Comment by codingisfreedom

I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.

How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade

React, React Native, GraphQL, LLama, PyTorch, RocksDB, Cassandra, folly, Hack, HHVM, OCP, Presto, btrfs, cgroupsv2/PSI, eBPF, zstd, roughly 12% of all Linux kernel contributions are signed off by Meta + Meta is the 5th biggest contributor to Linux kernel.

Also a ton of other projects that did not originally come out of Meta but get a ton of patches and support/funding: MySQL, Memcached, Hadoop, LLVM, Systemd, Rust, Python etc.

Perhaps research a bit more before you make these ignorant comments.

> for very fat salaries

For a fairly sizable portion of the population (especially the tech worker population), salary/TC is seen as the measure of someone's value as a human being. I've had acquaintances who really, sincerely struggled to understand the concept than an engineer making 1/N what an engineer at Meta/Google/etc does could be overall a better engineer. The typical reply has been something along the lines of "but if they're better, why don't they just make more money?"

They really couldn't understand when I tried to explain that, in my experience, nearly all the really brilliant and interesting technical people I knew tended to be making less, because they would rather work on interesting problems with a high degree of control than play leveling games at a large corporation.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade […] they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.

React? We can all criticize it, but it has revolutionized the web. Llama. Did you forget what sparked the whole open-weight wave? It was that. I dislike Meta, but I would not criticize the engineers competence. They have done impressive things, check out their blog if you genuinely are curious.

Getting paid half a million TC at Meta beats only making 150k as a DoD contractor.

You’re arguably a war criminal either way, might as well get top dollar.

In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.

Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).

But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.

There is a difference between contributing nothing to society and doing more harm than good overall.

The former is just wrong in the case of Meta, you don't need to look far to find many of their contributions. The latter is debatable, but it is not what you said.

There is also a difference between the company as a whole and the people working for it. Their "very fat salaries" can let them support noble causes, or not, they are people, in all their complexity, not just machine parts.

> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.

Only because the longer you work there, probably the more you've been able to handle while you time there, but I don't really care if you worked at Meta or at Momandpop Software Corp down the road, I care about your personality and ability to learn and adapt, these are stronger signals of the types of devs I want to work with than anything else. I'd still consider you, but I might pass on you if I feel more confident about someone else.

First of all, i don’t know why you are talking about engineers. This is a business decision, not an engineering one.

> I seriously can’t understand why there’s so much respect for anyone that works at Meta.

Is there? Thats new for me.

> yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers

Are they? I associate meta with the “move fast and break things” philosophy, not engineering excelence.

I’m sure there are some fine engineers there. But by and large it is just a big company with questionable ethics and lots of money.

> and maybe even made it worse

I don’t think that’s a maybe. There’s actual research on social media addiction. For me, getting off Facebook improved my life.

The salaries aren't based on contribution to society, they are based on contribution to Meta. Fat salaries come from fat contributions.

People working at Meta tend to gravitate around the same group of tech companies who offer the same range of salaries, same selection process, same internal structure. Many of them aren't particularly brillant SWEs (in the sense you don't need to be an elite coder or top PhD), although they can deliver based on the evaluation processes in these companies.

Meta has a bad reputation in some circles, but I don't think there's anything peculiar or particularly evil about them, at least not worse than similar publicly traded big tech companies. They are amoral money-making entities.

That being said I agree that their products suck. I don't use them, besides what's app because it's difficult to avoid. It's also end to end encrypted so it doesn't really matter regarding mass surveillance.

> These people have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade

Not as FB. But they have shipped a lot of useful stuff. That doesn't mean the company is suddenly great and all should be forgiven but there is some nuance here.

In addition to all of their open source contributions, their ability to pay a ton of money and fun problems to solve led a lot of fantastic engineers to want to work there — especially before 2015.

I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by Adtech, starving hysterical naked

Okay so one of the reasons I post on Meta platforms less nowadays is that they often don't show my content to my own followers and friends. I'm tired of talking to walls. I'm tired of having communication between friends gatekept by a stupid algorithm. I'm fine with recommendation systems being used for things I DON'T subscribe to, but if it's between friends I want to see ALL of it.

So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?

And yet Google isn't quite as rebuked. There's another thread on HN today about ads in google TV.

But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.

Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.

Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.

To Meta workers -- and I've known many of you, right up to the c-suite.

If you still work there, you're a garbage human being. It's that simple. You are a POS that deserves no harbor or shelter from any right-thinking tech worker.

(All here have noticed how you no longer highlight your workplace. Apparently shame is useful for something, if not enough.)

Because they do Leetcode interview and the day to day work is to solve Leetcode problems.

Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?

I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.

And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.

> and yet they’re being praised for being the example of best engineers.

By whom? I haven't seen anyone say something positive about Meta or their employees for at least 15 years, unless you count people who were being paid to write PR articles.

There's nothing better about working at Meta than working at Flock or X or Kalshi or Palantir, it's pretty clear that Meta has done far more damage than all 3 combined due to scale. The problem is that many more people on HN have worked at Meta or know someone who has, so coming to terms with that would be painful, so they rather not. It's not too different for people outside tech who pretend to care about these things, but instead of knowing people who work there they're active users of Meta platforms. And I guess the open source contributions give a convenience excuse to techies, as if they make up for even 0.1% of the damage.

This is also why criticism of Meta tends to get a much worse vote ratio in comments on HN than for the other companies I named, lots of people here with direct personal connections to them due to scale.

Meta just added another chapter to their endless list, election interference in Brazil to help Bolsonaro. Just like X.

PyTorch .. React ..

That two libraries already build Frontend and AI.

thank you for saying this. We have to bring back shaming in tech.

Society basically says money = good. God forbid we treat a sex worker with respect but if you're precious little Johnny works at Facebook finding new and exciting ways to get teenagers even more addicted to their phones it's all good because he makes a lot of money and money = good.

Facebook is one of the most successful products of all time. Billions of people use it because they get value out of it. You can raise all of the legitimate criticisms of Facebook that you want, and there are many, but saying they have contributed nothing to society is delusional.