Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being a user. Just for personal interest.
Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
No, it looks good on your resume. The type of clown who would get upset at you working for Facebook is not someone you want to work for anyway so consider that another plus.
Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will never face up to the fact that the companies they work for and buy from are neck deep in politics, consumerism, advertising, influencing, the war industry, corruption, greed, etc., too.
These people aren't nearly so brave or numerous in the real world as they would have you believe though. If you personally feel okay working for a company then I wouldn't bother worrying about the opinion of hypocrites.
I'm talking about the vast majority who are in fact hypocrites and are very happy to rile up hatred and anger towards others while never reflecting on their own behavior and situations.
I do know one or two people who think and care very deeply about this stuff and they (to some degree) put their money where their mouth is by attempting to avoid and not support these things they disagree with. They are typically the last to point their finger at others.
I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience: for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst, neutral.
I'll match your anecdote with mine. I'm an engineering leader at a small company that has worked at FAANG. I have personal mixed feelings about working at FB, but it's a very strong positive signal about someone's engineering ability (and comp expectations lol). Send any good coders you toss out because they worked at FB my way!!
I’ll match your anecdote with mine. I’ve been everything from CTO to lead engineer. I’ve made sure we always pay well above average for every role because I’d rather have one exceptional engineer than 10 regular ones.
FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
I would like to know this as well. Anyone willing to write off literally millions of engineers because they happened to work at some huge companies is someone worth avoiding.
It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated.
> because they happened to work at some huge companies
Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so.
Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash” now and get to choose who I hire. Turns out I’m not a fan of the people who sold out.
> Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations
FAANG are not incredibly evil corporations.
They are average evil, and incredibly successful.
If you are CTO at another company and you think your company is less evil, it's probably just less successful and you’re blinded to its evil by your vested interest in changing the “less successful” part.
> but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.
You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
What about Microsoft? Do their employees get a pass because the company wasn’t included in Jim Cramer’s acronym? It seems odd to single Cramer’s stock picks out specifically. What about Philip Morris ex-employees? Palantir? HSBC or any other evil investment bank? I think those three have done far more evil, but you’ll consider their alumni because they are not specifically “FAANG”? So odd to single out five specific companies that are only associated with each other because a TV personality made an acronym out of them.
There is plenty of evil. FAANG has no lock on it. Microsoft, Oracle, ransom gangs, Goldman Sachs. Wanting to get out of them ought to be a mark in one's favor.
I personally wouldn’t hold it against someone for working at FB. Life and people are way more complicated (or not complicated, for that matter) than what you’ve reduced it down to. For one thing, consider that just because you exclude people who worked at FAANG, you’re not actually accounting for all the other thousand ways people can behave immorally or amorally. Screening out FAANG employees doesn’t actually get you very far in this regard. So it just looks like you’re harping on this one thing. Do you screen candidates who you think associate with politics you think are immoral? Or who have worked at tobacco companies? Etc.
That said I appreciate your attitude here. These companies are civilizationally damaging. It’s good to keep repeating that. I’m just not sure your approach makes sense.
So how do you hire the best people? Seems like most employers focus on name-brand resumes and leetcode. I've never met anyone who does an actual substantial interview.
What kind of mistakes did you make, what kind of bad hires did you have? I'm curious what kind of flaws would correlate with having worked for a big company before.
If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon, never buy any foreign electronics because they're made with child labor, work for a non profit that doesn't shovel money away from those who produce it into the hands of shareholders that control the public policy allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it, take the bus instead of owning a car, and boycotting cable and internet companies. We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed. The workers aren't the evil, it's the people who call the shots and make the investments. If Jeff Bezos wants to go to space, he's going to space whether you help or not, so might as well take what you can get.
> If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon
I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this regard.
> allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it,
I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these corps should have faced serious jail time for C8 contamination.
> We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed.
I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who did not work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad thing?
CTO and lead engineer of what size companies? How big was the tree of reports under you? What is the band of your total compensation recently? $100-200k? $500-1000k?
Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
You're not going to dox yourself with compensation bands or something more specific than 400-1500. There are way too many people like that, and comp is not very public info.
Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?
There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad.
Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.
“ FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.”
I literally know a couple of unicorn founders in my personal life. They don’t think that. You’re full of shit and are probably a shit leader (if you’re not bluffing) if you make categorically false statements with such conviction (much like the former president).
What? I don’t know what you wrote. However all of your attention seeking and grand standing does appear you are seeking something from others and are coping hard to have yourself believe you are not a sell out like every one else. Why you have to frame things so negatively is beyond me. I would not do so myself.
in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
Taking you at your word that you do this, I'm very glad I don't work with you. I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management, and then punishes them for wanting to leave that same management. Seems pretty biblical, in the original sin sense.
The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?
> I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management
That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working there in the last couple of years? You might just be an employee but you’re willfully helping well-known behaviors.
This isn’t like some revelation of fraud that employees don’t know about. Countless articles have been written about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the crosshairs of national politicians several times.
At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette company.
I don't disagree with this, and I've never worked at MAGMA for these reasons, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't incredibly tempted. As an experienced dev (possibly not a great one though), I'm struggling to make ends meet with one dependent. Being able to eat out without having to update a spreadsheet to see what other things we're not going to be able to afford is a pretty big draw.
And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
Make sure you’re not violating your company’s guidelines. If I were at a company and I knew of signals based on subjective morality being used for filtering, I’d summarily fire the offending employee.
Clicked "favorite", because I have a feeling that a year later I'll be like "Dammit, what was that comment that made me think 'Now this is peak HN cringe'? Can't find it again..."
Not sure if you're making things up, but I really like your attitude. The world only moves forward because of people with principles, not because of people who make 'tough compromises'
I waited a while to reply to you, because the thread got overwhelmed with some pretty over the top opinions.
When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals:
- Is your resume even vaguely coherent
- Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done
- Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points
- If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late?
I don't think anyone is being discarded just for working at Facebook, but if you're borderline in any of these other categories, working for a long time at Facebook is certainly a negative factor for getting a call back.
I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty rare.
> I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in
Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck.
Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.
They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
I mean, if you've been brainwormed by the idea that FAANG (what, literally all of them?) are _strongly net negative_ compared to the most realistic counterfactual that would spring up in their absence, and not only that, but that engineers working there are therefore morally tainted, then sure.
But no, I don't work for FAANG. I could say the same about any of my previous places of employment, none of which were even tech companies (unlike the current place).
But let's put all that aside - how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation? Are you trying to establish an equilibrium where it becomes more costly in expectation to join one of those companies, because it might be harder to find another job afterwards? Good luck, I guess! I don't expect you'll move the needle much, especially given that there'll be quite a few people actively working against efforts like that.
> how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation?
It massively improves the situation. The kinds of people who work for these companies now are morally bankrupt. Everyone knows the score going in. They’re smart enough to pass l33t code but dumb enough to not make their own startups.
These are not the kinds of people you build groundbreaking companies with, they’re opportunistic parasites you’d do well to avoid.
Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making.
I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time.
It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
It’s an entirely rational decision. The kinds of people who take a fat salary from FAANG are the exact kinds of people I want to keep out of my companies at all costs.
They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any).
Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice.
The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values.
In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal.
Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche.
I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level.
I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad.
I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.
> If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any).
Not actually true for early career SWEs, especially those that switched from a non-CS field. Because FAANG relies so much on coding puzzles, they are often the best option for someone that is self-taught without formal training. Since they often have a large recruiting pipeline, they are often the easiest places to get interviews without any connections, too.
I would also add that their ability to sponsor H1Bs is unmatched.
> The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values.
It's hilarious reading these anonymous hiring managers discussing how they'd hypothetically snub people like Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Andrew Morton, James Gosling or John Carmack for lack of morals and values.
All I can say is, the more I gain life experience, the less judgmental I get of other people and the less I believe in the concept of "good" people and "bad" people.
Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context you're interacting in and your own predispositions that brings out one or the other.
No I wouldn’t. I’d feel gross being so judegemental and thinking so highly and self righteously about myself. I highly doubt the work your company does is blessing the earth with immense positivity.
I highly doubt, just based on sheer numbers and basic data, that the people working at your company are amazing humble people who care so much about the world. I doubt they are concerned with the homeless population and other disenfranchised groups. Vs in your case being all gung ho about the evils of FAANG that you are so above. The number of people who are against the current status quo enough and willing to sacrifice the comforts of their lives to fix the issue are so small. It’s not even a bad thing. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s much easier to point to a couple of big companies and say how evil they are and any one working for them.
> No I wouldn’t. I’d feel gross being so judegemental and thinking so highly and self righteously about myself.
Why is applying realistic negative values to behavior such as willful FAANG employment “judgmental”
You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
I didn’t say I have some kind of employee utopia, but we build real things that help real people and honestly do make the world a better more honest place.
Of course we have no way of knowing what you or your company does. You believe you make the world a better more honest place. Funny how often self righteous people believe that. I’d be willing to bet there will be plenty of people who have in my opinion more consistent views and principles on the problems with the current status quo and capitalism that would easily find your business not as amazing as you claim.
> You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
Almost all of this can be tuned up a bit and be used against you. Unless you’re an incredible rarity that is doing amazing selfless work. I highly, highly doubt it.
It is much easier to point to easy “bad guys” and delude one self of one’s own work not being such great stuff either. Beyond that. This is a general moral stance. I’m sure if one was to compare you overall life, principles, morals, and a good hearted person working for a FAANG, your life wouldn’t be the one coming out ahead.
At least most humbler people can see “selling out” is not binary. You have sold out too. We all have.
—
Just realized. It appears you or whomever owns the business and companies. It is so incredibly easy to point to how self serving and it being the definition of selling out to gain more from the effort of others without doing equal amounts of work and effort. And no I’m not a socialist.
Some hiring managers will care about your moral compass and your motivations more than others. (This isn’t a moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes of hiring managers that I’ve seen.)
They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
> Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.
After reading your many comments in this thread, I honestly hope you *did* come across my resume and silently "disqualify" me. Sounds like it saved me from a miserable job working for a toxic narcissist of a manager.
You seem to have an enormous chip on your shoulder towards FAANG companies. Did you work for one and fail spectacularly, or did you just get rejected a bunch of times?
I really wish that people who let strong political opinions bleed into their professional careers would somehow flag that on their resumes, so I could likewise avoid them.
I apologize, "he" was for most of American English's history the default pronoun when gender was not known. I'm still working on using "they" instead, but I occasionally slip up.
Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively double the pool of people your throwaway comes from, adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style sample, and on another topic, probably does more to identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.
Unpopular opinion: Facebook is widely disliked by the loudest voices in the room (for good reason), but the vast majority of people still just treat it like a fancy forum. It's not going to stain your CV.
Plus, Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-company especially now that's a formal distinction. I imagine it's still relatively cool to work on Instagram, for example.
I’m firm, firm in my belief that the people who have chosen of their own free will to work for FAANG have made moral compromises that disqualify them from my employment.
I don’t get how this is “sanctimonious”.
These people have made some absolutely terrible life choices, and alienation is a part of the consequence package that comes with those life choices.
Why FAANG specifically? For instance, how does Apple fail ethically, in your view, compared to the others? Are there any other companies- Microsoft, Uber, Twitter and so forth you would also have a problem with?
Hi, I’ve worked for two of FAANG, it’s super duper easy to work outside of SV.
The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate candidates based on whatever perception you have about who they are instead of trying to understand who they are.
I’m sure you don’t care, sounds like it’s working for you, so in any event congrats on finding what makes you happy!
I firmly believe that actions speak louder than words. People will say all kinds of things to project an impression, and then you see what they actually do or did, and sometimes it's quite surprising with the inconsistency.
Shall we also start making moral judgements about the city or country you live/lived in? The products you choose to purchase? The schools you chose to attend? The political party you choose to support? The religion you are or aren’t a part of? The sports teams you support?
Shall we look down on NASA engineers because it’s part of the US government and pulls heavily from the US military/has overlap with the intelligence services/some of its top secret projects maybe do things I’m morally opposed about?
This kind of guilt by association is pretty bad and that’s the pushback you’re seeing in this thread. Humans are social animals. No social group will be without it’s flaw and larger groups have more and larger problems. This same line of reasoning is what fuels religious and political persecution. It’s barely acceptable in sports but that’s because it’s mostly harmless and in good fun until you hit riot levels of idiocy. Heck, the big tech companies are massive. They have so many individual teams that do totally unrelated stuff to the things you might have issues with.
As for the bitterness someone else noted, it’s not that you stated your values. You went further and made the claim that these engineers would have trouble finding jobs outside of SV because of the association. That part is blatantly false on its face. They may have trouble because of niche skills that aren’t relevant elsewhere because the scale doesn’t exist elsewhere. Are there some employers who won’t hire us because of our association with some company? Sure. So? I’ll not choose companies for myriad of arbitrary reasons too. That doesn’t mean I’ll struggle to find a job overall.
As an aside, I find it a bit telling that you lump Netflix into it and then your primary complaint about the company was that they canceled a show you are attached to. That’s not even about morals and is fairly arbitrary. This is why there’s feedback that it looks like you’re salty about something unrelated and note you’ve attached a larger reason behind it based on morals.
So I keep seeing things about Netflix so I felt I might comment. Netflix is in a profoundly evil field. They work to manipulate people through media. They are not the only company, of course, but they are egregious.
For example, Netflix infamously pulled Hasan Minhaj’s episode on Saudi Arabia from Saudi Arabian Netflix in exchange for allowing Orange is the New Black to stay. They want to, for lack of better words, morally corrupt societies and they do not care if that means more injustice and political suppression.
Their leadership has stated one of their intentions was to promote things from western culture in other countries in order to change the culture and society there. This is blatantly cultural imperialism and an extension of US soft power projection.
The media has that addictive quality of captivating masses. I see Netflix as like a tobacco or Juul company — profoundly damaging for the groups of people they seek to captivate. And maybe a comparison to an oil company is apt; Netflix certainly pollutes in terms of the minds and behaviors of people. Time and focus and cognition spent watching their shows pushed by their algorithms entrenches their position in a world where they do not care for their negative externalities.
Netflix are accused every day of the exact opposite, i.e. "pushing social justice narratives". They're a media company caught up in some nonsense internet culture war, don't read too much into it.
I assume you live in the United States. By your logic, you are complicit with the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of peoples from Africa then.
> Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF that, but you won’t put your money where your mouth is.
Some big companies are also big FOSS contributors. Some people even join these companies to do mostly FOSS (like Golang, AOSP, React, VSC). So if there's a contradiction there, I don't think it's that obvious for everyone.
> I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes
Actually this might be a good strategy if you have too many applicants and you pay closer to the median of the market rather than the top 10%, since such applicants are less likely to accept your offer. So better stop the process early.
I would have more respect for this comment (and your entire crusade in this thread) if you were complaining about Facebook for political reasons. I would disagree with you, but, I couuld understand your perspective.
But, all FAANG, really? What business are you in that's so noble by comparison?
Or the job is grueling and requires more time commitment/energy. Or it’s a very niche technical problem. Or the person has an outsized impact on the company in other ways like bringing prestige and making it easier to hire more people.
There’s lots of reasons people get paid large sums.
What do I have to be salty about? I’m honestly a very happy person.
I’ve found some incredible people that fulfill me, and that’s freed me.
I used to be afraid of what people would think if I said what I felt. Now I can say what I believe with little consequence and to be honest? Not going back.
I think it's worth reflecting on the fact that you took time out of your happy life to leave your original comment, which declared that you will use whatever small amount of professional power you have to enforce your personal grudge against a small set of companies you hate by refusing to hire their former workers.
Edit: Just realized you've left like 20 comments on this thread that are all grinding the same axe.
Hey. I've never worked for a FAANG, but I am considering joining Facebook. They way I see it, Facebook is hugely impactful and there is real work to do there, ex: flagging disinformation, flagging external government influences, etc. It's challenging and extremely valuable work.
If everyone who works at Facebook is blacklisted by people like you, it would just make the company a worse influence on the world because there would be noone left there to make it better. So I would prefer if good people had the freedom to try to make an impact according to their will without fear that people such as yourself will then work hard to tarnish their reputations. Thanks!
I don't know how informative my opinion is, but I'll do my best to lay it out.
Some background:
I'm quite pro-privacy. I go to great extents to marginalize cloud services in my life. I pay for services and am, by default, skeptical of free services. I consider this core to my ethos as a person. I was raised in a decently religious household, but went to a religious school, every day, for over a decade - I'm not a fan of "morals".
I'm also a senior engineer who does most of our hiring filtering for a fairly large firm. I will interview and hire Facebookers, Googlers, Amazonians etc. They're skilled, usually in singular domains, and passionate people - thus useful. Do I agree with their ethical compasses or excuses they've made for such work as a person? Absolutely not. However, their life is not my life, and I'm sure there's judgements they could equally pass on to me about my life and experiences if I were so brazen to (publicly) pass my judgement on to them.
There's some inevitable questions that come with my view:
How do you trust them given the orientation of their ethical compass? Simple. My company (and team!) has our own ethical frameworks and principles. If they don't abide by them my judgement isn't needed - the company will terminate them.
How do you listen to talk about ethics or morals from them? I don't. The great thing about ethical frameworks is they're usually set by people far above me who have a much higher view of the landscape than I do. Morals are a cathartic replacement for ethical frameworks when someone needs to feel good about themselves; thus they're pretty irrelevant when ethical frameworks are abound.
> Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
Among all your potential future interviewers, the percentage of those who would judge you negatively for a Facebook work experience is vanishingly small - be mindful of the HN echo chamber. Besides, you probably don't want to work in those places anyway. (Not that it's necessarily bad to hate Facebook, but if your manager can't separate their political belief from reviewing candidates, would you want to work there?)
Yes absolutely go work at Meta. The person in the post had worked there for ten years; they’re likely a millionaire.
It’s very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven’t done so yet, it will keep your motivation up.
I think while you can hit an interviewer with a strong dislike of the FB and everything it means, including the people who work there, it is probably a rare thing. I guess a slightly more likely case is for your resume to get rejected as "we cannot match their FAANG salary, no point in an interview", but I would not worry about it too much.
Thats a good point. I've definitely heard of that but haven't thought about it in a while. You're right of course, its nothing to worry about. I'd be lucky to get to that point.
> Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview.
My thoughts? Screw ‘em. They aren’t worth your skill set. I’m not joking, fuck these people. The paycheck they give you won’t make you happy, what will however is not working for these scumbags.
I know a bunch of highly skilled people who would never have trouble finding work at other companies who say they love working at Facebook. I also know a lot of people who use it and think it's a great tool for keeping in touch and communicating with friends and family and the social, hobby, interest and volunteer groups they're in.
I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the things it does very much, but they aren't the devil. I could say the same about probably most corporations. Where do you work that's pure as the driven snow?
I view ad targeting as good for the world: they help make my life better by aiming me at products and services relevant to my interests and needs, sometimes when I didn't even know such a thing existed. It saves poor reinvention of the wheel in so many cases.
And FB-the-social-network is also great in theory: groups help you make friends and go deep into very niche interests. Without it, I would be a more normal, less interesting person. Now, with the join of a group, you can immerse yourself in a hobby even if absolutely nobody in a hundred miles shares that interest. It helps people go deeper on what they care about, thus becoming 'weirder' or a more fulfilled version of themselves. And helps people get ads they care about.
> I view ad targeting as good for the world: they help make my life better by aiming me at products and services relevant to my interests and needs, sometimes when I didn't even know such a thing existed. It saves poor reinvention of the wheel in so many cases.
Let me give you another point of view:
Ads benefit the already wealthy corporations above small businesses that cannot pay billions for ads and add another lay on to inequality.
"Reinventing the wheel" is sometimes necessary for innovation, often called disrupting the market.
Also, I believe that endless consumerism is actually killing the planet and ads (no only banner ads but also product placements) play a huge part in making people feel insecure and less worthy just because they don't have the newest gadget.
In case you weren't aware, the targeting tools provided by Google and Facebook have actually rebalanced the advertising market back towards smaller businesses.
I kinda agree on the consumerism thing, but that's more a reflection of our society than evil genius advertisers.
> "Most corporations" don't do global surveillance on the scale Facebook does. It's that simple.
It's never that simple.
What corporations are okay to work for, in this unidimensional worldview? Exxon Mobil? Philip Morris? Pfizer? Dupont? Boeing? Nestle? BHP? Fox News? Volkswagen? Nike? HSBC? Is it okay if your employer's owners or executives have appeared in the panama papers? Are or have been on the boards of FAANG companies or own stock in those companies? Are you allowed to buy Google or Apple products and use their services?
What about companies that collect and trade on the personal information and habits they collect about their customers, just not on the scale of Facebook or Google? Are they okay? Even if they would like to be able to sell more personal information but don't presently have the means to would that be okay?
So where do you work? What products and services do you buy?
Everybody decides where to draw their own line. For some it's Raytheon or Bayer or Boeing, for some it's HSBC, for some it's Facebook. Doesn't matter, you can't invalidate a person's moral compass with whataboutism. There are plenty of small and medium businesses that aren't terrible.
I think this has to go both ways, many in this thread use phrases like "lack of morals" implying One True Morality scale, presumably one where surveillance capitalism is.. most evil?
I'd personally love to know what everyone actually works on. In real life I know people who work on guided missiles and ICBM-adjacent tech who manage to sleep well at night.
I wasn't invalidating it any more than they were invalidating my opinion that facebook isn't the devil with their response to telling me that is the dealbreaker. "It's that simple".
Note this wasn't the poster I initially asked the question of. It was someone else just coming in and trying to tell me "it's that simple". My reply was not whataboutism, it was explaining why it's not "that simple".
And it wasn't a rhetorical question, I really want to know, from someone who does have this very simple "line", whether it's okay to use Apple or Google or Facebook services or products, whether it's okay to work for companies whose owners or executives own stock? Whether it's okay to vote for politicians who take money from them or who themselves own the stock?
This isn't whataboutism, it is exploring the consequences of this moral position.
I know a bunch of people who work at FB. They explain that Zuck would love to be as evil as Google or Microsoft, but is just nowhere near their league.
Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China, but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin does rabble rousers in a year.
Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would like to be.
> I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the things it does very much, but they aren't the devil.
What about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News? Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
Maybe Zuck isn't the devil. But he sure as hell is irresponsible at being the CEO of Facebook. If you can't tame the scale of your operation then you shouldn't be that size to begin with. The collateral damage is too significant.
> pure as the driven snow
There are degrees. There are literally thousands of places that are not Fox News, Exxon, Nestle, or Facebook. Especially in the tech world. You can't toss your resume out on the street in Silicon Valley without it landing in the lap of a recruiter. I'd start with "didn't contribute to genocide" or "didn't think a psyops campaign on our users was okay" is a good place to start. I've certainly never worked at such a place.
I don't think he's the devil either. I do know the nature of their game though. It's to divide people. They're doing a great job of it.
> Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
I do quite a lot of screening/hiring. I’m personally very critical of Meta the company but have no issues hiring people who’ve worked there. The malaise in Meta is obviously a product of its top leadership not the engineering people
I would probably hesitate if someone was in a position of leadership at Meta in the past few years, had been leadership for a long time, or did their formative engineering years at Meta. I’d want to question to ensure they’ll actually push back against unethical suggestions by product people if they suggest things without knowing that those features might rely on something unethical like scraping personal data.
If you can stomach it, you should absolutely do it. Having one of the tech giants on your resume has definitely been a strong positive in my experience and you can't beat the comp.
And they won't mention the company they work for, so even if you want to go for the one in existence that does you'll never find it.
Or maybe there is no such company, and we're just being trolled.
Sure. What I mean by top-tier pay is essentially paying well above average to fewer, higher quality people.
I’d rather have 2-3 expert engineers making 2x pay than 10 mediocre engineers making 1x pay.
There is a sweet spot where you can scale with one expert in each domain, and if that “expert” is well compensated they can replace an entire engineering dept.
I was previously at the top of the salary band for Sr. Software Engineer at a decent big company, making 1.7-2x mediocre engineers I know elsewhere. Joining FB, my total comp (400kish) is an ample 5x mediocre in my area, and I hear thats normal across FAANGs.
I know 2x is still ridiculously high, even 1x is a very reasonable amount to live on, but 2x doesn't compare to 5x.
Maybe you live in a place where developers have the privilege of being able to pick the right employer among thousands.
It's not like that in most of the world.
In many places even senior software engineers have to choose between:
- nasty companies (advertisement, finance and trading, faangs, real estate speculation, cryptocurrencies, gambling and worse) that provide a living salary and provide a decent working environment
- few ok-ish companies that can offer a low salary, very unremarkable conditions and stability
- start your company or consultancy and make 0 money
- regret working in software and open a grocery store
The median salary for devs in the US is ~$110k, which is pretty close to your $125k. 200-250k TC doesn't seem like top-tier compared to the top of the market though.
Considering how sheepish parent is being and how carefully they are saying it, seems likely that they're hiring people outside the US where market rates are significantly lower and trying to feel proud of themselves for paying some few peanuts extra.
I’ll hire at $400k cash comp for 2 yrs experience and I won’t skip you for Meta. The only problem is that, like most big tech companies, it has some people who are there as a retirement.
It's in SF by the Embarcadero. You will write financial trading code. I pay salary plus bonus plus other stuff.
Experience:
- You spent those two years becoming very skillful at some language where you can express invariants/constraints neatly, and know how to structure programs in something like Java, or modern C++ (OCaml, Scala, Rust, whatever, is fine)
- You are the kind of person who spent those two years with very little time road-blocked, i.e. every time you got stuck you found a way out.
- You have a conceptual understanding of low-latency
Lots of people do find the comp attractive, so I find that leading with it hits poor outcomes, so sadly I won't post a job link, but you can either email me and I promise to respond or you can stick something in your profile and I will look tomorrow.
Thank you for the answer, much appreciated -- a lot of people throw out comments like yours but won't back them up.
I'm probably not the right fit for the job, I'm happily a lowly kernel developer with 20 years experience on half the salary and not in SV/SF. But I do appreciate the answer and maybe your post leads to a mutually beneficial arrangement with someone here.
I once aspired to be a kernel dev. As an aside, I once spoke to an engineer at a previous gig and told him that we don't get as low-level as what he was used to (wrote kernel code) and he was affronted. Had to calm him down and tell him that I meant "close to the metal" not "inferior software".
Didn't work out for other reasons but I was embarrassed.
Sounds like he needed some thicker skin or awareness of the terms of art in his own field! I don't think you had anything to be embarrassed about, that's what my pun was related to.
Although as another aside, I know some kernel devs who do very low level work for HFT. You're not in Chicago or NYC so maybe you're not in that game. Or at least you're happy to keep a healthy distance from the coalface.
It's not what you want to do with your life, but I've had jobs at suspect places while I was getting established (Palantir) and lots and lots of others have too. It's better than having worked somewhere people haven't heard of (ie above replacement value) and much better than having worked somewhere with a reputation for doing poor technical work.
I think it is unfashionable right now, but doesn't really deserve it. I think twitter is more toxic and reddit has bigger echo chambers. Perhaps in a few years everyone will settle down a bit.
I’m not in a position to hire anyone, but I would immediately dismiss anyone who continued to work at facebook after the genocide in Myanmar. It shows either a lack of morals, massive ignorance, or both.
Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
Rather than focusing on how an association with FB would be viewed on your resume -- you may want to ask yourself whether that company lives up to your own moral standards, and whether (just to yourself) you would feel proud of yourself for working there.
Many people have come to the conclusion that it is an extremely cynical and unethical company:
Whether any of this matters to you is ... up to you. But it is definitely a question you may want to investigate before you start working there -- rather than after you've signed the dotted line.
Being as asking your recruiter or your interviewers these questions -- isn't likely to get you very far.
The founder's destructive behavior wasn't the only factor mentioned - in fact it was the least of all factors mentioned.
... acted like a sociopathic in some people's opinion?
What's with the attempt at dissimulation here? The issue is what the guy did. Not "some people's opinion" of what he did.
I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
I can't see how the founder's ethical standards (expressed not just through what they did 16 year ago, but in the present day) wouldn't affect your experience working at their company.
The issue is labeling and some people like yourself have label this as sociopathic. Others see your label and think less of anything you say for trying to find the most cutting label vs the more accurate.
Why stop at facebook. Throwing chairs should make Microsoft a dead zone. Steve behaviour at Apple in the 80s should force you to return your iphone. Oracle, Amazon are not angels either.. Many of those small places are much worse..
Steve's behavior at Apple in the 80s should force you to return your iPhone.
So we're going in circles now.
Any and all issues raised about a company's ethical behavior in the current day (for example, outsourcing to suppliers with deplorable labor practices) are equivalent to stories of a founder's poor interpersonal skills from decades ago, in your view.
Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
Any thoughts?