2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
This post has an 80% chance of being satire, and 20% chance of being from someone who honestly thinks not being able to afford a new iPhone every six weeks is literally like starving to death. Honestly, I can't tell.
Patrick Star, in response to SpongeBob asking him to refrain from eating a candy bar, following a closeup pan of Patrick's extremely overweight body, "what do you want me to do, starve???"
Something children can understand the humor in. Being used to excuse marching us into totalitarian dystopia.
> 2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
"I was just doing my job. ... I was just following orders".
I want to believe that you got downvoted by the Oracle employees making 600k a year, rather than by people that couldn't tell you were being sarcastic.
Yes, all those people Meta just laid off due to whistleblowing on the Glass privacy violations, and their content moderators and data labelers and so on have my full support.
No sympathies for anyone doing SW engineering or similar. Anyone working there can definitely get a different programming gig. It likely doesn't pay as much but that's how it goes when you sell your soul.
I still have sympathies for any individual contributors even if they are high paid.
No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.
Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?
Oh come on, It is very well known that the Facebook bar to get hired is ruthless and very high, it requires studying for weeks to pass the leetcode interviews. They just decided to get the extra 20k$/year to be at Meta because this is what they wanted to optimize for.
I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.
Tell me how your argument is different than “deep sea oil rig welders make more money than their more ethical alternative of welding for a small local shop.”
Are we going to blame those people for “enabling the oil industry” as well? Or are we going to accept that they are working a pretty serious high pressure job for top pay to set themselves up financially? It’s not like being an engineer at Meta is easy. I couldn’t even pass the screening interview. They aren’t paying for candidates to drop their morals, they’re paying for top talent.
And I would also ask you, which lower paying companies can I work for if I’m a software or hardware engineer that:
1. Don’t collect user data in similar ways to Meta (no tracking cookies, no use of Meta analytics or advertising platforms, no Google analytics, etc.
2. Voluntarily follow more strict privacy rules than mandated by the United States or CCPA.
3. Have zero employee behavior tracking
4. Don’t use any AI for HR issues like hiring or performance.
5. They also have to have enough headcount to replace all the people who are going to quit working at Meta for moral reasons (e.g., if you tell me that Craigslist is a great place to work that’s cool and all but they have like 50 employees).
This idea that Meta is far more moral than anyone else and I can sacrifice pay to work for a more ethical company is a false choice.
This is an industry with almost no unionization or worker protections. IT workers are specifically exempted from overtime. Yes, it’s high paid, but that is not relevant to the issue of worker power and power distance.
When we get caught up in blaming the upper middle class we are fighting the wrong class war.
> workers should show more solidarity to one another, not because of “deserving it” or not, but simply because it’s the only way out of the pit they put us in.
In the same way we shouldn't have any solidarity with scabs, we should have no solidarity with the people who happily built the pit-pushing tools.
That's great, only like a generation of people having to suffer and struggle from say age 20 to 40 so that their masters can attempt to be a superpower.
The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good.
The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure
>Following rulings in several courts, the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday said Oatly could neither trademark nor use the phrase "post-milk generation".
>The long-running dispute has centred on Dairy UK's argument that, under trademark law, the term "milk" can only be used to refer to products that come from an animal.
Next they should ban "zero sugar" and similar on packaging
1) Me and my entire family starves to death
2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
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