Hacker News

Right on. Meta employees, fuck you for building the surveillance state we live in today. You are the fucking scourge and death of the 2000s internet. Eat shit, I care not for your "privacy concerns."

"Companies should be able to bully their staff, since their staff are free to quit" is not compatible with a decent society.

Have you seen the salaries Meta pay?

I have no idea why you are being downvoted. This is probably the most rational take.

Some level of sacrifice is required when you feel super uncomfortable at work in the US. I get the arguments of "I can't lose my pay", but at the same time, if you aren't aligned with how they treat you now, what do you think they will be doing with that data? What does 1 year from now look like? 2 years? Do you think it will be less invasive? Or will they be tracking your eye movements as well, facial sentiment?

Exactly.

It’s the same defeatist attitude people who get an extra three months of pay to train their Eastern European or Indian replacements.

They will gladly take the three months pay to train a replacement. I’d quit on the spot. Let them figure it out.

The majority of people working at Meta will never ever again in their lives get a job offer that good. Meta knows this and doesn't care about many of them quitting. They can currently scoop up an endless supply of developers that have memorized every single leetcode hard, system design and """behavioral""" interview question.

Health insurance and opportunity cost

Money, of course. Both greed and comfort.

got two words for you - money

> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?

While I agree with you, sadly not everyone is in a position to just quit so easily, and even if the majority of the company quits, there are always people who are desperate enough to do the work and not complain.

There are other methods broadly classified as self-defense that an employee can apply against a company and its officials who attack their privacy.

Let Meta and its officials feel the consequences of their actions.

> Have people lost their spine?

Yes, but this being Meta who are one of the several poster-children for surveillance capitalism, this comes across as more a face-leopard than a missing spine: https://old.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/

> seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?

Have you seen the job market lately? Not just in the USA, but also in the USA, there's a lot of people holding on to whatever they've got because it's hard to find replacement work.

> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?

Come on, they may be caring for children, sick relatives, or have a million other reasons to want a stable, well-paying job. There are many well-justified reasons they could have to stay, and yet want to opt-out. "Just quit your job" is extremely out-of-touch.

good times create weak men and we had it so good for so long it ruined us

That would imply that Zuck is being surveilled.

Ah I saw it now through another HN submission.

Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get exposed and caught, ending up as patsies to parrade to the public as fake "proof" that the system they pay taxes and answer to, somehow isn't corrupt to the core and working against them.

Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.

I agree with this kind of... I did automate $4.5M/yr in labor, but I probably only worked 10 hours a week and billed for 40.

For 5 years everyone was happy, but I kind of knew what I was doing was wrong.

Not that I think I could have automated $16M/yr, but I def knew I was billing for doing dishes.

With enough data and time many of those jobs will be rendered obsolete.

This is basically my case against RTO... I am a talker. I wont stop talking. I actually waste people's time talking philosophy.

We should focus on effective means for change. Focusing external influence on low-level individuals with no decision making power might feel good but it has accomplished a sum total of nothing in the past. Why would we think it will make the situation better this time? They swap people in and out of projects all the time and it's really not disruptive at all. The only ways these tech behemoths have made any meaningful positive changes is through sustained governmental pressure either through oversight or regulation.

As I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met.

You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.

The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?

This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?

I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.

If they were a cleaner or some other position that people typically take up because they have no alternatives, then I'd understand and sympathize a bit, you usually don't have any choice and can't really help it, you need to survive somehow, that's OK.

But most of the people working in technology positions at Meta and Facebook are not in that sort of position, they're usually well paid already, and could easily change jobs if they had a tiny bit of spine and could sacrifice getting paid less. Internally they'll reason and justify why they can't just leave, but from the outside it's embarrassingly obvious they don't really care in the end.