> If there is one thing our world does not lack, it's amoral people. Would you prefer that Facebook only hire them?
If they are currently hiring only amoral people and people who are afraid of expressing their moral outrage, then there is absolutely no difference than if they were just hiring amoral people to start with.
> The next best step is to pledge to not hire ex-Facebookers.
I actually agree with that, and not because of any personal agenda against FB, but because I don’t want the corrupted, unethical mindset of FB to permeate my organization. I just cannot trust ex-FB employees to make ethical decisions.
Again, I disagree heartily. I know FB employees who aren't ethically compromised, which serves as a counterexample to your claim. I can't think of any legal, large employer with whom people are ethically compromised simply by employment.
Also, your original claim was that they are morally corrupt. How do you distinguish between these two?
> they are making the world worse for me, the people I associate with
As a gentle reminder, a single person isn't the world, and your life being assessed by you as worse (without mention of baseline) is not a huge price to pay for free connections, central marketplace, and not to mention the groups that have been extraordinarily helpful for the marginalized. I've been in that place (marginalized), and finding support through groups facilitated by FB's platform was essential to my well-being. So again, counterexample to the totalizing claim.
Am I a fan of FB? No. But it's a really hard stretch to assume that everyone is compromised for being involved with them. Such claims aren't novel, but seem to be histrionics in most cases.
> I don’t know if being in proximity to Facebook’s leadership corrupts people.
I guess you need to be a bad person from the get-go to be able to keep a smiling face in that place. I mean, it is not even that Facebook employees are forced be necessity to work there. They have plenty of options. It is just that honest work, like say a weapon manufacturer, pays so much less than ratting out your friends and family to Zuckerberg.
> Just because you work on something interesting does not absolve you of the moral responsibility you have to yourself.
I agree and am not sure why you think I thought otherwise.
The person I was replying to said "I don't think I have any ideological objections to Facebook" which I assumed to mean they don't see any moral problems with Facebook.
I was merely disagreeing with the idea that someone's lack of interest in the exterior facing product implies there are no interesting projects for that person in the entire company.
> Facebook is, in general, an unethical company. And this has been known for a long time. If you didn't leave yet you won't leave over this either.
You might be right. But you might be wrong. And the way you're framing it, it's either a) someone agrees with you, and has already left FB (meaning you were right), or b) someone has stayed at FB, therefore ethics is unimportant to them.
Your dichotomy leaves no space for the idea that you might be wrong, or that the people who work at FB might not agree with you that it is unethical.
> And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB.
They don't have to care. They just shouldn't be surprised if I refuse to hire them because I was able to find them on Facebook/Instagram. Likewise, if they worked for Facebook I won't hire them. They're tainted. LOL
> Do you believe it's possible to work for Facebook without at least indirectly benefiting the company as a whole?
No, probably not. But I still draw that distinction.
I'm not a strict consequentialist. I think that people's intents matter and that their inner lives have moral significance.
So, for me, that outcome (Facebook benefiting) is only one factor in the moral calculus. In the case of the people I know (and likely John Carmack, though I don't know him), it isn't the dominating factor.
I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.
If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.
The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.
Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.
> By staying at Facebook your friends are explicitly supporting these and other scummy actions. They have decided to hold their noses and prioritise themselves over humanity.
> Think less of them.
Given their explicit support of scummy actions and not humanity, do you feel Facebook employees should be punched, in the defence of humanity?
> But because Facebook, Inc is an evil company and we shouldn't use their products.
Sincere question: what do you mean by this? I don't perceive them as "evil". That comes off as a vague and subjective accusation. What specifically are you referring to? What makes them worse than other organizations?
As opposed to when? When you worked there? When was this period that Facebook was a beacon of ethical behaviour?
> to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler.
Like aliasing people into a point on a social graph and a wallet? Dehumanising behaviour and monetising that is the main ethical problem with Facebook. It's a bit rich to accuse opponents of over simplification.
>It is a poor model
FB market cap seems to disagree. Pidgeon-holing people for profit is an exceptionally lucrative model.
> Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity
And the trains in Italy ran on time!
You worked there for five years and never had a clue. Maybe you're not the right person to provide a judgement on judgement.
>Wrote another: “This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.”
Says the company who's very moral compass is coming into question.
Nazi soldiers following orders to line up minorities in slums and shoot them, or herd them into cattle cars - loyal, yes? Moral? No.
"Loyalty," in that post, to what? To Mark and the investors' bottom line, and tangentially with it the bottom line of you and your fellow employees? Loyalty to this idea of "connecting the world?" Is that really the value of Facebook?
Yeah, that's what I don't understand about the current outrage at Facebook. IMHO they are far ethically better today than they were say 6-10 years ago. I just don't understand the outrage today if its ok to do what they did several years ago. I mean, I left Facebook in 2011 due to their ethical issues.
> would adhere to the same principles in any other similar case?
Consistency isn’t the paramount principle in a moral system. If you have a compulsion for kicking babies, controlling that impulse most of the time is better than going hog wild on a kindergarten because you lost control once. Facebook is an awful company. But it’s doing the right thing here. That action commendable, even if it’s doer is usually not.
> I think it's weird when people declare that working at Facebook is bad because Facebook does some bad things
It's about making ethical decisions when a choice is available. One of the advantages of being a software engineer is that there are too few of us to go around: if you are halfway competent then you get some choice as to where to work. Involving some ethics in that decision is appropriate. It would be different if you were unskilled and needed any job to pay the bills.
You don't get to choose what country you are born in. You do get to choose who you vote for (in many countries), and that's the place where your ethics comes in.
>It may be self-serving but it may also be targeted to other Facebook employees and recruits or to the general FB-using public to let folks know how dire and complete their complicity with things is.
Fair enough and I do consider his action to be a moral stance that took courage to make. And I certainly respect your decision to not work for these companies.
Having said that, I think you are way overstating how bad FB or Twitter or Google is (I wasn't sure which two companies you were talking about). And I say that because I look at the full picture of the economy that has, for example, timeshare companies, payday lenders, banks and credit card companies, casinos, alcohol and beer companies, pharmaceuticals (especially with opiates). Products from those companies can have terrible real-world consequences on people that may take decades to rectify, and then when I look at Facebook and the negative things they bring .. Facebook doesn't even rank. I'm sure FB has problems that they need to work on fixing but the hyperbole around them is so outrageously disproportionate, it feels like gaslighting.
> Can you quote anything at all from this particular thread that supports this statement?
The original parent comment of this thread...
> Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again.
Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization.
As to your comment...
> The argument here is that by now there is enough evidence that this compromise is too much, and that ethical people who work at Facebook should consider that.
The argument in this thread is not that people who work at Facebook should "consider" that, but rather that anyone who continues to work at Facebook is no longer ethical.
It's not a straw man if the very first comment proposed exactly that.
Which is a sort of absolutism that I'm taking issue with. I'm sure there are parts of Facebook that are wretched hives of scum and villainy. I'm sure there are parts that would make my and your employer look terrible, ethically comparatively.
So maybe we should use a bit finer brush when tarring people. That seems like a fairly modest proposal to me.
If they are currently hiring only amoral people and people who are afraid of expressing their moral outrage, then there is absolutely no difference than if they were just hiring amoral people to start with.
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