I am at a point of disenchantment with Facebook, that I honestly think that even if you’re doing the best, most meaningful research of your life, you’re still doing it for Facebook. And that’s inherently invalidating whatever you’re doing.
I honestly don't agree with that point of view, in fact, I find it quite disappointing to see this kind of point of view on HackerNews out of all places.
Debate about Facebook being good or bad aside, a large portion (if not majority) of human civilization's technical progress were made due to less than idealistic motivations. In fact, I'd categorize a large portion of engineering and scientific achievement under the label of "less-than-altruistic intention, but positive externality".
On the topic of Facebook, I actually think it's fantastic that the biggest social network is getting so much public scrutiny left and right that everything they do is put under a microscope.
Let's be honest, social networks will not go away, if Facebook disappears tomorrow another one will take its place before the end of the year, and they will just be as "evil" when it comes to privacy invasion and data gathering (why else would you start a social network in the first place?). However they are likely to be less incompetent than Facebook at PR and likely to have a more charismatic and likable CEO than Zuck, and before you know they are doing the exact same shady things without the public freaking out all the time.
> if Facebook disappears tomorrow another one will take its place before the end of the year, and they will just be as "evil" when it comes to privacy invasion and data gathering
This certainly wasn't true of MySpace.
Also I just disagree with this sentiment in general.
Im in a lab with people who go on to work at Google Research, deepmind, MSR, etc. I asked them about fb and they do not remotely care what fb does. Most Ph.D. graduates want to collaborate with specific individuals who are at the top of their field, and will go where ever they are..
It's sort of sad but I agree. For outstanding engineers and researches there are now better companies available to work for on cutting edge research. Facebook still pays well, and I'd assume they bump up compensation again to mitigate the ongoing exodus.
I can see where you are heading with this, and we probably do not agree, but I know you have spent more time thinking about this than I have so I will defer on core values. Still, it is an important topic that I should probably spend more time on. But I really don't see how in the modern USA (Where most of FB/HN is) you could make it through life without spending much of it making others more money than you are getting paid yourself. Further, I really don't see how getting paid 250k and producing a value higher than that is such a bad thing in practice. And, another important thing I think to add to the conversation is that it is rather difficult to ascertain what "value" an individual SWE has produced. There are also a non-zero ammount of SWE's that produce less value than they are paid for. Are they immoral for showing up to the job?
