Like most state employees, I am in a union and while there are MANY things I do not like about my union, from its high dues, to its constant forays into politics, to the supine pose it takes to contract negotiations, there is one thing that it does very well, and that is stands up against BS like this in a very meaningful way. Tech workers need a union or some union-like organization that stands up for basic worker rights.
It won’t happen, the last few generations have been brainwashed and have forgotten the past history of when people united together to give us the rights we have today which haven’t been added to since the 90s (the family leave act - which doesn’t even pay you it just keeps from losing a job)
There’s a reason they keep us fighting each other over race, culture wars, and other bs, because they know united our country would look so much different and they wouldn’t be able to make as much money
My union is excellent but we are the exception to the rules. Our contracts always net better pay and retirement benefits. Sometimes I’m in disbelief what they sometimes get on paper. It wasn’t always like that but the protection unions bring are a huge benefit. Like them or hate them this would be something that would be a line item in a contract with protections.
In my EU country the national tech(IT) union is useless because they are simply toothless. Unions of teachers, airport, road, rail, etc workers are strong and always get what they want regardless of economic performance, because they can grind the country to a halt by simply not showing up to work for a day, but tech workers are under constant pressure of outsourcing and offshoring due to the globally distributed nature of work, so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against employers because they just have no leverage, when their workload can be taken over by someone from another country if they go on strike.
The local company union/workers council (Betriebsraat) si also equally toothless and didn't do much at the mass layoffs.
Unions are only as powerful as their impact to the comfort of the citizens and to the votes of the politicians.
>so the unions never manage to negotiate anything against >employers because they just have no leverage, when their >workload can be taken over by someone from another country if >they go on strike.
Are there mitigation policies in place in your org in case your union decides to take a sabbatical? What would happen if you all called in sick? It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions. Spirit Airlines in the states just shut down, but everyone just yawned, "oh, so sorry too bad". If your employer does have that plan B, then why are you still employed? Won't they want your union to strike and off with your heads?
I never got my head around the unions. They start idealistic but end up as corrupt as the source of their angst as they mature and it's a constant push/pull and the civilians' bank accounts suffer regardless. I am not saying "give in". So, close the borders, physical or digital?
Probably a government lawsuit on the employees to investigate the suspicious mass sick leave, and on the doctors who issues the sick leave notices.
And during discovery they would uncover the written paper trail employees used to organize the mass sick leave and then they'd get sued for sabotage and have to pay damages to the employer.
>It seems there'd be more economical damage than teachers or ATC not showing up for their shift, because commerce/transactions
That wouldn't fly over here, since that would be considered intentional sabotage which is not legally allowed by law here, and heavily punished with fines or jail time. The only legal outlet for labor protests is conversations and negotiations through unions, which are toothless and more for show, to give the workers the impression that their opinion matters and they're not under the boot of government and corporations.
Austria isn't as friendly to labor uprising as modern US due to the very strict laws and legal system that restrict what workers are allowed to do against their employers, there's no "jury of your peers" to let you off the hook if you damage your employer's business in protest. Everything is done for "stability" including defanging labor powers.
Unfortunately too many tech workers think they're special little snowflakes and deserve the highest pay possible and think that unions will interfere with that. Because if you aren't getting the highest pay or the highest job title, you just aren't good enough and why should I be associated with those that aren't good enough? You will never get tech workers to come together for the common good. It's always about only what's best for me. The amount of greedy self-centeredness and backstabbing I've seen in this industry across multiple companies is unreal.
No. I am not paying $1,000s in dues for them to spend it on a rally to "End Child Poverty" (to use an example currently in my inbox; and it's a good cause, just not a good use of my dues). My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.
That's it, the union: every union for themselves, no cause no solidarity, just cold hard mercenary cause of money for you! That's the true spirit of labor, I'm sure.
How about the career of the bosses of that union? You are not paying to advance them to the next step but suppo3End Child Poverty is probably well received by the people that will support them in their next job.
It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it.
You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.
The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?
The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.
Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."
I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).
Of course running a vegetable shop is political. Politics is the question of who gets what. There have been countless societies across history, and still exist many, where the political formations meant the very concepts of “shop”, “business”, or even “employment” per se were foreign.
This is really a "hoisted by your own petard" situation. I hope they don't think people are going to be sympathetic towards them when they're guilty of doing the same type of things (and far worse) to billions of people.
I'm sympathetic to this view, which has merit. I'm also happy to accept any new advocates for privacy and liberty. Purity tests are counterproductive to a movement's goals. Effort should be directed toward activities that advance the agenda of the movement, directly or indirectly.
Here's a better statement "I'm glad they're seeing the light, even if they had to become victimized themselves to finally care."
Fair point, but I'd have to see something more concrete than just them complaining about this situation specifically to believe they've actually seen the light. If they just continue to work there as usual and make no efforts to even find a job elsewhere, it doesn't seem like they've yet opened their eyes to the light.
There's something to be said about being an internal advocate for the right thing. Better to be fired for repeatedly advocating for privacy than to resign. Adding friction to wrongdoing is good.
I will never blame the non-management workers in this situation. Most of us are forced by modern society to work for someone else and there are a limited number of jobs available.
Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
This woukd be like saying the person scanning your ticket at the concert condones Ticketmaster as a monopoly. No, they’re just trying to feed their family.
Meta employees aren’t DoorDash gig workers trying to feed families. These are well compensated workers. It’s okay to have the opinion that most white collar jobs do some harm somewhere, but pretending these are poor souls forced to work for meta because of lack of options is not a great take.
Furthermore the guy scanning the tickets doesn’t work for Ticketmaster, Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta. Big difference.
That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs. Think about departments like support, graphic design, marketing, etc.
Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated.
Also, it’s not like you have a wildly great choice of ethical companies to work for as an employee. What percentage of corporations are truly ethical? What companies that compete with Meta are highly ethical? If I quit Meta who am I working for that has no ethical issues?
> There are definitely Meta employees who are not making especially high salaries like SWEs
With very few exceptions, Meta employees are generally making more money within their domain as compared to what they would make working at other companies, which is always an option.
> Most white collar workers do not have any luxury to stop working even if they are well-compensated
It’s a false dichotomy: work for meta or be unemployed. Millions of white collar workers are doing fine not working for Meta.
And questioning if any corporation is free from ethical problems does not absolve you from the responsibility of the outcomes of what you build. Some corporations are objectively worse than others. A corporation building systems to pay gig workers less than the minimum wage is going to be probably worse than a corporation that builds a design collaboration tool when it comes to ethics. You can choose to work for either and be well compensated for your work, but let’s not pretend you’re some poor soul trapped in a job that you can’t escape.
Remember that Meta owns their own data centers. I have found jobs for Meta on their careers page in places like Ohio, Alabama, and South Carolina, and Illinois outside Chicagoland that pay under $100k or just barely above it.
Many of these towns are not near major employment centers.
If I am a diesel technician in Huntsville, Alabama are you saying I should not apply for that job and keep working at the truck dealership? Is a franchised dealership even more of an ethical business than Meta?
It’s very ignorant of us to assume that everyone working for Meta is flooded with options in their life and isn’t feeding a family and supporting people on a basis of needs. Meta employees aren’t just singles in their 20s, they are dads and moms and people supporting their parents and people sending money back home. Being paid higher other options is a very compelling reason to work at a company, and I can understand someone who feels like it’s a lesser evil than being broke.
The software industry is facing some of the worst job market in years.
If you’re like me and consider most corporations to be fundamentally detached from the concepts of morality, as they are a financial and legal structure and not a person, what difference does it make? If I don’t work at Meta I have to work for someone else who operates under the exact same legal framework and essentially plays by the same rules.
You’re free to work for Meta and you’re free to make as much money as you want. You’re also free to tell yourself whatever story you’d like to make yourself sleep at night.
What you’re not free to do is to call others ignorant for not agreeing with your world view. Famously, “I was just following the orders” or “I had no other options” is not a great excuse. Own your decisions and take responsibility for your actions.
I am free to call you ignorant for not agreeing with my world view, actually. I’m not sure why you’d claim I can’t do that, the statement is factually false.
I wasn’t specifically trying to do that in such a strongly worded way, I’m not saying you should agree with my world view. But I think it’s ignorant to assume that everyone who works at Meta is super privileged and can just get some other job instantly.
Again, I listed off job postings in areas of the country that are not as economically strong as California and NYC. If I can choose between working for the local truck mechanic shop for $60k or work for Meta as a diesel technician for a data center for $120k you gotta ask yourself if my kids getting a college fund or not is worth working for a company I have moral issues about.
Not everyone working at Meta is making SWE money.
I also think the whole concept of “don’t like it? You can just choose somewhere else” is incredibly naive of the current corporate landscape. Corporations have very few checks on their power. I can be a data center technician at Meta and engage in surveillance capitalism or I can be a cashier at Target who is doing surveillance capitalism or I can work for a local mom and pop shop that primarily uses Instagram and TikTok to advertise and is engaging in surveillance capitalism. This idea that I can choose to escape this system is a false choice. The only escape is to work to enact laws that properly regulate these companies to conduct ethical business.
I love comments like this here. Just trolling for the sake of trolling, paragraph after paragraph. The fact that _some_ Meta employees earn less than $100,000 a year is completely irrelevant to this whole discussion.
My whole entire point is that we can’t blame individual contributors for working at Meta and we can’t assume that they are upper upper middle class people with tons of other options.
Even for the upper upper middle class software engineers bringing back big paychecks I’m not going to blame them for literally getting years of their life and financial freedom back just because Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole.
Again you are ignoring the very important point to this discussion that other companies aren’t more moral than Meta. Find me a software company to work for that doesn’t collect the kind of user info Meta does. Hell, find me a software company that doesn’t use Meta platforms to advertise and track their users.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game, essentially. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, not a broken “free market” of non-union employees making false choices.
Okay buddy, you’re not making very compelling arguments here. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. People will and should hate the players because they’re participating in a dirty game and benefiting from it. You’re free to continue doing it, but don’t expect others to respect it.
"okay buddy you're not making very compelling arguments here" isn't even a basic contribution to the discussion.
You’ve claimed to empathize with workers, but then you’ve lumped them into the same category as an aggregate, in a company with over 70,000 employees. There’s no company with 70,000 employees where every single employee is highly privileged and working there entirely by choice. It’s just not probabilistically possible to be true.
To you, the developers of a Batman game for VR doing the same societal harm as an engagement psychologist just because they happen to work for the same company.
To you, NFL players are responsible for the negative impacts of their employer (e.g., covering up CTE, sports gambling promotion, etc) despite having extremely short careers, highly restricting work requirements like sudden relocation, and nowhere else to work within the same profession for anywhere near the same salary. “Highly paid compared to the average person” isn’t the whole story; it’s quite obvious why professional sports are unionized. And by your logic, everyone down to the lowliest support staff in the organization is complicit.
Under your logic, all doctors in America should quit their job because they’re participating in a dirty game of overpriced healthcare and benefiting from it. To me, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Not even close. Doctors are doing work that benefits society, despite all the system’s flaws. Meta employees are destroying the world while collecting a paycheck. Don’t pretend you don’t see the difference. Working at Meta in 2026 is the same as working at a sarin gas factory.
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.
Working at Facebook means you optimized ruthlessly for $$$$$ only, absolutely nothing else.
Working at Facebook means you are a leetcode monkey and could as well pass other interviews somewhere else and get paid 10% less. But to you, destroying democracy and killing teenager was worth those extra 10%
Working at Facebook means you became a millionaire, even if you joined mid-career a couple years ago because of the stock inflation.
No they are not just trying to feed their family. 99% of them are ruthlessly optimizing to make the most money possible to live in the top 1%, while completely dismissing all the bad Facebook, Meta and Instagram do in the world. No sympathy.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster for minimum wage.
At those income levels, who you work for DOES matter.
Interesting, I found Meta data center jobs in Ohio, Alabama, Illinois outside of Chicagoland, and South Carolina that pay under $100k or barely above it. I didn’t find any that pay $800k.
I found one for a diesel technician in Huntsville, Alabama.
How many options for ethical employment does a diesel technician in Alabama have? Do you think your local franchised truck dealership is more ethical than Meta?
> Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option.
Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors.
You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income.
Exactly. Working at Meta means you studied for 4 weeks for the leetcode interviews. That type of dedication means you could very easily get any job anywhere else.
And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster.
How am I doing that? I'm talking about people who have very valid options elsewhere.
"I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about.
I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff.
And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person".
Interesting, I’ve found job postings at Meta that pay under $100k for data center jobs in Ohio. There are also network engineering jobs in South Carolina that start at $105k.
Do you think people in Bowling Green, OH are flooded with employment options? They can just walk down the street to go work at Google or Apple right?
If I’m in Huntsville, Alabama and I’m a mechanic should I turn down this job because Meta isn’t ethical?
And where should I go work instead in Alabama? For the super duper ethical local car dealership?
I would also point out that many of Meta’s departments like hardware engineering have a much smaller US job pool than software engineering. If you’re in the US and your profession is electrical engineering you you can’t just work remote anywhere or find a bank or insurance company in practically any city in the US to get a job with.
A lot of your job prospects as a hardware engineer are also with the military and defense contractors.
Meta is also one of the few companies that has job postings for PhD researcher type folks that only otherwise employable as professors at universities at relatively low salaries. If you’re a scientist in certain fields it’s a similar situation: try to become a professor, work for the government, or find the rare company like Meta that performs cutting edge research.
It's hilariously fucked up. They pay us O($1M)/yr and treat us like we're working on an assembly line producing Jira story points. And if they don't surveil us carefully enough we might steal a point from them! Or something? Who knows. It's not just Facebook, although what they're doing here is particularly bad, but this ethos permeates the entire American tech industry. With very few exceptions, it's like this at every company.
I work at Meta (though after next Wednesday, maybe not).
I signed the petition.
Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so.
I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal.
Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent.
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In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.
Hard to say, lots of things I guess. One was that I was never good at the current interview triad and needed to practice it a lot. Another was my resume, not impressive to a certain kind of hiring manager and recruiter.
Still another was that I asked blasphemous questions like "will I get to sleep?" and voiced controversial views like "teams focused on quality move faster".
The thing is that you sometimes get quite daft reasons back. One place said "you gave more examples from Pivotal than Shopify". Well yes, I was at Pivotal about thrice as long, that's how time works. I just let it slide.
This sentiment continues endlessly up the chain.
Ultimately, deploying endless adtech, surveillance and data scraping techniques puts you only one or two steps away from a Palantir employee.
People here are making some warranted snarky comments. I ended working at Meta for a few quarters and quit. I will say many employees are so abstracted away that you sort of forget that you work for Facebook to some extent. I also noticed that people really believe that what Facebook works on is a net good. I don't agree and maybe we don't agree, but saying "haha now it's happening to you" isn't the gotcha you think it is to those people if those people believe the products are a net good.
I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid
Yup. I worked for Flock for a bit. During recruitment and onboarding, it was all big on ethics and morality and slippery slopes and responsible data stewardship.
After HR pats you on the back and you met with your team and org? Mask off.
"No, we won't build controls that allow us to block [data sharing that is illegal for agencies in state] for those agencies. That's not our concern. Oh, they want training on how to do that data sharing? Sure."
Garrett would talk regularly at all hands about a very Minority Report-esque future that was driven and made possible by Flock, and he was very clear it wasn't exaggerated for example or aspirational but an organizational goal.
Anyone who stayed there more than a few months knows exactly what they're doing.
The employees were all fine with tracking the entire globe and surveilling on Meta's family of apps, but when that is used against them by tracking their own mouse movements and their computers, it is now all too much?
Why are you still at Meta then? Clearly Zuckerberg does not care and can easily (and will) lay them off.
Instead of signing petitions to enact change, which obviously won't happen because you're under a dictatorship, erode the company from the inside out.
Your platforms are already enshittified, enshittify your workplace, make a game out of making your workplace America's #1 toxic workspace. Quiet Quit, Gaslight your superiors, have AI write all your code & workplace communications, hit accept on all, while sludging up communications & the codebase. Make everything harder to do work while claiming all the productivity gains.
hopefully they push back successfully. even if the most nefarious use is "we're training computer use AI", they should shell out for dedicated labs, not piggyback off the employees. gross.
sidebar but I've never aspired to work for faang and as the years go on it seems more and more like the right choice. vampire culture.
Seriously. This goes for all kinds of analytics. We've normalized surveillance, and if you dare suggest opt-in analytics rather than forced or opt-out you get hit with "but then we won't get enough data to improve our product." That's your problem. Do a UX study, interview people, make a focused effort to make good software. That's how we got the best interface design of all time. Now we're drowning in data and our software is fucking garbage that constantly frustrates and confuses its users. Clearly the issue is not a lack of usage data. It may even do you some good to fly blind if this is your alternative.
Really you should do the lab, though. Take this field seriously and cut out the live A/B testing.
They should be supported, but they did choose to work for a boss whose entire career has followed the path of collecting sensitive personal data from people for personal gain.
Why not protest the mouse tracking they do for the rest of the world? Oh wait because they only give a shit about themselves, that is why they still work for facebook.
What does this mean? I thought Meta has something like 80,000 employees. Meta had about 1,400 H-1B employee petitions last year. Even if we assume that number held for Meta's entire existence, that's less than 25,000 H-1B employees. Less than a third of Meta are presumably immigrants.
Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?
I don’t know why you think Meta accumulated most of its Chinese engineers through H1B. It’s top tier pay so most people move up to them from elsewhere.
If they were serious they would just walk out. They don't like the mouse tracking tech but I'll bet they like that sweet salary and cushy office job. How are the lunch options? I bet they're great. Oh what's that? You work from home? Must be nice.
your objection to them isn't that they work for a -- i think we can all agree -- pretty much despised and evil institution, but that their lives are too good? pick the right battle here.
