> Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
You think Google is the single company out there who is willing to employ you? How come?
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
To be clear, I have no beef with Google the company and wouldn't mind working there again if it weren't in the ads division. After two years I transferred to the Chrome org and greatly enjoyed the work there. I was proud to develop something that is used the world over, it's open source, and I got to optimize tight code and tune for performance. (Yes, Chrome is fast, I don't understand the haters!) If I had just quit Google immediately, this wouldn't have happened and I would've missed out on a great experience.
Did you think I would have applied there, taken a job, worked for three weeks, and then realized I'm morally opposed to the concept of working at Google entirely?
I don't know what to think anymore, seemingly all everyone else thinks about is money, I guess that's ok. Take care, hope you have a nice day regardless.
The great thing about open source is that you can fork it for free. If you don't like the direction Chrome is evolving, you can make a better one tomorrow.
You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
> You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
Nothing to do with vesting. I didn't want to leave Google, I wanted to leave ads, and I did. I got into Chrome org and was happy that my patience paid off
Many developers want to understand user behavior without the heavy baggage of ad-tech tracking. What do you think of self-hosted tools (like UXWizz) to track qualitative and quantitative data, but without having the problem of web-wide surveillance that GA provides?
Or do you think all analytics are evil? What did you think the platform was actually doing when you decided to join?
Sure, but you could say that about anything. If you're American, then your labour is paying for concentration camps no matter where you work. In a company of 100k+ people, responsibility is diluted.
The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.