In principle, I think most people believe their morals would prevent them from working at a company like Meta.
On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free?
There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems.
Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.
I am not even sure most people could articulate their morals. It's not just about never having heard about things as moral absolutism or consequentialism. Similar to how atrophied people's understanding of sympathy and empathy is as well.
Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying?
I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.
I'm curious what this distribution is.
I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
Sure. There were also a lot of very normal people. There were people trying to take down Nazi from the inside. And there were people that were genocidal maniacs.
It's not like one day all of Germany turned evil then a few years later turned good again. Framing things like that is unhelpful. It makes evil seem cut and dry. Trivial to identify. That's what authoritarians thrive on: oversimplification. Everything is easy, it's not your fault, "it's so simple, you just..."
All that accomplishes is letting evil flourish. Gives it time to grow and set root. You're just being dehumanizing yourself.
On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free?
There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems.
Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.