[michelb]

Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.

[echelon]

I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here...

I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.

Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.

Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?

It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.

[rightbyte]

Generally it is a bad idea to punnish defectors.

[probably_wrong]

What about Meta AI? For reasons I cannot comprehend they have been releasing quality research for free for years like PyTorch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models.

I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.

[devsda]

What's the end goal of that? Do you think Meta will run out of good engineers to hire ?

With that attitude, how long does it take to justify going after the next Meta?

[SpicyLemonZest]

My litmus test is, do you think that the person managing Meta’s coffee supply is ethically questionable? If you met them, would you tell them that they need to quit, and would you consider them a bad person if they don’t? There are organizations that meet that bar, but I really don’t think Meta is one of them.

[4ggr0]

i agree, but why limit this to Meta?

add the three-letter agencies, Surveillance firms, Palantir, military industrial complex and many more to the list. blacklisting people who worked for Meta seems so performative...

What about Google? Microsoft?

[stodor89]

But hey, at least the money is good..