I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
The workers would arm up with shotguns, rifles, Molotov cocktails. They'd then go to the bosses' house and have a "chat". If they didn't listen, they'd have their house shot up or burned to the ground.
It was the very bosses that hired Pinkerton's to go murder the union leaders as well.
Some of the railroad unionization got so bloody and violent that even the US military got in on the action, in favor of companies.
In the end, we got the NLRB and a whole host of rights. The violence did indeed work, but saying that is somehow breaking unforgivable speech.
And if violence isnt up to these meta engineers, perhaps they should look into CIA's own simple sabotage field manual techniques.
This appears to be a common philosophy. We all know it's foul, and then we cover up the smell with this thin justification and move on.
But ya, this seems to be commonly accepted already
And will those help them get where they think they want to go?
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.
Do you think your small act of defiance has a bigger impact on you, or on the company? Now imagine you have a family at home that depends on your income and do the math again.
We are collectively incapacitated by the soft glow of our smartphones. This was intentional. This community made these devices. This community should bear the brunt of the backlash. And likewise, the engineers at Facebook should be actively surveilled for the rest of their days as punishment.
> why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
I don't know why, but it's endemic. You have ICE, quite literally purchasing your surveillance data so they can sweep people off the streets. But getting people to delete some apps? It's effectively impossible. However you feel about the ICE issue, and future government program could deem you the enemy. And your data is out there just waiting to be weaponized against you. But will people actually do anything about it? Delete their apps? Stop using a smartphone? Write their congressman? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. They will complain online a bit and otherwise change _no_ behavior. The only positive movement I've seen in this regard is people moving away from flock. Otherwise, people are tripping over themselves to allow surveillance into their lives.
Let Meta and its officials feel the consequences of their actions.
Some of it is intentional. A lot of it is slow creep (“ah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol I’ve always wanted!”). While you’re doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - “oh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..”). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now you’ve landed yourself with new loans and obligations (more expensive car = higher maintenance cost, same with house, etc - higher expectation all around, keeping up with Joneses, charity events, …).
Getting out of all that is much more difficult than overcoming your own greed and discomfort - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family are pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). For some it can be leaving useful social obligations - you lose your social circle if you downgrade (may have to move further away, no more club or association memberships).
The only real remedy is to not let your expenditure go up when you get a raise. But it’s less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc. All in all, odds are not in an average Meta employees favour no matter what they might personally think/feel.
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.
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.
I don't doubt there are plenty at Meta who, if not nearing retirement age, might have been harboring some desire to take some time off to hike the Big Three hiking trails in the U.S. Or perhaps write a novel.
Seriously.
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?
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.
> Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads
> helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
… If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
The point I'm making is, there is a difference between what contract explicitly says, and what is implicitly understood due to practical limitations of the real world we live in. When the real world changes so does the effective implementation of contracts, even though the contracts themselves don't change. The problem is, by the time the world has changed against your favor, you might not have the power to demand an adjustment to the already signed contract.
The equipment is worth thousands of dollars and the company has a fiduciary responsibility to track their assets. Of course they are going to install spyware on their equipment and make it crystal clear that the employee has no expectation of privacy while using it.
I assumed this happens on any employer machine anyway. If not specific mouse movement and keystrokes then file access and connected devices. I honestly don't understand the outrage.
> .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
And Related:
Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
Bingo. Tale as old as time. The elites have always stayed in power by paying half the poor people to oppress the other half for them. And if you're thinking about the French revolution as a counter example, then I need to remind you that the wealthy elites didn't lose their heads there, the monarchy did, the rich people got away just fine.
Today the elites got the peasantry to be arguing whether something is "woke" or DEI, and to riot and burn down cities whenever a repeat felon gets killed by police, while the Epstein criminals get away with it while laughing all the way to the bank and nobody rioting.
> It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics
Nothing to do with globalism here. It's still exclusively up to US citizens to implement their destruction. US national security and surveillance tech isn't outsourced to India for them to worry about labor competition from abroad.
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
OK, and so what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what? Evil doesn't do gender discrimination.
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Most of those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files in ambiguous terms, which isn't enough of strong evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to slam dunk jail them on the spot like Maxwell.
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.
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
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.
Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.
No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
This is only a proposition if you can afford 1 day/week financially.
Edit: goes without saying, maybe, but make participation mandatory.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Labor unions.
Techies believed they didn't need unions because their compensation is high, and "meritocracy" yadda yadda. But unions were never just about compensation. Crucially, they also collectively negotiate working conditions.
You quitting your job is not necessarily much of a threat to your employer. But a union going on strike, effectively everyone quitting simlultaneously, is a major threat.
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.
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
Happy so say the exact same thing to their face for what it’s worth. There isn’t anything complicated here, if you choose to work for a company known for doing bad things you’re obviously taking part of the responsibility.
If people aren’t willing to leave when things are still very comfortable for them, because they might have to accept a lower salary for not working for EvilCorp, that sets a pretty bad precedent for leaving when things are even worse. You can rationalize, but that doesn’t remove the responsibility
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.
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.