...... find good leaders who understand team building and culture and let the score take care of itself.
Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.
Reading hacker-news is work; and never tell my Boss otherwise.
What you’re concerned about doesn’t stop at the employer.
Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.
Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.
The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.
How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.
This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.
Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...
In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?
We’re in weird times.
Well, at the risk implying intention and thus anthropomorphizing Larry... you know sharks don't eat, they simply consume food, like a fire consumes wood, this is what Larry Ellison advocates for:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
That smart TV you just got has ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), which takes a screenshot of what you're watching, twice a second, and sends it off to data brokers.
With companies enrolling AI to help look over the shoulder of their employees, I wonder how hard it would be to do some prompt injection just changing what is displayed in the surveiled screen for it to see. Potential for a new vulnerability vector?
Or, the tracking won't change much, it'll be the big-brothering that will dramatically accelerate
Other than adding buzzwords to a features list, I don't see AI really moving the needle here. As you've said, it's always been the expectation that employers are watching over their networks.
There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.
> (IT pros tend to not talk about it much) > In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.
In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.
> however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines
I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.
If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.
> employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
And the location, yes, your physical location as well
Work will even flag you for you using a VPN on your phone, e.g. if you check the company Slack.
If you can afford it, set up a proper trust fund for them.
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I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
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> now at a community-owned grocery co-op
I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?
Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!
That's lovely
>I had been used to six figure salaries
Great post but this is what it reduces to.
99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.
This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
The best way to unionize is to follow what Mahatma Gandhi did: Non-cooperation movement.
It consists of two broad strategies:
1. Consumer Non-Cooperation (Boycott): Boycott of stuff sold, or given by these companies, irrespective of how attractive it is.
2. The Constructive Program (Self-Reliance): Building and supporting alternatives, even if they cost you a little bit more.
All it needs is little self-discipline and a very very tiny bit of sacrifice on daily basis.
https://www.nextias.com/blog/non-cooperation-movement/
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A heavily unionized tech industry over the last 30yrs would be an interesting counterfactual.
IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers
Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
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> bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China
I don't strive for 996. Is this really the bar we want to meet?
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> can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI
This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
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My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
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Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
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Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.
I dream about it everyday.
I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.
It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere
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There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
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I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
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I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
>and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements
How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
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Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
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I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
Do you live in a city? That's my number one concern. I don't need a lot of luxury but living in a major cosmopolitan city is a non-negotiable for me.
I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.
Nothing solid, but if I have to spend 55-62 pouring beer at my local pub to cover medical insurance, I won’t be sad.
Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.
In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
Is that research still happening?
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
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I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill
I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.
I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
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Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
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As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
> how many more years do I need to work in tech?
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!?
Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...
Let just Meta die!
The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
I used to think there was a solution to this but theres not:
There is no limit to human greed
I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
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There are tons of good reasons to work for Meta. You can work on interesting projects, build your resume and network, work on interesting engineering problems, learn from other people, and of course, they pay very well. People do need to support their family, secure their retirement and so on...
Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.
Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...
Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
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Hey, at least you're open and honest about being okay with contributing to such a global net negative as long as you get something out of it.
This an ad company that proveably, willingly targeted insecure children. You could write the same things about Northrop Grumman or Palantir. I mean corporations were never angels, but how software engineers can work anywhere else with similar features... just why.
Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
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Median pay at Meta is $380k. Median. I'm sure it's high variance but I would put up with a lot for that kind of money
One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is.
Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.
This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!
People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you
After 5 years, you'll have an extra $1M in savings, and you can safely pay yourself 4% or $40k each year in perpetuity without doing any work.
This is also a really extreme version of the prisoners dilemma. In the standard formula, there are 2 prisoners, so it's somewhat practical to not defect, but there are hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates for working at Meta in these roles, so your personal decision to defect or not has likely no effect on the ultimate outcome. I.e. for the second option to work, you actually need to organize a unified labor movement with no defectors, which is probably impossible.
Spy camera manufacturer workers complaining about office cameras....
Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels. Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?
There is more to life than money. I've turned down FANG roles my entire career, especially Meta. There is lot of work out there.
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Sometimes you need to realize you need to choose between having the cake and eating it.
$$$,$$$
more like $,$$$,$$$.$$
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If you can hang, it pays great. I don't work there but I know some who do.
Have you tried finding a new job recently?
Yes, and I found one. It pays enough for having a very stable life, and in a company with ethics!
No reason to be that sarcastic, the job market is not dead (at least not in Europe).
Money. Even I would put up with this if they paid me enough.
Ick.
I'd down vote this if I could.
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In the end, most people choose money.
Maybe you should be asking that question on 1.3 acres and not here
This seems like rhetorical question where you know the answer.
Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.
Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.
Money and/or visa sponsorship obviously. Some things are more important than internet cool points.
In the US, if you quit your job, you lose access to many benefits, including affordable health care. It might be hard to get a loan for a car, to find an apartment, etc. This is systemically set up this way, including making sure employment doesn't get too low, which would give more power to employees.
Meta is still better than 80% of the companies. Other company spies on you, do micromanagement and still pay way less.
Pick your poison.
You need to be more cruel if you actually want these people to quit.
Make them fear for their professional and personal reputations.
Make them embarassed to show their face or state their place of employment.
We need to treat these people like Nazis.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like: engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
We need to make Nazis fear for their personal safety.
We need to make engineers who work in surveillance or advertising ashamed enough to avoid putting that work on their resume.
I think that's a pretty big difference.
Nazis or not, I’m pretty fed up with that glaze of a quote that goes something like the most brilliant minds of my generation are occupied with optimizing ads. There’s no condemnation, just a wistful yearning for the big brains to be unfettered from their big wage enslavement to save us. It speaks to a craven culture where intelligence is the only praiseworthy trait and character is not even a concept.
You think people raised in such a culture will save you? More likely they’ll be hooked by the next moneybag or hoodwinked by some insane philosophy (Libertarianism, AI Singularity, Effective Altruism...).
> I genuinely don't understand...
Really? Its quite obvious to me. They get astonishing resume and salary. That is until they get fired or burned.
> astonishing resume
Not sure about that one.
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Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.
The best part? Strikes work!
Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)
I'm trying to have sympathy for those who work there and are opposed to this, but the irony is so thick that it's a struggle.
I don't think they deserve your sympathy. I don't think there is an employee there that couldn't find another great job somewhere else.
I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.
These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.
I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.
Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???
I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...
All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.
And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...
If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...
If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...
If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...
Etc...
Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.
Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.
But the opt outs will, of course, be tracked. Choose to do it and it will go on your performance review.
I would bet that the 30 minute windows are tracked even more closely, just secretly.
Opt outs lower your KPI by a fixed value
If they give you shit for being opted out every day around lunchtime they would just find something else to give you shit about anyway.
2015 satirical article from The Onion: "HR Director Reminds Employees That Any Crying Done At Office Must Be Work-Related."
The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.
If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.
So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.
Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)
O'Brien turning off the Telescreen.
"You can..."
"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever"
boot/server
This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.
I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.
By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
I have a friend that worked in NYC in part of the DOE (not a teacher, but something adjacent). Its a union position, so during COVID when everyone was getting remote, her profession got remote too.
53 minutes per week.
53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.
This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.
Broken record here to announce that there are countries that have labor laws that protect employees, which you can take an example from or move to.
best I can do is incoherent muttering about illegals and blaming all problems on them.
or voting for the evil person as protest against the lack of options, also super effective
> Now, according to Reuters, external, new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!
The world smallest violin will be rendered in React... Why do these employees get this generous toggle, when we got zero minutes and a shadow profile?
No one mentioned Orwell so far?
Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
If your company provides a phone or computer, you should never use it for anything other than work. Not because of any moral obligation, but because it's a big security risk for you.
Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.
These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.
And who knows who gets to see the tick against your name as "opted out".
I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.
Meta: Just as incompetent as Microsoft, but somehow more evil!
They should just create a leaderboard of how many minutes opted out this week/month...
Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!
At what point does this company undo their name change that was aligned with them pivoting to the metaverse and virtual reality?
Is Metas tracking more obscene than the traditional tracking suites at large corps like Crowdstrike? In 2017 I recall on launching a tor browser and in 15 mins physical security came to me that something fishy was going on.
Who in their right minds would trust this...?
Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.
30 whole minutes?! How generous.
If you are being tracked all day long, just create a lot of discovery for lawyers in the future: "Mark asked me to x", "Mark asked me to do y".
Requires a functional legal system, so it seems unlikely to come into play.
Meta isn't alone in the strategy, but are probably the most effective in implementation. JPMC has extensive monitoring and I don't think they have any restriction.
The movie Antitrust but on steroids in real life. Also the Crossover white collar sweatshop ended up as trendsetter.
30 minutes of freedom! Hell yeah, sounds like a great place to work.
Right.
Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.
How considerate
Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
If you don't walk out after such rules, then what would you make to do so?
Meta where anything goes absolutely for making money...
In 1984, high ranking members of the party could turn off their telescreens for 30 minutes without suspicion.
That's generous!
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
Sick company environment.
That's very generous.
This is great, I hope the people at Meta suffer as much as possible while working for them. They should introduce mandatory eyeball sanders next.
I was thinking of those eyelid holders from Clockwork Orange. That way you won't waste time blinking.
Working as a dev at Meta has become like working a call center. Zuck lost the plot.
Why would they care about software developers when they're busy replacing them with AGI?
AI? What happened to the Metaverse? I thought that was the future, mr Zuckerberg? What happened?
I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta
We already have a solution to this, though. It's called criminal law. Where do you draw the line if you monitor people doing HR?
Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?
They need to unionize.
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
I don't think there are legal concerns with employee tracking. I suspect it would still be legal if they didn't provide an opt-out.
This is the United States, land of the free and home of the slaves. Workers are subhuman here.
Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.
Ah, hyperbole. You must be from Reddit.
Since Meta workers are slaves, no one can blame them for their work or employer though, as you no doubt agree.
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
Meanwhile… Alan Dye breathes a sigh of relief and resumes another 30 minute session of Minesweeper.
Just don't blame me if your coding agent curses CEO and bypasses presubmits with dirty hacks a year later, I never volunteered to be a role model.
Back to work slaves!
do the meta employees that code these stuff also get tracked?
Just enough time to...
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours
I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
Somehow this is way more dystopian than not having an opt out at all.
Meta has written itself into a solid tyrant role. A million aspiring rebels are happy to play along.
I'm looking forward to the HN story sometime next year about employees being let go for opting out of tracking.
Can't you just use your own personal device and avoid the tracking entirely?
If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak
Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department
The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?
So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.
> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.
This is a perfect reason to unionize. Individual action is never as powerful as collective action.
oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.
Surely they can't be serious?
It's part of meta-mating, we would not understand.
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