No, not at all. Their positive reputation was in many ways unearned, and it's a good thing to be glad that their own actions and attitudes are finally catching up with them.
I hate that this has happened. The Bay Area used to be a place where working for the big, shiny company that makes your parents happy wasn't prestigious. It was safe. But taking a risk and starting something new was admired. The present state of affairs reminds me of Wall Street.
So, yes, I believe they are trying to corner the market on the best programmers.
I know lots of people who feel they get and have got tremendous practical benefit from Facebook. It isn't "addictive" unless you use that term to mean anything some people make that other people enjoy.
Trusting these entities based on their noble intentions today makes no sense to me if there's no legal agreement or regulation to restrain them tomorrow, when they get desperate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386
"Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being."
Naturally, even if this study is accurate it isn't definitive; the causation could go in the other direction, that the unhappy use Facebook more often than the contented. But it's still quite suggestive.
I saw this study referenced from this article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...
Along with React, GraphQL and a bunch of other technologies with various degrees of popularity https://opensource.fb.com
Along with various startups building around the projects incubated at Facebook - Asana, Interana, Phacility, Qubole, etc.
The tech industry, despite its shortcomings, is vastly superior to Wall Street in that regard. It's still a meritocracy above all else.
Plenty of smart people break into tech after doing something else for a few years. If you want to go into investment banking, you better come from a consulting or have already been working in finance. Your only last bastion of hope is to get an MBA and then join the rat race.
e.g https://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state-of-49390473/29-29Becau...
Outside the tech community, probably Amazon, Microsoft, and Instagram (most people don't know Facebook owns Instagram).
Where B is the sum of the set consisting of:
-Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.
-Disinformation assisting genocide in Myanmar.
-Use correlating strongly with poor mental health
-Manipulating behaviour to encourage poor attention spans for the sake of ad-clicking
-Constantly violating basic standards of privacy
-(I could go on..)
Oh wait, excuse my arithmetic. I forgot to add another JS framework like Relay to the LHS of the equation, that makes it a net positive from Facebook! :D
You don't think those technologies could have been developed by people at ethical companies, or even by the same people at ethical companies?
It is a problem inherent in the structure of most social media companies. And Facebook is the most significant social media company, and thus contributor to the problem.
Also, a bunch of recruiting venues exploited by Facebook are not that accessible to smaller startups.
E.g. one of the top previous employers for Facebook employees was Google (or some other outfit within Alphabet group, like YouTube). Most likely those people would've stayed at Google.
Another hiring source was university recruiting, which involves participating at job fairs at various universities, exhaustive days of back-to-back interviews, flying candidates for on-campus interviews, and eventually covering relocation costs (and potentially visas and immigration paperwork) for someone moving from Pittsburgh, Waterloo or Romania.
Would a smaller startup have the financial oomph to run a similar recruiting pipeline?
Blaming facebook for "breaking" democracy in the US and the UK is ridiculous. I can't understand how this can continue being a claim remotely considered valid. I agree (or may agree, at least in part) on some of the other points, but not on this.
Claiming that Trump won just because of the russians putting ads on facebook is at least naive - and ignores the fears/actual issues a very big* part of the US population experience daily. Isn't failing public schooling a problem there also? Does that give us citizen more or less prepared to actually participate in democracy?
Politicians (of all sides) in the UK have accused the EU of being the root of all evil since they "joined", again and again and again: you lost your job? Blame the EU! We can't cut taxes? Blame the EU! You really want to blame facebook and NOT the politicians themselves because people voted for brexit?
If the Russians tried to manipulate (and for sure they did, oh gosh, I'm pretty sure the US and the EU states never do - or did - anything to manipulate elections abroad! Evil Putin, why you do this to us? :cry:) we rolled out the red carpet for them!
Democracy was broken because actual journalists did not do their job. Stop doing what they (may) want you to do, using social media as a scapegoat for their own (willing, sometimes, for sure, at least if you read what Chomsky has to say) MASSIVE failure of being the "champions of truth" they claim (and blindly believe - I worked on somewhat close contact with them for years, I've seen that) to be.
There's also financial support for building a community around improving the tech, by encouraging outside contributions via meetups, conferences, social events, better technical documentation, etc.
At smaller scale startup an engineer is surely welcome to work on his skunkworks project, but justifying expensive large-scale architectural undertakings on company's dime is problematic. Especially if a quicker fix is available and buys the company a chance to kick the problem down the road.
With that said, it's not impossible to build a major popular piece of technology within a small company (Joyent and Node.js being a good example), it's just harder.
This discussion is mostly irrelevant to the fact that this particular company is completely reckless and unethical. The technology they accidentally produce while building a dystopia to make people click on ads[1] does not justify anything.
Are you saying the latter two don't do that?
They may pay more, but they collude to make sure people couldn't leave without going far outside the bay. That's a monopolistic trait.
I agree they weren't putting a gun to people's heads but they were making the environment less available.