It's official. I will never work for Facebook. In terms of hipness (lack of it), positive impact (lack of it), and sliminess, this puts them on the same shelf as Comcast for me. It also frames their ruinous impact on societal discourse as "hostile" rather than just a "a naive and clumsy mistake".
For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?
I haven't been on Facebook in over a decade; I didn't see that it had any positive effect on my life (quite the contrary), and I'm definitely not impressed by their lack of social conscience. Despite the excessive pay and "pedigree" that working for them would offer, I'd never do it. I hope that a growing number of people from my and future generations will think the same.
This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB. There’s a litany of abuses that they have either been horribly naive too or downright negligent in addressing.
If you are bright-eyed optimistic about Facebook I'd be interested to hear your counterpoint to all of the scandal. I don't think there is any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise but it isn't surprising that FB would have a decline in hiring.
I very much doubt that most employees at Facebook share your viewpoint that Facebook is a net negative for society. It’s almost a tautology—people who feel that way won’t seek employment there.
That's one of the key reasons I never apply to companies like Facebook and Google. I'm sure there's a lot of greatness to be had at those companies, but having already experienced working at a left-wing media company, I imagine the fear of being made a pariah by coworkers could only be greater at Facebook.
I recently considered a role there, on a security team no less. I've never had a Facebook account and agree that the product as-is is fundamentally destructive.
However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a better direction.
In the end I didn't take the job because the position eventually offered was too low to do what I described above effectively. But I bet there are other folks here who might get better positioned if they took the time to interview.
I've never seen a company I've wished to work for that cared about my Facebook profile.
Companies that care about their employee's choice of fermented milk will go not be a good place to work at, regardless of Facebook. And they will have serious competitive disadvantages.
I know multiple people that have taken jobs at Facebook in recent years that feel it is a net negative in the world but could not resist the paycheck and justify it by committing to either by work hard as user advocates from the inside, or just finding open source work that doesn't directly exploit users to drain their resources on.
I for one have taken interviews at Facebook with 0 intention of working for them just because they have a tough process and it is good practice. Wasting some of the time and resources of an organization that inherently evil also makes the world that much better.
I know good people working for Facebook, but it does make me think "After everything you know about Facebook, the fact you would still work there, makes me respect you a lot less"
It depends. Facebook is a pretty good employer. It’s done some bad stuff. It also gets way more flak for doing the same stuff everyone does. For any problem with Facebook you hear about, there’s a team of people working on fixing that problem, and you can be on that team if you have the right skill set. On some of the issues Facebook gets criticized for, it’s already doing a better job than most (this is based on my experience working other places). Because Facebook is already cast as a villain in the media, it’s not going to get credit for that. How much will that bother you? Personally, I find it fulfilling to be helping to solve important problems, and I recognize that the bad press was earned by past conduct. It’s somewhat refreshing to work in a place where the risks of negative effects to society are openly confronted, instead of being afraid to bring them up (I don’t think I ever heard my coworkers ask those questions at my past jobs).
Some people respond negatively when they hear I work for FB, but their opinion turns when I give a bit more detail about what I do there. In that sense, I don’t think it’s harmed me socially.
Facebook is a massively evil company, a true net-negative to life on earth, a destroyer of personal privacy, responsible for facilitating genocides, constantly lying to its users, the most egregious example of how corruptive a monopolistic corporation can be on a society at a global level.
If this recruiter is to believed -- and I wouldn't believe a goddamn word of any of it -- there are all these poor, principled people who really truly want to "make Facebook better" but dangnabit they just don't have critical mass yet.
Bullshit. All of it.
This is a carefully calculated response, like all of Facebook's responses (PR or otherwise), to make you drop your guard and stop using your critical thinking faculties. It's a siren song, with promises of six figures and early retirement.
Listen... if you're at Facebook, you've personally made a decision that you'd rather collect your paycheque than stop contributing to the beast that surrounds you. You're fine with the pervasive corruption and rampant disinformation and hypocrisy because you're making bank. Don't be shy. Own it. Say it with a full chest. At least it would be genuine.
But don't lie to yourself, or your coworkers, or anyone outside the company, and say you're trying to "make Facebook better". It can't be made "better" in its current form. It will never be better. It needs to be dismantled. It needs to be put on trial. It needs to be bled dry.
I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer.
I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something.
Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt?
For Facebook employees: Is this really the company you want to work for? Is this the impact you want to have on the world? Is this really the best place in society to apply your talents?
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