Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
Where should we work instead?
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
Your options are:
1. Find another job
2. Don’t find another job
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
They dont need frontier labs. Meta's dashboard jockeys get paid the same
If you read the linked article it says the leaked data screenshot of some employees private conversation in plain text and other performance information.
It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.
They paused it, but they fully intend to restart it.
The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
I've never had a problem with employee tracking. For the 8 hours a day they are paying you for work, you should be working. And if you are working, you have nothing to hide.
The only people pushing back are those that sit on hackernews, reddit, etc. all day and expect to get paid for it.
You think Meta employees are only expected to work 8 hours a day?
Also, this isn't about tracking social media usage, it's about collecting employee keys/actions.
Let me guess, because you, yourself, are not an employee so you don't mind because it does not apply to you ?
I get paid for my work, not 8 hours a day. I’m a salaried employee. I sometimes have to work more than 8 to deliver things, I sometimes work less than 8. The fact that someone needs to monitor me all day long and potentially could use the information to treat me unfairly is disgusting. I’m not the first in line to defend meta employees, but this is just unacceptable.
I actually get paid by the hour but I think exactly like you do. Often work more than what I bill for. I'm delivering so much now with swarms of agents it really doesn't even make sense to pay me by the hour. I really think my next job will be a one person company run by moi.
Wow. What a narrow, naive view.
I guess you don’t mind a camera in the company bathroom watching you take a shit either?