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Discussion (84 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
zstd
I’m torn about React and PyTorch :)
Yes, but also “damning with faint praise” immediately comes to mind
Everyone I know in the GPU compiler/GPGPU space seems to be either going to meta or leaving meta for NV or some AI lab. My anecdotal observations don't align with "bin meta applicants straight to the trash."
now in arctic white!
https://www.meta.com/ca/portal/
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
1. Find another job 2. Don’t find another job
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
get with the times
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-foun...
It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.
I wonder whether they already thought of that, and are exempting from monitoring the roles most likely to generate "smoking gun" evidence.
• Engineer (E3, entry level) $248.2K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E5, senior level) $629.8K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E7, principal) $1.69M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E9, distinguished) $6.09M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
And so on with other roles, as you can see on that page.
Edit: I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted. Quite literally from the article:
> “We will only re-enable MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls,” Kasriel said.
I think the program was legal and morally fine.
Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.
I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.
The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.
Imagine if this were a construction company, and there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?
So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.
If you were hired with this as an explicit expectation, yes. It's one thing to know that your actions can be audited in case there's some sort of incident but imposing unlimited surveillance and using that information for the purpose of eliminating your job could be argued to be intimidation (ie. "we can't afford mass layoffs but aggressively monitoring employees will force the undesirables to quit").
No one likes the terms of their employment being changed against their will no matter how legal it might be. Why not make it opt-in in exchange for some other perks? If the data is valuable then compensate employees for the added burden/liability of total telemetry.
What did change is the culture and environment. While that term was always in the agreement, it was largely dormant, activated on an as-needed basis to troubleshoot issues, collect evidence for disciplinary actions or security investigations, etc. Now, it’s on 24x7.
This is the cost of losing consumer trust over two decades of untrustworthy acts.
> there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?
Yes. Every time these analogies to normalise mass surveillance are brought up, they mistake "another human or two can see you doing something in real time" with "a permanent record of every single action you ever take in your entire life, micromanaged down to the millisecond, accessible to many people over a period of years". That is, in fact, very different at all.
And if those are ok, what makes them different?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.