Yeah these interaction are becoming quite fraught because there is extreme danger of AI use just shifting the burden from one person to another. That guy wrote the code super fast with AI, but you had to do an additional round trip during code review with him to eliminate that weirdness. He gets a bonus for doing twice the work in half the time, you get nothing.
You didn’t touch a nerve. I’m not close to anyone there and couldn’t really care less. You just revealed profound ignorance. We don’t have perspectives to share because you don’t have one. Your point of view is made up of narratives you’ve seen other people articulate online, and I’ve read the same stuff. I’m not an apologist because my point of view is better informed and more complex than your own. Maybe you’ll grow to a point of understanding the difference. I hope you do. Because having life and death certainty about things you aren’t directly informed about is a dangerous thing.
Oh well, you should actually talk to some of them sometime. A lot of very bright, otherwise decent kids go straight from college to Meta and they think they’ll be doing good. One guy I knew spent his entire job working at keeping ISIS from using Facebook to organize. He didn’t go home at night thinking he was a terrible person.
Of course Meta is just a caricature of an evil corporation from a distance but it becomes more complex the closer you get to it.
With the great reality distortion field they had going there, the problem for a lot of staff was not ethics but perception. They were good people thinking they were doing good work but lacked perspective (not ethics themselves).
Of course someone can say “everyone should know FB is evil, there’s no excuse” but this is a classic case of “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever think something different than what I think.” Which, in itself, is just a lack of perspective. Funny how basically all humans suffer from that. You can chip away at this problem by asking yourself “why would a reasonable person think that?” instead of just going around saying “well then you’re stupid / evil” anytime anything outside your POV comes along.
In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:
Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.
Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.
THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.
For some people, there is no difference between $1000 and $3000. Both are amounts they won’t miss, and availability of the SteamBox is low right now so they’re happy to pay it to get faster access. Tell them they can get a more powerful gaming PC for $3000 and they don’t care. They want to try the Steambox and money is no object.
Basically, don’t necessarily attribute to stupidity what can also be explained by wealth.