Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to take a paycheck from Facebook even in the face of constant and horrific evidence of wholesale ethical violations and negligence.
Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields?
Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. Why should those people spend their time slaving as a subcontractor for yet another TLC/bank trying to squeeze their customers dry at the first occasion while getting 25% the salary and zero benefits? Are those less evil?
What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.
Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.
In my mind, FBs inaction in countries like Burma has caused more direct conflict/hate then most tobacco companies. However, if you look at the oil industry, its harder to draw a line... For example: Is the oil industry responsible for the bombing of Irak? The Government gave different reasons, but looking at current evidence for example, it just looks like pipeline protection.
So what i wanted to get at is that when a company gets to a certain size, it gets harder to separate government/ company involvement. At that point we need to look at how the company acts, and in this case, especially FBs, they are doing a horrible job (IMO) at actually standing up for their users, instead choosing to protect their business interests.
(While this is their supposed purpose as a company, there exists people like myself, who believe the current model of stock sponsored companies are the wrong way to do business).
Just a FYI: This is more a rant then anything, Im tired of the BS that these huge companies are producing and selling as the solution to humanities issues. Personally i hope that this current system fails for something better, however, personally i have not thought up anything much better atm.