I’m betting stores are given a floor price/cost and are given the flexibility to raise above that up to 10 cents cheaper than the nearest competitors in the specific area. All stores do not have the same ability/flexibility
Some retailers price some products at lost, it those products drive consumers to the store. Say neighboring gas stations sell gas with no profit, and Costco prices 10 cents less, losing the whole 10 cents. A car holds around 15 gallons, so Costco loses $1.5 on the refuel: but then a good chunk of the gas buyers are now with the car in your store, maybe even with a fresh idea of "fuel is so expensive that I need to avoid needless trips", so "as we are already here, lets buy some things I need".
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.
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.
The key point here is the “pay less” part. I know people that have turned down offers from meta that would 5x their salary and their personal situation would notably improve from at least some of that extra cash.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
This exactly. I value working from home and not working for a company that actively makes the world hell, so I make a quarter of what some of my peers at FAANG-adjacent companies make. Which is still a lot more than I realistically need.
Is there any place you look or way of looking that has you in that job? I'm currently happy with my ethical and remote job myself, but I question if it will be around in 10 years, and I especially hate job hunting.
I don't blame someone for working at facebook, but I don't think most of you realize how cash money a FANG company looks on your resume to IT managers at the lowly normal companies. Go work in financial services, insurance, retail, go be a contractor and work/travel until you find what you like.
But I also think all of the people criticizing Meta should post where they work. I'm sure plenty of people here work for ethically dubious companies, and make the same excuses.
In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
> Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
You don’t work at Anduril to make bread, at least not as a software engineer. It’s a long hours startup with worse pay than FAANG in high CoL areas. The people that work there fundamentally believe in “improving the defense of the west”.
It is the private sector equivalent of joining the military. If you want to bag on people in the military, go ahead. But they are not in the same category as people just doing things for convenient good money.
It’s okay, I put my thoughts out there and I appreciate the feedback from other engineers.
It’s actually kind of motivating. I’d interviewed at several places over the last few months and something out of my control always came up and halted the process (remote work closed down, hiring freeze, etc), so I’m definitely feeling a bit down about job prospects right now.
I needed some people to remind me “no, don’t be complacent, keep trying, there’s stuff out there and it’s worth the effort to continue looking”
People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
> donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
Have you considered that the harm of the loss of 6 figures can completely destroy local charities?
This quickly devolves into effective altruism and the problems that come with that but it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you think the net good you bring by keeping a local abused women shelter open far outweighs the negative consequences for working at Meta.
I don't care to dive into imaginary philosophical debates. I'm responding to the person in this thread saying, "I'm stuck" while clearly being financially well-off.
I think there would be more empathy if Meta were the only company in the world where it was possible to work. That's "stuck." This is not.
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
You're making it very easy for them here. Giving up on any kind of personal integrity or responsibility in exchange for a lot of money is not a complex dilemma. You don't need context to see it's wrong. It's a classic deal with the devil, a literary trope as old as time.
They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.
It's both. We can point to individuals who make terrible decisions and also acknowledge that there will always be such people as long as the system incentivizes them.
How many of index fund investors take a short position on Meta to cancel out that share? That's pretty easy to do. If it's nobody then everyone is "such people" and it is meaningless to single out any one person. Just acknowledge that there is no moral high ground for anyone. You either provide labor or capital to the enterprise, which is worse?
No. It's not not doing everything, it's not doing even the easiest thing.
You don't get to hide behind "investing" just because there are some intermediaries to move money for you. You are actively gaining a profit from Meta and investing for the long term, meaning you don't even need the money for 10+ years. That's way worse than someone contributing labor to do some work in exchange for pay now. In fact you are paying their salary to do all these things you despise, and insist that they do more of it for more $ every quarter when there are any number of safe though less profitable alternatives. How does it feel?
Talk is cheap. Time to put your money where your mouth is.
Yes, it actually is, because your argument can be applied to every moral question. Why aren't you taking a short position in Meta when Meta is an evil company? Why are you drinking a coffee while a kid in Africa is starving? Why aren't you standing by the lake if a kid could be drowning?
People can't be expected to do literally every single thing that would make a positive impact. But they absolutely can be expected not to actively do evil.
> In fact you are paying their salary
I don't hold any investments in Meta, direct or indirect.
I'll make sure to shame my Illumina scientist neighbor for working on tech that deliberately targets underage children (purposely violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.). After all, he owns the world's most popular index fund, which includes Meta. He certainly should feel just as culpable as the Meta employees!
The Meta employee does as they are told. Your neighbor gives money to Zuck and asks him to tell the Meta employee what to do, sharing in profit with Zuck. Yes, he is worse. Way worse. Drug mule vs. drug financier type worse. He can also stop any time with a few clicks. What's stopping him?
Your argument erases the employee's biggest moral choice: did the Meta employee just spawn a Meta employee? No, they chose to work there. You assign maximal agency to someone buying an index fund and minimal agency to someone who voluntarily spends 40 hours a week advancing Meta's objectives. That's backwards. (Or, more likely, a purposeful troll comment).
Did the index fund just drop in someone's lap? No. They chose to place orders to turn cash into stocks that control Meta's objectives. Every argument you make about an employee you can make about an investor. The difference is, as I said, the chain of command goes one way, and history has something to say about the relative culpability of each end. You may want to reflect on that.
At the end of the day, how someone spends 40 hours a week is as much your business as how someone spends their money is my business. That you fail to see it is indicative of your own biases.
Wrong. It's someone who owns shares in some LLC that does contract killing and hired the hit man, and many others. You keep trying to skirt around the obvious, which looks very ridiculous.
The gall of one of the best-compensated people on the planet acting like they
had no place else to go. Well, Mister Ivory Tower, I've got news for you: Having a conscience doesn't come for free. You'll be fine with a lower pay that's still several multiples of what other people make.
You don't need to retire early, there are companies aplenty that accept remote workers. But you won't, because you sold yourself out for money.
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
Deliberately vague, half so I can’t be easily identified (though my team’s case is not unique), half so I don’t get in trouble for sharing specific personnel information.
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were:
- Working on something I care about
- Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations:
- Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
Thanks for the honest assessment. I'm certain it took guts to open up about this, especially to the hostile crowd on HN. This comment is a good counter to the no-nuance "Everyone who works at Company X are terrible people!" narratives. Also, it brings up a point that often gets overlooked: These companies are absolutely enormous, and there are very likely small pockets within each of them with people who are at least trying to do good and stay out of the evil lanes. Not everyone working in BigTech is actively churning through Torment Nexus JIRA tickets, and at the very least, if you're working at one of these places, finding a team that is not actively harming the world is a good compromise.
I used to work at a company that had a client that was... let's call them morally dubious, because if I start typing out what I really think of them, there'll just be a paragraph of profanity that dang will probably remove.
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
Rather than donating 5-6 figures, what about saving enough cash to live on? Roughly speaking you can "make" ~$200k/year on $5M in T-bills. You could live comfortably in the US or Europe, or basically like a king anywhere else in the world. You could work on the software you want, even pro-bono, and walk away any time. I believe this is called "F U money".
My initial offer was $400k total comp (E5), so I didn’t really consider FIRE as an option in the near term considering my spouse is a full-time parent and this area is HCOL.
I’m nowhere close to $5m, and I’m hoping to leave Meta in the next few months. But I’d love to be able to “retire” and work exclusively for companies that match my morals.
I figured the amount I’m donating doesn’t make a huge difference to my FIRE date
That 200k is a reasonable amount to start withdrawing from a 5M portfolio (exactly the 4% rule from the Trinity study [1]), but you’ll want to adjust it for inflation every year. My favorite tool for planning these strategies is TPAW Planner [2], which visualizes the distribution of withdrawals under various market outcomes. It’ll also suggest a portfolio of stocks and bonds that’ll be safer than just T-bills, which have a high risk of not beating inflation.
If everyone who works at META is a bit like this, then it will be an overflow of good when y'all find your new place. Thank you for doing your part. Gratefulness
If you ever actually see the work or something charities on the ground and the people they help you might change your mind very quickly. They certainly do more good than another million in some index fund.
No that’s never happened to India you’re right. If you “support” relocation of a Ukrainian like Iryna Zarutska they might end up moving to Charlotte, NC where they get stabbed on a train. Road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.
No, but the UK did support the relocation of my great-grandfather who fought alongside the British against the Soviets and Nazi's leaving him no home to return to once the war was over.
He dedicated his life to the defence of his home, then to Britain and then spent 37 years in the coal-mines powering the country. All the while being a refugee.
I totally understand your worry about globalism, and to be clear: very human feelings about demographic shifts and change are being stoked by both sides of an ever polarising political spectrum.
But, I think it's important to remember that the reason refugee protections even exist as a concept is because there are real people who suffer, and we offer protection to those who need it not because we think ourselves superior: but because we hope that if the day were ever to come for us: that other nations would help us live our life so we could return home.
Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, even though he settled in the UK; he would have returned, but his part of Poland had become part of Ukraine, and Ukraine was the Soviet Union: the entity he went to war against.
I can tell you there will never come a time when American or UK refugees will be able to look to Poland or Ukraine or Afghanistan or India for rescue. It is that level of idealism and high trust naïveté that makes first world civilizations nice places to live but also dooms them to be taken advantage of by tribal mooches if there is no careful pragmatism.
> They are the only man-made technology in history that we don’t fully understand from first principles
…what? What about bicycles? Ice skates? General anesthetics? I feel like there are a ton of commonly-used man-made items we don’t fully understand from a first-principles perspective.
No, I don't think you are missing anything. Only recently have engineers been inventing things from "first principles". I think for the majority of human civilization we've mostly invented and improved through trial and error.
1. These can only be flown in most class E airspace and class G, so not anywhere close to most airports
2. They are much bigger and more visible than drones
3. The ultralight pilot is inside the aircraft which means “see and avoid” is much more reasonable
It’s hard to compare ultralights to drones IMO as a licensed pilot
Yes, though any subject which trains you to think with mathematical rigor will help.
I switched my major from CS to math midway through my undergrad studies. I have worked at startups and FAANG as a SWE so I have seen these skills in different engineering environments. A few things I’ve seen:
1. My later classes used the Moore Method which made whiteboard interviews much less stressful
2. I can spar with our data scientists and call out BS metrics rigorously in a very political environment at my current company
3. I can sometimes find pathological execution scenarios and bugs faster than my CS coworkers
The one caution is that time spent studying things that aren’t programming needs to be balanced with time spent programming
As for math outside of CS that’s helpful for programming and thinking, modern algebra and category theory can really help in understanding type systems and their limitations. They’re also very accessible when compared to stuff like differential equations and analysis IMO
Fly under sport pilot privileges. All you need is a drivers license.
Reach out to West Desert Aviators in Utah. Several young people in tech fly there. If you can find LSA to fly, light sport isn’t as restrictive of a license as it’s made out to be and you don’t have to live in fear of the FAA yanking your medical
How Adobe’s CFO is avoiding mass layoffs: ‘We don’t want our employees worried about when the next shoe is going to drop’
https://fortune.com/2023/03/22/adobe-mass-layoffs-tech-industry-trends/
Seems like companies are either friendly to their customers or their staff. I guess this makes sense since it's largely about the allocation of resources.
Someone would drive out to a few neighboring gas stations, record prices, and set ours ~10 cents lower.
That’s it. That’s how the price was set.
Aside, working there was very good for a college job and I was treated very respectfully for the summers I was there.