this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
697 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
84569 readers
3844 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
~~Kinda~~ 1000% fuck Meta employees tho fr
Boo fucking hoo, psychos, you know exactly what rideyou signed up for. Kinda like this from Zuck tbh even tho hes a complete ghoul. Meta workers are not on the right side of the billionaire/labor dichotomy
I hope their fucking stocks fail to vest or whatever. Fuckem
You do realize that the problem is that people need money? Yea, many would likely have a choice where to work but many might Not have had options.
What is needed is financial basic freedom for everyone. Countries need to sit down and figure out how to make it work because as it stands, jobs have turned into a form of slavery by design.
I really hope you can see the difference between a tech company hire and dudes on the streets playing SS
There's no difference when the tech company is used to push propaganda supporting the SS and the workers don't stand up to it. They are complicit and therefore responsible.
Meta is largely the reason for the current state of the world via their purposeful boosting of alt-right talking points. They've helped incite a genocide ffs. They're not actively on the streets shooting people but this is what the company pushed for
I'm not American but I am in tech and have been unemployed since January and even though my financial situation is grim, Meta and Palantir are two companies I would never, ever work for or even apply to. There's always plenty of other companies to apply to (which is what I did and I start somewhere tomorrow!)
The difference is smaller than you think
They certainly think they do a lot of good. We sit off in the distance reading the latest Reddit threads about whatever latest outrage has happened, and it looks all negative to us. But from their point of view they are serving 3 billion people’s needs to connect and network.
I’m not saying I see it that way. But you seem to imply that they all know they work for an Evil Empire but they truly don’t see it that way. There are a lot of young people there who don’t look past the cachet of working for a well known and successful company. And there are wiser ones who genuinely believe the good outweighs the bad.
That's bullshit. Almost all meta hires are poached, and they're not coming for you if you're not in a position to make good money.
The vast majority of these people chose to leave an already cushy job to get in there.
I mean if I worked for a soul sucking corporation (pick one Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) and another shitty corporation (Meta) offered me a substantial pay raise why wouldn't I take it?
Isn't that the issue? We've created a system where you need money to live, and basically if you buy food and have a place to live you contribute to a system of exploitation.
You do know that meta doesn't only have high level jobs, right? There cannot just be middle managers everywhere without the bog standard workers.
What kind of perception do you have of tech giants? That all who work there are some kind of imaginary elite?
The majority of their hires are experienced profiles. "Bog standard" worker in Meta is already a pretty high paying job as entry level work is massively outsourced.
That's not at all what i'm saying. I'm saying if you can land a job at Meta then you can absolutely find a job elsewhere. There is nobody in the world who is stuck between an empty belly and accepting a position at Meta. They're just stuck between making good money somewhere, and making better money at Meta.
Noooo everyone at meta is making at minimum 300,000 a year.
They poach their janitors
I would imagine their janitors don't actually work for meta, but are provided via a complex web of contracts that helps them pay the janitors as little as possible, while enriching a middle man who does... little...
Exactly. Mega corps don't touch entry level work, they do exactly as you say and pay a friend of theirs so that this friend can steal wages from poor people and guarantee them floor-level prices.
You think they poached “almost all” of their 80k employees?
It's kind of standard practice at this level. They get a million resumes a week in inbound, of which they hire very little, and they have an army of recruiters who go searching for people in the industry, who for the most part already have a job.
It's way more profitable to let small startups grow juniors into competent employees and pluck them when they're ripe, than to take risks on junior profiles. (not that i condone it but it's a sad truth of recruitment)
Yeah, they already did that, and "slavery by design" is what they came up with.
The next time, we don't consult our country, we force them to do what WE want.
Why stop there? Fuck all employees of the owning class. How dare they be employed
Meta is a special kind of evil, they're exemplary
While I do generally agree, there are a LOT of companies that have their own special kind of evil, and ultimately if people are choosing between being employed and working for one, they will work for one. There simply aren't enough ethical jobs for the number of people who would prefer to work for ethical companies
Its not a dichotomy. Its a spectrum. Meta, palantir they are at the bad end.
Nobody working at facebook has any illusions that they work at a company that helps people make connections and express themselves online. They know its a manipulation machine that oversteps its boundaries, constantly, hoovering up their data. They are also well paid, so its not bread line or facebook. Its a choice.
Many are starting to wake up, but the damage is done. So, its also perfectly reasonable for anyone to not feel sorry for them, if their choice to screw over the world ended up being less beneficial to them than they hoped. That doesnt mean they deserve vitriol or they had it coming.
Couple things.
Firstly; just because they are well-paid does not imply they have the means to survive without employment. In fact that places them far closer to you and I than to somebody capable of living solely off the labor of others. Additionally, large tech companies utilize H1B visas as a form of coercion for both the visa holder and the other employees.
Secondly; you open your first paragraph with
But open paragraph #2 with
Those two statements contradict each other.
That's not my point, though! My point is; blame the goddamn reptilian tech bro billionaire and the shareholders. Blame the government that allows Meta to exist at all. Blame the dysfunctional and cancerous-at-best socioeconomic systems that allow either to exist.
Or, to put it more succinctly; don't hate the player, hate the game.
Being aware it’s not what they present themselves as is not the same as realising you’re helping fascists and genocides.
If you're willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you've got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.
Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they're ALSO partly responsible for ICE.
facebook is actually the first to do the most damage, by being one of the sole platform for russian backed propaganda to bring people into conservatism. boomers/gen x are the users.
Can you explain that last part about them being partly responsable for ICE? ICE has existed for a few years before Facebook was even founded, and they were also evil back then.
They were evil but constrained and minor. Their current power is the direct result of the anti-immigrant flames social media like Facebook have been fanning with their algorithms for years.
you don’t choose to work in a factory, but as a sw eng myself, you definitely choose to work in a faang corp. fuck the owning classes but remind the faang workers they’re trying to become the next owner and betraying the working class at the same time.
I saw an interview with some anonymized meta employees and all of them knew they were doing fucked up stuff. Then they said they were doing it for the stocks the company give them after x years worth millions.
So yeah, fuck them.
Really depends on if it is c-suite or the cleaners tbh.
I’m not gonna say ‘Fuck wendy the cleaner who desperately took the first job available to support her sick mother’.
Fuck the brass tho, obvs.
Thats unlikely for that company, i woukd think. There arent really AI janitors yet as far as i know
Not anymore anyway, they got zucc’d
Honestly doubt that, theyre probably externally contracted out already
Yeah another thought to have though is that 8,000 Meta employees suddenly on the market makes life harder for other people who’ve been laid off and are still looking for work, some of them for a whole year without success.
Thats the only audience i maybe have empathy for but im sure things are quite different at that level of jobs and compensation
For years, Meta has been hell for smaller companies trying to hire, because Meta would routinely offer $100k over the market rate, and hire people just to hire them. I swear about half a dozen times I interviewed people and made them job offers only to realize afterward that all I accomplished was giving them a bargaining chip for their negotiation with Meta.
Now it’s the reverse. People are out in the cold searching for work while Meta dumps all those people they overhired back out into the market, where their time at Meta gives them an edge. Yes, we can hate Meta all we want but it still looks good on a resume.
And yes life is different on tech wages but these are still people with bills to pay and families to feed. My HCOL property taxes are equivalent to some people’s entire mortgage.
One thing to note is Facebook bought a ton of other companies. So some of those people didn't choose to work there at all they just stayed because they needed to keep their job. Some may even be trapped by circumstances like visas or medical needs. Companies don't only screw over their users. They buy people and screw them too.
Staying is still a choice tho and if thry were retained, they likely tasted some action. Im not going to feel sorry for the closest analog billionaires have in the labor force, they will be fine, however impossibly far apart as they may be in reality