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.
The parent poster is calling on them to do just this with regard to Facebook.
There is nothing wrong with that call, and it doesn’t impugn your friends unless they ultimately fail to re-evaluate the company.
What about those who argued for React to move to a more reasonable license? What about those who pushed for open sourcing code and hardware in the first place?
Companies at the 25k+ employee size are complex, often internally-disagreeing enterprises. Code may be pure, but resource allocation (programmer time) is political.
Of the recent Facebook news (e.g. shadow profile and 2FA phone numbers being used for ad targeting)... "we had bugs in our code" is by far the least ethically problematic.
I think that is clearly a fallacy.
Nobody is arguing that every individual within Facebook is an unethical person.
The argument is that the overall project is unethical and the ethical people within it should take that possibility seriously.
For more philosophical background on this idea:
And is ridiculous, for anyone who's worked in the real world.
We all make ethical compromises, and have worked for companies that made ethical decisions we didn't agree with.
That was the crux of the Nuremberg Trials: what portion of an endeavor's ethical decisions can be assigned to an individual.
The answer was "more than none, but less than all."
Can you quote anything at all from this particular thread that supports this statement?
It’s clearly the position you are trying to refute, but I think it’s a straw man.
That said, at least you are in the domain of agreeing that working for Facebook is an ethical compromise:
“We all make ethical compromises, and have worked for companies that made ethical decisions we didn't agree with.”
Once again, your position seems to be to try to erase the distinction between Facebook and any other company. The Nuremberg trials demonstrate that this position is not tenable - we don’t erase the distinction between the Nazis and any other government.
The argument here is that by now there is enough evidence that this compromise is too much, and that ethical people who work at Facebook should consider that.
Being an ethical person doesn’t imply some kind of mythical ethical purity. It implies that you care about ethics.
The original parent comment of this thread...
> Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again.
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.
As to your comment...
> The argument here is that by now there is enough evidence that this compromise is too much, and that ethical people who work at Facebook should consider that.
The argument in this thread is not that people who work at Facebook should "consider" that, but rather that anyone who continues to work at Facebook is no longer ethical.
It's not a straw man if the very first comment proposed exactly that.
Which is a sort of absolutism that I'm taking issue with. I'm sure there are parts of Facebook that are wretched hives of scum and villainy. I'm sure there are parts that would make my and your employer look terrible, ethically comparatively.
So maybe we should use a bit finer brush when tarring people. That seems like a fairly modest proposal to me.