Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash, describing work in "Fed Land"...
'''
Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
Makes me wonder what it’s like to identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Or Thanos wasn’t so bad. Those rebel scum had it coming. Homelander is the good guy!
>identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea!
Are there many stories where the bad guys create the metaverse? AFAIK, Stephenson coined the term in Snow Crash and there it was built by the main character and his buds.
The Matrix, I suppose? Though I think Zuck's (immediate) vision and who he identifies as is way more Hiro Protagonist or James Halliday.
You might be right. It’s been a while since I read snow crash. I just remember the metaverse as a sort sad state of society, but I don’t remember if the evil corp stuff was in there or just in the world at large
Every story, even ours, needs a bad guy. Best villains don't think they are villains. They just do what they must/should/want (in that order, depending on their intensity), because they can.
I had no idea it was a lord of the rings reference. Here’s an apt quote from wikipedia: “The [palantir] stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented.”
This is the reality for many low wage workers today. Amazon drivers are on strict schedules and are watched at all times. This isn't fantasy, this is reality. It just hasn't gotten up the chain to effect the average HN reader yet.
It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.
I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.
On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.
I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.
Device management is definitely a big hole to punch into each machine, but, once you're above a handful of staff, managing devices manually is not really tenable, and I do think the restrictions provided by device management have tangible benefits (it's amazing what people will download and run without a thought).
Arguably the risks of the MDM should be assessed and mitigated with some kind of defense in depth approach—highly sensitive things like bulk wipe disabled with multi-person approval required to re-enable, hardware MFA requirements, anomaly detection + alerting for weird behavior, etc etc. I'd argue the risks stem more from badly configured MDM where a compromise of one sysadmin's browser has a company-wide blast radius, rather than the fundamental presence of device management itself.
I think I'm probably coming at this from a different perspective than IT people.
I've worked on IoT products where we've deployed fleets of thousands of devices without user interfaces placed all over the world in random, inaccessible places, hanging off cellular radios. We're definitely not managing those manually. Architecting management systems for that is always interesting. Sometimes the question would come up, "why don't we do X?" where X necessarily included the ability to brick the entire fleet (and probably kill the company) in 5 minutes. My philosophy was that certain things are too dangerous to exist, no matter how useful they might be.
Are you IoT devices ALSO used by humans directly, where they would be forced to have some admin permission to do their work if there was no MDM system?
MDM are clearly a possible SPOF for certain attack vectors, but are also the only defense against others (unless you want to hire a legion of IT helpdesk specialists)
There are also individual-level risks. If you capture everything, you might capture bank account numbers when setting up direct deposit or credit card numbers from corporate purchases (these are clearly valid uses of company equipment). In a only slightly less valid use, you might submit a medical claim (using a company benefit), and surveillance software gets part of your medical record.
There are underappreciated liabilities companies take on with this monitoring.
Yeah, many companies don't want the liability issues. Like what happens if I open my bank account on my work computer? You could argue I can expect someone to be watching but I have no warning that someone is? Here in the EU that would probably be an easy lawsuit.
Why would you ever login to a sensitive account on a device you don't own and have root on? Like I trust my employer not to do anything shifty with my banking info, if I were to use it, but I'm not going to take that chance for a dozen reasons.
I don't. No financial transactions for me on something so easily lost or stolen, with any number of possible exploits lurking out there. Phones should be treated as compromised from day one.
They have my account and transit number and stuff, sure, that's different than my username and password for online banking. We print them out on cheques that can be (reasonably) safely given to my plumber.
patio11/bitsaboutmoney has some good writing about this
your employer knows how much they paid you and what account they paid to. They don't know your balance, where else you might be getting money from (selling science fiction short stories eh, Cosgrove?! This job should be enough for you!!), that you have donated money to the Democrats recently!! We suggested that was bad!! And lots of other things that come under banking info.
Can’t speak for the EU, but the companies I’ve worked for in the US explicitly state what they do not track in their privacy/use policy when giving out laptops/phones/tablets.
E.g. their anti-virus or firewall system may ignore URLs related to banking, medical, or political affiliation and chose not to log or decrypt that traffic
Once I was trying to find a scene from a TV show at work for a joke with colleagues, and the quote I used ended up triggering a very NSFW search. Did not get fired, not even talked to. Thank goodness!
A lot is tolerated, until they want to get rid of you. But in the EU i'm pretty sure they can't use regular non-compliance stuff (general browsing, etc) in evidence. In DE you can't even identify an individual.
Isn't Facebook training their AIs on their finest engineer's computer use so the AIs can become better computer users?
In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher productivity (perceived, as whats measured no longer ends up being a useful metric) and control and urge people to do more of what they desire.
And my curiosity is: does what Facebook desire align with what the humans who work for Facebook desire? I think with AI, that's a no. The company desires as low a labor/workforce/compensation cost as possible, while the humans desire as much compensation as possible.
I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.
There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.
> I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Interestingly, I have a similar career and I have never ever split personal and work businesses on different notebooks/phones. On the other hand I would never even consider working with a company that monitors my screen or has insight into the computer I'm working on.
When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.
I very rarely use my personal laptop. I stream on my phone, if I want a bigger screen, I either cast or use the app on the TV. So for me it's work laptop and two phones, not bad at all for the peace of mind. I literally turn off work. I used to run mixed, and I really wish I had changed earlier.
I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.
Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.
Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.
In the years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, I was writing code at a massive bank. Didn’t have an iPhone yet and Gmail was blocked on the work computers, so I’d step across the street during the middle of the workday to sign into a law school library and use their computers to check my personal email. A lot of friends still didn’t want to spend money on per-message SMS fees so I could find out if anyone was inviting me to do something after work in my Gmail inbox (a lot of us used Gchat in those days but the only way I could access it was on a desktop/laptop, no mobile yet).
I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.
I do the same. Its very easy today with portable devices and plentiful mobile data. I have my personal phone and personal laptop, connected to mobile data, for lunch breaks or the odd search I need to do during the workday. My work laptop and associated accounts are strictly for work activities and information.
Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.
I also find this weird. Even though the companies I worked for didn’t have any crazy rules or restrictions (never had phone from work), but I never used my work laptop or computer for anything personal. I have friends doing their own side projects on theirs. Even though in the countries where I worked/work they have to let you know what they track if they track, I still remember one of my contracts that stated that any work done on the work computer belongs to the company. That’s why, even if maybe it’s not legal for them to say that, I never ever used any subscriptions, hardware or tools provided by my employer for personal use.
Agree with this. The > the organization the > the big brother dystopia. Big corps that say use outlook will ask for admin permissions on your cell which include delete access, reading media, etc if you want to use teams/outlook. So i never opt in. Probably good for work life bal. They can call me in emergencies.
I’d note that my concern with Meta tracking my keystrokes isn’t that I’m mixing work with personal but that Meta is an intensely metrics driven culture with KPI optimization fixation (iRev is the heart of all their decisions, even at the cost of doing things that are clearly wrong, likely illegal, or immoral). The place is a pressure cooker of performance management and while this data likely is used for model training, there’s zero chance it’s not also going to be used to measure your relative performance and determine when to fire you because you aren’t conformant enough with whatever bizarrely poorly thought out metrics some VP pushed some director pushed some M2 to conceive of then everyone nods and signs off on as long as they can wave a data scientist at it to say “statsig,” with the ultimate goal of producing a classifier that can automate the process of end to end reviews (how do you really do a 50:1 IC:Manager ratio without performance review automation?)
They’ve already structured the model to be a binary classifier - every six months they’re going to let go 10% for performance, and they are flattening the performance range in the upside to show no signal. They billed this as a great thing for ICs because they won’t have to compete for classification and there’s no bubble zone of impeding doom, but they gloss over the top grading range went from 10->15% per year (in 2025) to 21% (as the 10 percent twice a year compounds) performance cuts, and they try to hide the fact LLMs will be doing the reviews for managers (not to mention a 50:1 IC to manager compression implies letting go 80% of managers - so the managers are now in full on squid game mode using ICs as meat shields).
So I think the “will they see my personal stuff” is not at all what is going on inside the mind of meta employees. It’s the fact they’re being fed into a stochastic parrot wood chipper.
Yeah, that's pretty clear. There's a comment saying that just managing PCs is risky. I don't think most people here understand how 1000s of devices are managed in larger companies and the damage an average non technical user is capable of if just left to their own devices.
I'm the exact same way. If it's a work device, I'll literally never use it for something personal. Why give them any ammunition? Plus, laptops are so thin these days it's not really a burden to pack two, or use a phone like you said. It's one of those things where it almost certainly doesn't matter... until it does.
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
Same principle as too much security. One of the things that contributes to this is that the safety side usually doesn't have any incentive to reign itself in.
There is an old adage for that general idea.
"The treatment should not be worse than the disease"
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
You can rest assured a company firing you for what they saw while surveilling your work computer will not be so stupid as to reveil this fact. That would indeed be a liability for them. They will simply invent a different reason for firing.
Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as much as possible.
Well, usually they would never tell the person the real reason for the firing or layoff anyways. there's no benefit for them to tell you, it just increases liability.
Or they just find another way to show you did it - the idea is very similar to how law enforcement uses illegal spying. They simply find another way to prove what they already caught you doing - it’s called Parallel Reconstruction.
It’s not true that it’s not allowed in the EU. There’s the Barbalescu ruling which is case law that says employers must fulfill a bunch of criteria around informing employees, the necessity of the monitoring, and they are not allowed to impose blanket bans on private use, but it is still legal to monitor employees in the EU.
I guess from my perspective there are even more dire problems in the US that I'm surprised people accept. But it seems they don't know, or care, or know that they should care.
Perhaps it's the lack of proper authoritarian regime in the US' past that drives this. I believe the temporal proximity of such makes people aware of, and angry against, the many traps that such systems leave in their "law", so you can be imprisoned anytime for anything. EU has a bunch of countries with varying degree of such past.
Most people need to work to support themselves so it's quite inconvenient to single-handedly solve all of the problems in the US. Suggesting people simply don't know or care is very naive.
I’m sympathetic to this view, butI don’t see any evidence they actually do know or care though. This (workers rights) gains no traction in US elections. You have this weird macho culture around it, almost like complaining about this abuse would be a sign of personal weakness.
You should expect it because it's the safest position to work from. Don't use your work device for non-work, they may be tracking something or everything and do you want that in that record.
Additionally, don't use personal devices for work, but that is because of other reasons.
Most companies large enough to have their own IT have monitoring and know what's going through their network. The larger the company, the more likely they're watching. I've personally never seen that information used against anybody unless they were looking at shady stuff (porn, hacking websites, etc.), but I'm sure they're monitoring.
Even outsourced IT for small companies will often put "security" software like Sentinel One or Sophos on machines they manage, and those can track and block web traffic, report everything being installed, and even MITM HTTPS traffic.
Personally I don't see the big deal. If I don't want my employer watching something, I don't do it on their network. I monitor what's going on in my tiny home network, and I expect anybody administrating larger networks does the same thing.
No court order. Just a suspicion against an individual, and a process to follow. Plus, you have to tell them. There is no mass surveillance without notice, correct.
> It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
Its allows in most of the EU apart from germany where there are strict limits.
however you can still record what your users are doing for purposes of detecting fraud. This is where it differs from the USA, where they can do anything because they have no data protection laws.
I always assume it is the case that my company will spy on my work computer. It’s naive to assume otherwise; there are just too many incentives/externalities for it to not happen given enough time and a reasonably funded infosec department.
Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
This is the fruition of Microsoft's dream, since it's the most obvious way to drive copilot usage in a way that A) burns mad tokens, B) is actually useful to paying customers.
Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.
> It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.
We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.
Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.
Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.
My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
This sounds like the "everything you create in your own time is company property since we cannot distinguish if what you do in your own time isn't company related" clause in some contracts. Under no circumstance is it actable where I live, but it can sure scare the hell out of people and presents a line of thought. Yes, some companies think they can own copyright on the things you write at home.
I call that the "shower clause," because the company claims ownership of any ideas you come up with, in the shower.
I think, like noncompetes, there's limits to how far the company can actually enforce it, but they bank on the fact that they have lawyers on permanent retainer, and you don't. Even standing up for your rights, against blatant corporate overreach, is expensive.
Interesting. I've always asked, too, and 0% were willing to make any changes to their policies. I suppose it has a lot to do with the size of the company and your relative bargaining power.
In the US, the enforceability of that sort of thing depends on the state. Generally, if that state enforces non-competes (other than for selling the business, or managerial staff), then it most likely enforces "you're salaried, so everything you invent belongs to us".
> When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks
I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this. It's not surprising you don't get officially dedicated "study time". The vast majority of programmers aren't hourly anyway, so officially sanctioned study hours doesn't even fit in with how work is prioritized. Not to mention the optics look terrible if your team is ever behind your manager is now in the awkward position have having "non-work" on record as part of what you're getting paid for.
Just bring your book with you and read during slow period, when a job is running, model training etc. You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.
I've never had official permission to study at work about I've also never had any problem studying at work. If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
My last employer had a monthly Day of Learning where you could study whatever you want (so long as you could sort of tie it back to work). It was great. They’d organize presentations from employees but you could spend the whole day essentially however you wanted.
> If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
>I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this.
>I've never had official permission to study at work. I've also never had any problem studying at work.
In this case, since the manager was the one pushing for "personal growth", asking ensured that
- the activity is sanctioned, and one doesn't have to bet on nobody asking questions
- it effectively gets put on record, in a quantifiable way, and can be used for promotion/salary boost at performance reviews
- it also enables others to do the same, even if they're not "shipping consistently and high quality" (in the eyes of the management). So that they could reach that level, y'know. Learning that benefits the employer isn't a reward one should earn for high performance.
- in case of denial (as in this case), one gets a clear signal about where the priorities are and what's bullshit, and can act accordingly. By updating their resume, at the very least.
>If you're shipping consistently and high quality
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this "if" kills your entire point.
>You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.
I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but when I was in Google, we were told to bring our entire selves to work.
That's to say, while you were there, Google has your entire self. You're no longer a mere person, you're a Googler, and there's no such thing as non-Googler time while you're on the payrolls.
The consequence of "you're not hourly" isn't that you get to have non-project time to yourself. It's that you don't get to have your time. All your time belongs to the company; you are bringing your entire self to work.
Sure, you're allowed to spend some of that time doing other things. The Corporate will graciously avert their eyes. You will be held accountable for what you do in that time though.
You better answer those stupid emails while you're loafing, because you weren't hired to answer emails, and the engineer's time is expensive. You are expected to demonstrate impact for every hour spent. Answering emails is not impactful. You still have to do it though.
So you do it in your "off the clock" time, when the corporate isn't looking.
There is no such thing as YOUR time. There merely is time when your performance is measured and judged (working hours).
It's showtime, when you compete with other employees for that promotion (or simply not being fired).
It's a precious resource that you have to ration for the pirouettes that get the most points from the judges, like coding and leading and doing other things with demonstrable impact.
An athlete doesn't stop being an athlete when the competition clock stops. Oh no, that's when the real work begins.
That's why the parent commentor asked.
The real question was: do I get points from the judges for this move?
If the answer isn't a "yes", then the judges expect you to do it in your "off work" hours when they aren't evaluating your performance. If they see you doing it, it will adversely impact your score.
You're only supposed to do things that count during the preciously small 8-hour window when The Corporate deigns to see what you're doing.
The things that you have to do to showcase this performance are the things you do on your own time.
You don't watch the Olympics to see the athletes do all the things that they have to do to be high-performing athletes.
There's a word for people who, say, only play soccer when there's a judge present to count the score, and go back to their lives in the end of the day.
The word is amateurs.
Amateurs don't get paid. And they're certainly not needed in the club.
It's not just Google, of course, other companies are the same or worse. The corporate chat shows who's online and when, inviting the employees to the after hours game.
Oh, and the best part is having everyone judge each other.
The Corporate promises not to look when the clock stops, but your peers aren't beholden to the same promise.
They will look, and they will judge.
No, the corporate doesn't expect you to help out a colleague in the "off hours". But someone's going to write that peer feedback in the end of the perf period. And you don't want to be the unhelpful one.
You can't complain about being messaged in the off-hours because the corporate says that you a aren't required to answer messages at that time, so there's nothing to complain about.
Prisoner's dilemma ensures that the judgment never stops.
The competition keeps going; you're just being judged for different things.
And none of them is the process personal growth.
During work hours, you'll be judged for how much you "personally grew".
But nobody wants to watch the paint dry or watch the grass (or you) grow.
This is when I would look up the nearest course for the subject that the job would want me to study, including the cost, time and travel distance. Talk is always much cheaper than the real thing.
Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
One time my manager messaged me panicking about a big nextjs vulnerability. I told him, no worries, I saw it on HN and we patched weeks ago. He told me to use HN at work as much as I want.
No. You should grow professionally outside of work by also following the work-mandated professional development plan. And you will be punished if you don't do it, or you do it at a pace that doesn't match expectations.
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
Seems like that'd just discourage people from going above and beyond at work. Why do more than the bare minimum to avoid being fired if nothing else you do counts?
>Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
(This is from Office Space for those who don’t know. Hilarious scene with Jennifer Aniston)
some people see 'career growth' as going to seminars and networking with manager types.
some people see 'career growth' as opening up a new technical manual and acquainting themselves with new stuff.
I think it's import to differentiate; networking with managers and going to industry-specific (or even company specific) seminars offers next to zero enticement for me, but I usually always have the time to read about a new language or tech.
In other words: If a growth opportunity arises, i'd rather it be personal growth.
It's like a law of technology. As technology increases the ability to surveil increases. Then we learn why we weren't surveiled in the first place. It was just a lack of ability - not laws, benevolence of government, etc. I cannot imagine a world 100 years from now without much more surveillance.
Literal thought police is not a crazy idea. That might only require more usage of something like nueralink and progress in processing signals from your brain.
I don't think AI introduces anything new. In theory, manager could pull the reports of their 4-12 people to see which programs are active and what websites they are using for how long once a month, targeting individuals that they are looking for a reason to bump. No AI needed.
Ridiculous tracking happened before AI too. Go read the book about Bridgewater, describing, among other things, how internal security worked when it was led by James Comey (yes, the one you know from the news, and was later FBI director)
What you’re concerned about doesn’t stop at the employer.
Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.
Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.
The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.
How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.
This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.
Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...
In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?
Well, at the risk implying intention and thus anthropomorphizing Larry... you know sharks don't eat, they simply consume food, like a fire consumes wood, this is what Larry Ellison advocates for:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
That smart TV you just got has ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), which takes a screenshot of what you're watching, twice a second, and sends it off to data brokers.
Why would you do that on the employer-provided device? I just use another laptop and my smartphone. I am even using headphones if I want to listen to something for privacy, no idea if my company would go as far as recording from my microphone but I am not willing to take the risk.
I have been working from home for the last 8 years but when meeting the team onsite I have seen people bringing small personal laptops and ipads so it seems quite common. Those days at the office were so sporadic that I could do with my smartphone only.
I've never seen anyone do that across almost two decades in tech, it's a security risk that would absolutely get you the wrong kind of attention in an organization that takes itself seriously.
Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.
> With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing
Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.
This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.
In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.
When AI takes all the jobs, it will also need to take care of supplying all the demand/customers, as humans will no longer have the resources for that.
Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.
And employees will employ robots to do hyper realistic work like activities to game the system. Here's an idea...... find good leaders who understand team building and culture and let the score take care of itself.
With companies enrolling AI to help look over the shoulder of their employees, I wonder how hard it would be to do some prompt injection just changing what is displayed in the surveiled screen for it to see. Potential for a new vulnerability vector?
> (IT pros tend to not talk about it much)
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.
In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.
> however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines
I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.
If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.
Other than adding buzzwords to a features list, I don't see AI really moving the needle here. As you've said, it's always been the expectation that employers are watching over their networks.
There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
> but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America
I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.
The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.
Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.
The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.
> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
This is a flawed argument, the current system gets rid of good performers all the time, and we have evidence of wage suppression, so employees don't get to negotiate on fair terms. You just get stuck in your pay band.
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
> IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
Even Non-FAANGs have banded, bounded comp. I remember discussing a compensation increase at a smallish, medium sized company, and was given the usual "The book says the comp for your role is between $X and $Y, and you're at $Y." They even showed me The Book! Like, ok so you're just willing to lose me over this stupid book then? (Narrator: There were willing to) I dipped over to FAANG for a pretty nice increase. I guess FAANG uses a different book...
It's just a larger book, yes. No matter how much value you deliver the most important value is that you are Smaller than the Big Guy, and at google he makes a lot more money.
It would be a hard model to pick up and move over and just drop into place. The trades that have union halls for carpenters, electricians, etc., aren't normally working in anything as unstable or dynamic as tech startups. If I try and think back to how things were thirty years ago I don't think it really applies. Unions are for big shop floors where bosses could fire you on a dime and replace you and then you're SOL. Skills in high demand 30 years meant fine, you could just go work somewhere else just as easily. Who expects to be in the same place for 35 years anyways?
A union is merely a group of people who agree to work together for a shared benefit. That doesn't mean that there cannot be individual negotiation, nor does it mean you can't get rid of bad performers. There is no reason why it would need to hurt the startup ecosystem either.
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
Take the National Basketball Players Association as an example. They represent NBA players and collectively bargained for a minimum wage, benefits, and processes to address grievances with management. NBA players aren't all paid the same, and they don't have identical terms in their contracts. The union sets the floor.
For a more down to earth example, my graduate school student union also only negotiated the floor of pay and benefits. The compensation for graduate students varied easily by 50% over this floor, even students in the same department.
Yes, but that does not preclude layering individual bargaining on top. The collective bargain could simply be something like "you may not track employees", while still leaving each individual employee to negotiate the compensation they seek. If the workers would rather be completely hands-off they could defer all negotiations to a negotiator, but, again, the workers make up the rules. It's whatever they want.
OP is just using "union" as a way of articulating that he's extremely unhappy with current corporate behavior, and also that he wants there to be some sort of at-scale, easy-ish way to correct that behavior.
The funny thing most Americans don't realize about 996 in China is that the Chinese, while very hard workers, don't work the same way as Americans do. For example lunch is expected to be good (and taken pretty seriously) and followed by an in office nap. This is not some secret thing either but typically encouraged by the company (most office works will have blankets, pillows, eye masks etc at their desk).
Even the Chinese don't believe you can grind at your desk non-stop for 12 hours.
Don't get me wrong, 996 is awful, but the American re-imagining of it is even worse.
Right, let's do absolutely nothing so we can fire Joe, who's been underperforming for the last two quarters (because of healthcare issues, life affordability, lack of direction, burnout, etc).
> or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
In my native country unions have crippled the job market and most of my peers don’t see any benefit from them, we actually hate them for the most part.
Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians.
> In my native country unions have crippled the job market
We have to think about this critically. If there were no unions, do you believe there would be more jobs for everyone? If so, what is happening to those jobs? What is happening to the demand that would support those jobs? I'm missing some of the logic here, so want to understand better.
My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
Any review that's not a hard metric can be gamed to be about anything the reviewer cares about.
They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.
And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
From what I've observed, the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy. By comparison, in most service sector jobs you have no authority or autonomy but also little responsibility. In other engineering disciplines you have a lot of responsibility but also much more authority and autonomy.
> the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy
Very apt description of "Big Tech". That's why I decided to leave as well. This combination just creates a lot of stress and it was negatively impacting my health.
That makes no sense. They didnt provide any specific reasons they dont like the tech industry. All of their reasons can be applied to just about any industry lmao. The core issue is and always will be capitalism
I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
When I was younger (50ish now) I could juggle full time work with side projects but I just can't now, especially with family demands. Full time work is pretty much burning me out. I'm close to leaving and starting a mobile food cart.
When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life.
I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.
I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that.
But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
In my case, I need to get a head MRI every 6-12 months for the rest of my life, and regular oncology visits forever. I'm still going to investigate the feasibility of going without insurance; the possible ER visit is what really has me worried.
The concern isn't really about the cost of one-off procedures (which ARE ridiculous and potentially financially bankrupting in the USA), but the low burn of everyday office visits and specialists. $50 office visit here, $250 specialist visit there, $1000 in blood tests there... Without any chronic health problems, my family's out of pocket $5-10K a year or so with insurance. Without insurance (or on a crappier plan), it'd be even worse.
It really depends. I went without insurance for a couple years. I was able to bring every single price with the provider directly. As soon as I told them I wanted to pay cash in advance they had discount and other incentives.
In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year).
There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents.
Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
One of my good friend "Metamate" argument is that "if he doesn't do it, another engineer will do it. Might as well take the money".
But at least they all seem to acknowledge it is a terrible company and they know they are working on something terrible (which is beyond me why you would accept to do that).
I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
Pixels? Everywhere? Pre-installed FB mobile apps that harvest contact info and build shadow profiles of non-FB users?
Doesn't seem like serious analysis. Raising a family is important, but so is how you fund it, right? Still ok to fund it if you're robbing banks, but it pays for college? That is your logic it seems.
There are many, many ways to provide for one's family, Meta is but one. And I say this as a father providing for mine.
Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger I saw the petroleum industry as evil, but if there was no demand there would be no supply. Who is to blame? Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
> Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
So you changed your beliefs to ease some cognitive dissonance and help yourself sleep at night. Seems normal and expected to me, people do that all the time. These companies actively advertise and lobby to get their product into more peoples hands and quash alternatives.
When the entire world has been built around requiring you to use petroleum to go places and build certain things, and requires you to use certain software to interact with everyone, I have sympathy for users whose hands are often tied from the get-go. I can't blame them when "the system" (a reductive phrase, but it works for this response) is setup as such.
That there's demand isn't necessarily the fault of the user, in many cases it's the fault of industry. At this point, at least for petroleum, it's a feedback loop - we built infrastructure around it, people became dependent upon it because alternatives are limited, the dependence creates demand, and that demand is used to justify continued production.
The petroluem industry then just has to work hard to squash alternatives, as it very much has, thereby leaving the user with little to no choice.
Well, this fellow is a programmer, that's his trade and at his level he would be working for one of the fangs or whatever they are called these days and they're all creepy as far I am concerned. Which one of them is 'responsible'? Google and its pervasive tracking and selling of our data to all and sundry? Microsoft and "let's make our AI addictive"? Working for Amazon and contributing to the gutting of small businesses and bookstores? ... Really, you speak as if you have slept through the past 26 years in this field.
> Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
Really? It's like me complaining that my pot and smoking habits were due to evil designs of their vendors. I take full responsibility for taking those initial puffs knowing full well that they were addictive and not good for me.
p.s. my general point is this: The entire industry was pushing developers to think nothing of 'ethical concerns' and 'just move fast and break things'.
And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
(Anyone working for "AI" companies here complaining about Meta? ...)
>And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
This particular discussion is about Meta, hence the focus in these comments. My views (and I'm sure the views of many others here) do, however, apply broadly to much of what you refer to.
That comment about me sleeping through the past 26 years? I'd say the same about all of the companies you cited, they've all had their own broad negative impacts.
Edit: Further, the marijuana comparison is a bit weak (as an aside, I'm a former pothead myself, who made the choice to start and stop). The world hasn't structured itself to the point where most people are required to smoke pot to do everything they need to do. The world has structured itself to require Meta products be used in many instances, lest you lose access to information from certain sources or the ability to communicate with others. "The system" pushes people to it, and it tries it's damndest to keep you there once you arrive.
If you are trying to say that it's not just Meta but all tech giants, you have an oddly defensive way to make that point.
Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!
Facebook is forcing people to use Facebook. If there were realistic alternative social network systems that allowed account migration with contacts and messages, Facebook would be dead in the water.
You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.
There are tons of good reasons to work for Meta. You can work on interesting projects, build your resume and network, work on interesting engineering problems, learn from other people, and of course, they pay very well. People do need to support their family, secure their retirement and so on...
Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.
Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...
Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
Well not in bulk to its advertisement competitors as you seem to suggest. But as a different revenue stream, data collectors sell the collected information. Don't be naive, of course they do, first customer are governments.
This is a pretty uncharitable perspective. Most folks I know working at Meta or Amazon aren’t morally bankrupt. They just have kids, debt, poor parents with health problems, etc. They work at Meta to support their loved ones. And it’s not like you can walk onto the street and just wave down a morally superior job with similar pay and benefits. Blame the tech oligarchs, not the workers.
This an ad company that proveably, willingly targeted insecure children. You could write the same things about Northrop Grumman or Palantir. I mean corporations were never angels, but how software engineers can work anywhere else with similar features... just why.
Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
Meta isn't nowhere near cigarettes manufacturers in terms of damage. Tobacco kills millions every year. Meta may need even more regulation, and you can argue that social medias aren't the greatest invention, but I don't think they are that bad.
There's no mental gymnastics here. I draw the line differently than you, that's all. I'm not a big fan of Meta and their products, I would be happy to work there anyway for the reasons I mentioned. But I wouldn't work for let say Marlboro.
I think one could make a hypothetical case that working at a cigarette company in 2026 is a more morally justifiable position than working at meta in 2026, because cigarettes as they're regulated today generally only affect adults, only affects those who opt in, and kills people on average near the end of their lives.
Meta's decisions affect everyone, even non-users, because of their outsized impact on society. But they also have way more users than cigarettes, and deliberately prey on children and teens in ways that could affect them their whole lives (see recent lawsuit).
I would struggle to judge anyone working for either of these companies. I think the blame lies at the top, or is shared by all of us for failing to build a better society which prevents such exploitation.
Measuring damage to society, or the degree of moral bankruptcy in a company's leadership, is a very difficult thing to quantify.
So, I agree with you that these are personal choices, and everyone will draw the line differently based on who they're comfortable working for and what they're comfortable contributing to.
Maybe not in the millions, but Meta is certainly not free from bloodshed. For example, in efforts to promote "engagement," they left the rollout of Facebook in Myanmar dangerously unmoderated, and (at least according to claims by Amnesty International[1]) are at least partially responsible for the genocide of the Rohingya there, which saw the tens of thousands of deaths.
People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you
After 5 years, you'll have an extra $1M in savings, and you can safely pay yourself 4% or $40k each year in perpetuity without doing any work.
This is also a really extreme version of the prisoners dilemma. In the standard formula, there are 2 prisoners, so it's somewhat practical to not defect, but there are hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates for working at Meta in these roles, so your personal decision to defect or not has likely no effect on the ultimate outcome. I.e. for the second option to work, you actually need to organize a unified labor movement with no defectors, which is probably impossible.
This is a tough one because I've been there. I have worked for orgs that don't align with my values, but when you're in there you aren't thinking that you are contributing to the absolutely horrible crap they're doing. You just keep telling yourself, "I just do this one little thing." And that's enough to convince yourself that it's ok. You're keeping your values and morals intact.
Saying that, I'm sure if more of them had options they'd jump in a heartbeat.
One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is.
Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.
This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!
But if you work in tech your rent barely makes a difference?
If you are a senior engineer and make 350k$/year (Meta is more like 500k$/year) and you pay 5000$/month for rent and could potentially pay 2500$/month instead in a MCOL, that's only 30k$/year of savings? Negligible compared to your income.
And on top of that most companies will cut your income for moving to a MCOL/LCOL by more than those savings.
Apart from housing the costs aren’t that much more. You pay the same to travel. You pay the same to buy stuff online. Food is maybe slightly more but it’s not that significant.
Once you get past being able to afford housing it’s insanely lucrative. It’s harder for entry level people of course.
I have had that discussion multiple times with people. They all seem to think you absolutely need to live in a 5 bedroom 5m$ house in Palo Alto (because how else are you going to live?).
But if you rent a normal 2BR for 4000$ in the Bay area, and could potentially rent the same for 1500$ in a LCOL, that is a minimal saving compared to your income. Everything else stays mostly the same. An on top of that most companies will give you a paycut.
But for some reason people think you are going to be a king just by moving to LCOL. I think it is the opposite
Now, if you get bamboozled into buying a 5000 sqft house like the average american does, then yes, big savings in a LCOL.
The Scene:
Gavin’s development team complains that his new tech ("The Box") is antiquated. He fires back in frustration: "Why did you all take my money then, you entitled little pricks? You all think you’re John Lennon until someone waves a dollar in your face!"
Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels.
Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?
Of course there is more to life than money, but people still need some base amount of money to live safely, especially if you have a family. If you are working in SV then your "big" salary does not go very far, I know lots of developers making $350K and have very little savings cushion, and these are not people just blowing money.
Most big enterprises get really good at paying you just enough to live comfortably, but not enough to give you financial autonomy. This makes the "why do you still work there" question land as naive most of the time.
I turned down a 285k/yr +MM RSU staff engr offer from Google in 2021.
I’d probably still be in that job and would have a few million in the bank (instead of $10,000) if I had taken it, but I would have sold out my principles.
I think this is a unrealistic point of view. If Meta really were as draconian and toxic as many people make it seem, most smart people would have left. Market is tough right now, but then there were other times when jobs were booming. And people still joined Meta. Money is one big aspect.
I am not saying Meta is a paradise. I completely want Meta to face their reckoning for what they have done to the world, but painting it as like a prison camp is misplaced I feel.
How can you say the smart people haven't already left? The only people comfortable working at Meta are comfortable with a company that enabled then profited off a genocide, has mass teenage girl misery machines, invested in companies whose products caused users to kill themselves, worked on systems that helped erode democracy across the world.
I'm sorry but if you're at meta it's not because you are smart, it's because you are a human that derives money from ruining lives. Thinking has very little to do with situation outside of deciding how much greed you're entitled to for the human misery you personally create by enabling such a system.
I understand your point of view. It's not possible to execute a high growth company like Meta without extremely smart, high IQ individuals. And they are OK with the harm Meta is doing. My point was that Meta is bad, but the perception that it routinely abuses employees is misplaced.
A few years on a salary like that and you may find that you can live fairly comfortably for a long time… in a place where the cost of living and housing are inexpensive.
I have an aunt who is quite old, who has been living for decades in a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. I suspect few people reading this will think that's any kind of an "escape plan", but I have been jealous of her seemingly contented and relaxed retirement for a long time now.
Perhaps you have to weigh it against, "working in the industry you hate for an other decade or two." Could you enjoy yourself in your retirement in your trailer? Is there something more you need to enjoy your retirement?
Most people at Meta (or other FAANGs) are caught up in the game. I have witnessed this first hand in the bay area.
They forgot what the end-goal is. They are just on the hamster wheel waiting for the next vest or next promo so they can brag they were made "staff" or "director". Every other discussion was about artificial levels and other corporate BS that those companies put in front of you to keep you grinding.
Meanwhile when you ask why not retire now that they saved 10M$. Most of them have no idea what they would spend their time doing. Their biggest achievement and satisfaction is to play that artificial money game.
I'm exaggerating for (poor) comedic effect, as Meta has to pay more to attract people. Every time they've ever tried to recruit me I've lol'd at them and said I would never work there under any circumstances.
I mean... their stock is up more than 1,000% since 2014. Anyone who has been there for a few years should have multiple refreshers that have grown significantly in value.
This seems like rhetorical question where you know the answer.
Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.
Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.
Why not sponsor my free software work instead of downvoting? I wouldn't have to choose between getting rich and doing the right thing if I was making 200kUSD/year on my AGPLv3 programming language work. I'm currently making around $24/year.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like:
engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
Nazis or not, I’m pretty fed up with that glaze of a quote that goes something like the most brilliant minds of my generation are occupied with optimizing ads. There’s no condemnation, just a wistful yearning for the big brains to be unfettered from their big wage enslavement to save us. It speaks to a craven culture where intelligence is the only praiseworthy trait and character is not even a concept.
You think people raised in such a culture will save you? More likely they’ll be hooked by the next moneybag or hoodwinked by some insane philosophy (Libertarianism, AI Singularity, Effective Altruism...).
In the US, if you quit your job, you lose access to many benefits, including affordable health care. It might be hard to get a loan for a car, to find an apartment, etc. This is systemically set up this way, including making sure employment doesn't get too low, which would give more power to employees.
I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.
These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.
I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.
Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???
I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...
All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.
And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...
If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...
If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...
If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...
Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.
By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
I have a friend that worked in NYC in part of the DOE (not a teacher, but something adjacent). Its a union position, so during COVID when everyone was getting remote, her profession got remote too.
53 minutes per week.
53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.
This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.
I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.
Or just other companies. Not every company does this insane level of tracking. People at Meta put up with it for the salary. There are lots of insane things people pursuing FAANG comp seem okay with enduring. There are plenty of much more relaxed environments where you may only earn a couple hundred grand a year, which of course is just awful (/s).
If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.
So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.
Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)
Is it not obvious to the Meta employees that the purpose of this data is to replace them? Combined with the job cuts... surprised they haven't revolted or unionized already
Part of me says that they have no grounds to be upset considering how much large scale surveillance and tracking they impose on their users and so many other people online. (The rest of me understands that this is bogus and that it's important to nip this in the bud now)
So employees unhappy about being tracked are expected to explicitly draw attention to the times their doing something where they’re uncomfortable about being monitored?
This has got to be something a blue haired HR person came up with
If your company provides a phone or computer, you should never use it for anything other than work. Not because of any moral obligation, but because it's a big security risk for you.
Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.
Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.
These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.
They should just create a leaderboard of how many minutes opted out this week/month...
Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!
> Now, according to Reuters, external, new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!
Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
Is Metas tracking more obscene than the traditional tracking suites at large corps like Crowdstrike?
In 2017 I recall on launching a tor browser and in 15 mins physical security came to me that something fishy was going on.
Meta isn't alone in the strategy, but are probably the most effective in implementation. JPMC has extensive monitoring and I don't think they have any restriction.
This does make me chuckle. The workers for facebook inc. who make write the very software that spies on everybody is up in arms about being spied on. They forget what a grifter that the Zuck is.
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
Work wants me to use a phone for work, they get me a work phone. Or I dont do it.
Why? If you have ever had to go through discovery, Youd know. Company I worked for got sued by Oracle for bullshit licensing (aws RDS licensed oracle is evidently NOT for commercial use, sigh).
And know what they do for all engineers maintaining? They subpoena EVERYTHING.
If you did personal stuff on work machine, your personal stuff is now in lawsuit scope.
Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department
So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.
> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.
Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash, describing work in "Fed Land"...
'''
Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
'''
Truly terrifying. I'll admit I was expecting one of the near-15.62 options to be "acceptable". How wrong I was; I should have seen that coming.
As one of the below comments says, you just don't know what level of snooping is going on. If you're reading this $CEO, hi!
> occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section
No eye tracking in this dystopia I guess.
Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”
Weirder than having a character just named Y.T. ?
'Yours Truly' seems banal when the main character is Hiro Protagonist.
Self-debasing levity is one of the many reasons Snow Crash (1992) is a great reaction to Neuromancer (1984).
Makes me wonder what it’s like to identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Or Thanos wasn’t so bad. Those rebel scum had it coming. Homelander is the good guy!
>identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea!
Are there many stories where the bad guys create the metaverse? AFAIK, Stephenson coined the term in Snow Crash and there it was built by the main character and his buds.
The Matrix, I suppose? Though I think Zuck's (immediate) vision and who he identifies as is way more Hiro Protagonist or James Halliday.
You might be right. It’s been a while since I read snow crash. I just remember the metaverse as a sort sad state of society, but I don’t remember if the evil corp stuff was in there or just in the world at large
Every story, even ours, needs a bad guy. Best villains don't think they are villains. They just do what they must/should/want (in that order, depending on their intensity), because they can.
or you know, naming your company PALANTIR
I had no idea it was a lord of the rings reference. Here’s an apt quote from wikipedia: “The [palantir] stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented.”
Or, Anduril.
All the techbros love them some Lord of the Rings.
> All the techbros love them some Lord of the Rings.
While being completely oblivious to the literary themes. But as the meme goes, tech bro philosophy is just sophomore know-it-all-shallowly-ism.
Because reading deeply would require spending more time, which is a well-known anti-pattern.
This is the reality for many low wage workers today. Amazon drivers are on strict schedules and are watched at all times. This isn't fantasy, this is reality. It just hasn't gotten up the chain to effect the average HN reader yet.
It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.
I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.
On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.
I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.
Device management is definitely a big hole to punch into each machine, but, once you're above a handful of staff, managing devices manually is not really tenable, and I do think the restrictions provided by device management have tangible benefits (it's amazing what people will download and run without a thought).
Arguably the risks of the MDM should be assessed and mitigated with some kind of defense in depth approach—highly sensitive things like bulk wipe disabled with multi-person approval required to re-enable, hardware MFA requirements, anomaly detection + alerting for weird behavior, etc etc. I'd argue the risks stem more from badly configured MDM where a compromise of one sysadmin's browser has a company-wide blast radius, rather than the fundamental presence of device management itself.
I think I'm probably coming at this from a different perspective than IT people.
I've worked on IoT products where we've deployed fleets of thousands of devices without user interfaces placed all over the world in random, inaccessible places, hanging off cellular radios. We're definitely not managing those manually. Architecting management systems for that is always interesting. Sometimes the question would come up, "why don't we do X?" where X necessarily included the ability to brick the entire fleet (and probably kill the company) in 5 minutes. My philosophy was that certain things are too dangerous to exist, no matter how useful they might be.
Are you IoT devices ALSO used by humans directly, where they would be forced to have some admin permission to do their work if there was no MDM system?
MDM are clearly a possible SPOF for certain attack vectors, but are also the only defense against others (unless you want to hire a legion of IT helpdesk specialists)
There are also individual-level risks. If you capture everything, you might capture bank account numbers when setting up direct deposit or credit card numbers from corporate purchases (these are clearly valid uses of company equipment). In a only slightly less valid use, you might submit a medical claim (using a company benefit), and surveillance software gets part of your medical record.
There are underappreciated liabilities companies take on with this monitoring.
Yeah, many companies don't want the liability issues. Like what happens if I open my bank account on my work computer? You could argue I can expect someone to be watching but I have no warning that someone is? Here in the EU that would probably be an easy lawsuit.
Why would you ever login to a sensitive account on a device you don't own and have root on? Like I trust my employer not to do anything shifty with my banking info, if I were to use it, but I'm not going to take that chance for a dozen reasons.
> Why would you ever login to a sensitive account on a device you don't own and have root on?
You mean like the phones that everyone uses with banking apps?
I don't. No financial transactions for me on something so easily lost or stolen, with any number of possible exploits lurking out there. Phones should be treated as compromised from day one.
I have my problems with this as well, but at least no one else already has root on my phone.
You probably use direct deposit in which case your employer already has your banking info
They have my account and transit number and stuff, sure, that's different than my username and password for online banking. We print them out on cheques that can be (reasonably) safely given to my plumber.
patio11/bitsaboutmoney has some good writing about this
In most cases, that's an external payroll service, not the actual employer that has that info.
People often have accounts at multiple banks…
your employer knows how much they paid you and what account they paid to. They don't know your balance, where else you might be getting money from (selling science fiction short stories eh, Cosgrove?! This job should be enough for you!!), that you have donated money to the Democrats recently!! We suggested that was bad!! And lots of other things that come under banking info.
What are the reasons?
Can’t speak for the EU, but the companies I’ve worked for in the US explicitly state what they do not track in their privacy/use policy when giving out laptops/phones/tablets.
E.g. their anti-virus or firewall system may ignore URLs related to banking, medical, or political affiliation and chose not to log or decrypt that traffic
Once I was trying to find a scene from a TV show at work for a joke with colleagues, and the quote I used ended up triggering a very NSFW search. Did not get fired, not even talked to. Thank goodness!
A lot is tolerated, until they want to get rid of you. But in the EU i'm pretty sure they can't use regular non-compliance stuff (general browsing, etc) in evidence. In DE you can't even identify an individual.
Moreover: what is the upside?
Spying on employees is not free. If you want to spend serious resources doing it, there has to be an upside.
How do you expect an employee to prove their banking actions on the company computer were spied on? I imagine this impossible to prove.
If the employer is spying on everything, it's quite easy.
In discovery you can ask for the records. Of course you would need some initial evidence to show it’s likely it exists.
By having it in a small window that's always on the screen.
Isn't Facebook training their AIs on their finest engineer's computer use so the AIs can become better computer users?
In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher productivity (perceived, as whats measured no longer ends up being a useful metric) and control and urge people to do more of what they desire.
And my curiosity is: does what Facebook desire align with what the humans who work for Facebook desire? I think with AI, that's a no. The company desires as low a labor/workforce/compensation cost as possible, while the humans desire as much compensation as possible.
I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.
There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.
> like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work
It's not inconvenient to bring a phone, but it is very inconvenient to have to conduct personal business on a phone rather than on a laptop.
Nonetheless, I agree that it's a bad idea to conduct personal business on an employer-owned machine.
But I don't want to pretend that it's super convenient to have to carry a second laptop, either.
> I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.
Interestingly, I have a similar career and I have never ever split personal and work businesses on different notebooks/phones. On the other hand I would never even consider working with a company that monitors my screen or has insight into the computer I'm working on.
I'm the same.
When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.
[late edit: I meant work travel]
Last time I travelled for work I brought only my work laptop.
But I do commute on bicycle with both in a bag clipped to a child seat. Combined weight of the devices is 4kg.
I don't generally bring either. If I'm traveling, I'm on vacation.
I believe they do not bring work laptop. A separation is a separation.
Travel doesn’t always mean vacation, or work. For me, it’s rarely only one.
I very rarely use my personal laptop. I stream on my phone, if I want a bigger screen, I either cast or use the app on the TV. So for me it's work laptop and two phones, not bad at all for the peace of mind. I literally turn off work. I used to run mixed, and I really wish I had changed earlier.
I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.
Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.
Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.
"your employer won't provision you a Linux with root" - there's your problem!
In the years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, I was writing code at a massive bank. Didn’t have an iPhone yet and Gmail was blocked on the work computers, so I’d step across the street during the middle of the workday to sign into a law school library and use their computers to check my personal email. A lot of friends still didn’t want to spend money on per-message SMS fees so I could find out if anyone was inviting me to do something after work in my Gmail inbox (a lot of us used Gchat in those days but the only way I could access it was on a desktop/laptop, no mobile yet).
I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.
I do the same. Its very easy today with portable devices and plentiful mobile data. I have my personal phone and personal laptop, connected to mobile data, for lunch breaks or the odd search I need to do during the workday. My work laptop and associated accounts are strictly for work activities and information.
Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.
I also find this weird. Even though the companies I worked for didn’t have any crazy rules or restrictions (never had phone from work), but I never used my work laptop or computer for anything personal. I have friends doing their own side projects on theirs. Even though in the countries where I worked/work they have to let you know what they track if they track, I still remember one of my contracts that stated that any work done on the work computer belongs to the company. That’s why, even if maybe it’s not legal for them to say that, I never ever used any subscriptions, hardware or tools provided by my employer for personal use.
My last employer had a very generous moonlighting policy. You could absolutely use their hardware.
Agree with this. The > the organization the > the big brother dystopia. Big corps that say use outlook will ask for admin permissions on your cell which include delete access, reading media, etc if you want to use teams/outlook. So i never opt in. Probably good for work life bal. They can call me in emergencies.
I’d note that my concern with Meta tracking my keystrokes isn’t that I’m mixing work with personal but that Meta is an intensely metrics driven culture with KPI optimization fixation (iRev is the heart of all their decisions, even at the cost of doing things that are clearly wrong, likely illegal, or immoral). The place is a pressure cooker of performance management and while this data likely is used for model training, there’s zero chance it’s not also going to be used to measure your relative performance and determine when to fire you because you aren’t conformant enough with whatever bizarrely poorly thought out metrics some VP pushed some director pushed some M2 to conceive of then everyone nods and signs off on as long as they can wave a data scientist at it to say “statsig,” with the ultimate goal of producing a classifier that can automate the process of end to end reviews (how do you really do a 50:1 IC:Manager ratio without performance review automation?)
They’ve already structured the model to be a binary classifier - every six months they’re going to let go 10% for performance, and they are flattening the performance range in the upside to show no signal. They billed this as a great thing for ICs because they won’t have to compete for classification and there’s no bubble zone of impeding doom, but they gloss over the top grading range went from 10->15% per year (in 2025) to 21% (as the 10 percent twice a year compounds) performance cuts, and they try to hide the fact LLMs will be doing the reviews for managers (not to mention a 50:1 IC to manager compression implies letting go 80% of managers - so the managers are now in full on squid game mode using ICs as meat shields).
So I think the “will they see my personal stuff” is not at all what is going on inside the mind of meta employees. It’s the fact they’re being fed into a stochastic parrot wood chipper.
Especially because many employers use security tools that log your activity, including keystrokes.
Which means your keystrokes (passwords, cc numbers, anything you type on your work laptop) may now be sitting in clear text in logs somewhere.
I fully agree with you.
I think large majority on HN works in cool startups without IT rules that could even cost their job when failing security assessments.
Another one, there is no cowboy instalation of dependencies, the CI/CD servers can only talk to internal nexus, jfrog,...
Yeah, that's pretty clear. There's a comment saying that just managing PCs is risky. I don't think most people here understand how 1000s of devices are managed in larger companies and the damage an average non technical user is capable of if just left to their own devices.
I'm the exact same way. If it's a work device, I'll literally never use it for something personal. Why give them any ammunition? Plus, laptops are so thin these days it's not really a burden to pack two, or use a phone like you said. It's one of those things where it almost certainly doesn't matter... until it does.
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.
Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"
Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.
But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.
I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.
And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.
Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.
Same principle as too much security. One of the things that contributes to this is that the safety side usually doesn't have any incentive to reign itself in.
There is an old adage for that general idea.
"The treatment should not be worse than the disease"
What a relief, it won't be 100% but just to the extent that Amazon does it in their warehouses.
>Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.
Yes, and they will do it anyway, as long as they can afford it, and even if they can't.
Business decisions aren't always optimal.
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
You can rest assured a company firing you for what they saw while surveilling your work computer will not be so stupid as to reveil this fact. That would indeed be a liability for them. They will simply invent a different reason for firing.
Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as much as possible.
Well, usually they would never tell the person the real reason for the firing or layoff anyways. there's no benefit for them to tell you, it just increases liability.
Or they just find another way to show you did it - the idea is very similar to how law enforcement uses illegal spying. They simply find another way to prove what they already caught you doing - it’s called Parallel Reconstruction.
parallel construction
I think the keyword is “can”.
It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
It’s not true that it’s not allowed in the EU. There’s the Barbalescu ruling which is case law that says employers must fulfill a bunch of criteria around informing employees, the necessity of the monitoring, and they are not allowed to impose blanket bans on private use, but it is still legal to monitor employees in the EU.
It can be legal, but demonstrating the necessity is a significant bar.
Yeah, I know they can. I just can't believe it's normalized and that people simply accept it. Good on the EU for pushing back.
I guess from my perspective there are even more dire problems in the US that I'm surprised people accept. But it seems they don't know, or care, or know that they should care.
Perhaps it's the lack of proper authoritarian regime in the US' past that drives this. I believe the temporal proximity of such makes people aware of, and angry against, the many traps that such systems leave in their "law", so you can be imprisoned anytime for anything. EU has a bunch of countries with varying degree of such past.
Most people need to work to support themselves so it's quite inconvenient to single-handedly solve all of the problems in the US. Suggesting people simply don't know or care is very naive.
I’m sympathetic to this view, butI don’t see any evidence they actually do know or care though. This (workers rights) gains no traction in US elections. You have this weird macho culture around it, almost like complaining about this abuse would be a sign of personal weakness.
You should expect it because it's the safest position to work from. Don't use your work device for non-work, they may be tracking something or everything and do you want that in that record.
Additionally, don't use personal devices for work, but that is because of other reasons.
I'm surprised you can't believe it.
Most companies large enough to have their own IT have monitoring and know what's going through their network. The larger the company, the more likely they're watching. I've personally never seen that information used against anybody unless they were looking at shady stuff (porn, hacking websites, etc.), but I'm sure they're monitoring.
Even outsourced IT for small companies will often put "security" software like Sentinel One or Sophos on machines they manage, and those can track and block web traffic, report everything being installed, and even MITM HTTPS traffic.
Personally I don't see the big deal. If I don't want my employer watching something, I don't do it on their network. I monitor what's going on in my tiny home network, and I expect anybody administrating larger networks does the same thing.
Why the scare quotes around security?
It is allowed under certain circumstances.
I am pretty sure there would have to be a court order, i.e. a severe violation would have to have good ground to be suspected.
No court order. Just a suspicion against an individual, and a process to follow. Plus, you have to tell them. There is no mass surveillance without notice, correct.
> It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
Its allows in most of the EU apart from germany where there are strict limits.
however you can still record what your users are doing for purposes of detecting fraud. This is where it differs from the USA, where they can do anything because they have no data protection laws.
I always assume it is the case that my company will spy on my work computer. It’s naive to assume otherwise; there are just too many incentives/externalities for it to not happen given enough time and a reasonably funded infosec department.
if it's a device provided by your company, it's very likely it'll have some spyware on it.
Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
This is the fruition of Microsoft's dream, since it's the most obvious way to drive copilot usage in a way that A) burns mad tokens, B) is actually useful to paying customers.
Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.
> It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).
Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.
We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.
Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.
Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.
My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.
Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?
Yep.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
This sounds like the "everything you create in your own time is company property since we cannot distinguish if what you do in your own time isn't company related" clause in some contracts. Under no circumstance is it actable where I live, but it can sure scare the hell out of people and presents a line of thought. Yes, some companies think they can own copyright on the things you write at home.
I call that the "shower clause," because the company claims ownership of any ideas you come up with, in the shower.
I think, like noncompetes, there's limits to how far the company can actually enforce it, but they bank on the fact that they have lawyers on permanent retainer, and you don't. Even standing up for your rights, against blatant corporate overreach, is expensive.
I always ask companies to remove that clause from contracts, I think all offers I've ever got had that clause, but also 100% removed it on request.
Interesting. I've always asked, too, and 0% were willing to make any changes to their policies. I suppose it has a lot to do with the size of the company and your relative bargaining power.
Probably cultural norms and location play a huge role here, I'm in a nordic country and feel like trust is generally high and people are reasonable.
My bargaining power is not that high and managed to do this from tiny companies to global corporates.
If my contract says that I must be available immediately at any time, do I have ANY personal time? Or is all of my time their time too?
Absolutely. Your personal time is that time which, in retrospect, the company didn't need you for. It's strictly a backward-looking definition.
In the US, the enforceability of that sort of thing depends on the state. Generally, if that state enforces non-competes (other than for selling the business, or managerial staff), then it most likely enforces "you're salaried, so everything you invent belongs to us".
The legal term to search is "work for hire".
> When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks
I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this. It's not surprising you don't get officially dedicated "study time". The vast majority of programmers aren't hourly anyway, so officially sanctioned study hours doesn't even fit in with how work is prioritized. Not to mention the optics look terrible if your team is ever behind your manager is now in the awkward position have having "non-work" on record as part of what you're getting paid for.
Just bring your book with you and read during slow period, when a job is running, model training etc. You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.
I've never had official permission to study at work about I've also never had any problem studying at work. If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
My last employer had a monthly Day of Learning where you could study whatever you want (so long as you could sort of tie it back to work). It was great. They’d organize presentations from employees but you could spend the whole day essentially however you wanted.
> If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
Or if they do, it's a toxic workplace.
>I've never understood why employees push for official approval like this.
>I've never had official permission to study at work. I've also never had any problem studying at work.
In this case, since the manager was the one pushing for "personal growth", asking ensured that
- the activity is sanctioned, and one doesn't have to bet on nobody asking questions
- it effectively gets put on record, in a quantifiable way, and can be used for promotion/salary boost at performance reviews
- it also enables others to do the same, even if they're not "shipping consistently and high quality" (in the eyes of the management). So that they could reach that level, y'know. Learning that benefits the employer isn't a reward one should earn for high performance.
- in case of denial (as in this case), one gets a clear signal about where the priorities are and what's bullshit, and can act accordingly. By updating their resume, at the very least.
>If you're shipping consistently and high quality
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this "if" kills your entire point.
>You're not hourly anyway, so in theory any non-project time is your time anyway.
I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but when I was in Google, we were told to bring our entire selves to work.
That's to say, while you were there, Google has your entire self. You're no longer a mere person, you're a Googler, and there's no such thing as non-Googler time while you're on the payrolls.
The consequence of "you're not hourly" isn't that you get to have non-project time to yourself. It's that you don't get to have your time. All your time belongs to the company; you are bringing your entire self to work.
Sure, you're allowed to spend some of that time doing other things. The Corporate will graciously avert their eyes. You will be held accountable for what you do in that time though.
You better answer those stupid emails while you're loafing, because you weren't hired to answer emails, and the engineer's time is expensive. You are expected to demonstrate impact for every hour spent. Answering emails is not impactful. You still have to do it though.
So you do it in your "off the clock" time, when the corporate isn't looking.
There is no such thing as YOUR time. There merely is time when your performance is measured and judged (working hours).
It's showtime, when you compete with other employees for that promotion (or simply not being fired).
It's a precious resource that you have to ration for the pirouettes that get the most points from the judges, like coding and leading and doing other things with demonstrable impact.
An athlete doesn't stop being an athlete when the competition clock stops. Oh no, that's when the real work begins.
That's why the parent commentor asked.
The real question was: do I get points from the judges for this move?
If the answer isn't a "yes", then the judges expect you to do it in your "off work" hours when they aren't evaluating your performance. If they see you doing it, it will adversely impact your score.
You're only supposed to do things that count during the preciously small 8-hour window when The Corporate deigns to see what you're doing.
The things that you have to do to showcase this performance are the things you do on your own time.
You don't watch the Olympics to see the athletes do all the things that they have to do to be high-performing athletes.
There's a word for people who, say, only play soccer when there's a judge present to count the score, and go back to their lives in the end of the day.
The word is amateurs.
Amateurs don't get paid. And they're certainly not needed in the club.
It's not just Google, of course, other companies are the same or worse. The corporate chat shows who's online and when, inviting the employees to the after hours game.
Oh, and the best part is having everyone judge each other.
The Corporate promises not to look when the clock stops, but your peers aren't beholden to the same promise.
They will look, and they will judge.
No, the corporate doesn't expect you to help out a colleague in the "off hours". But someone's going to write that peer feedback in the end of the perf period. And you don't want to be the unhelpful one.
You can't complain about being messaged in the off-hours because the corporate says that you a aren't required to answer messages at that time, so there's nothing to complain about.
Prisoner's dilemma ensures that the judgment never stops.
The competition keeps going; you're just being judged for different things.
And none of them is the process personal growth.
During work hours, you'll be judged for how much you "personally grew".
But nobody wants to watch the paint dry or watch the grass (or you) grow.
This is when I would look up the nearest course for the subject that the job would want me to study, including the cost, time and travel distance. Talk is always much cheaper than the real thing.
I wonder what happens when you have kids and you can no longer spend your free time to keep learning new things that your company wants you to know.
(Just kidding, I know what happens... they will fire you and hire someone who doesn't have kids.)
Either get let go, fall behind, or pick up an expensive stimulant habit to try and eek out a little productivity at unholy hours.
> (Just kidding, I know what happens... they will fire you and hire someone who doesn't have kids.)
And then the boss will blame young people for collapsing the demography and endangering the country.
You either fall behind/into a rut, or like you said, get let go. It’s scary
I'm experiencing a similar thing- company pushes online lectures but don't even think about putting them on the sprint board.
Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
[1] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping
[2] bhmt.dev/blog/ctf
[3] bhmt.dev/blog/feeds
One time my manager messaged me panicking about a big nextjs vulnerability. I told him, no worries, I saw it on HN and we patched weeks ago. He told me to use HN at work as much as I want.
No. You should grow professionally outside of work by also following the work-mandated professional development plan. And you will be punished if you don't do it, or you do it at a pace that doesn't match expectations.
You know, don't forget the details.
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
Seems like that'd just discourage people from going above and beyond at work. Why do more than the bare minimum to avoid being fired if nothing else you do counts?
>Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
(This is from Office Space for those who don’t know. Hilarious scene with Jennifer Aniston)
The Flair scene? Oh seriously than got me so much vicarious embarrassment, I feel uneasy just at the thought of it.
[Jennifer Anniston flips Mike Judge the bird, on-screen #inLove]
>>"How's THIS for expression?!? I'm sick and TIRED of this ... job!"
----
I will never go above&beyond again – for any corporate entity – ever again. You can blame past corporate bullies, not yourselves.
Or grow professionally during work hours using a personal device.
You're 100% supposed to grow professionally outside of work.
And catch up on chores during work hours
What else would you do when i̶t̶'s̶ c̶o̶m̶p̶i̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ claude is generating?
Says who?
pass
This is such a curious POV for me - I'd genuinely like to hear your thoughts on this. Who owns your career growth if not.. you?
(If you don't desire to grow your career, that's a viewpoint I can entirely understand.)
some people see 'career growth' as going to seminars and networking with manager types.
some people see 'career growth' as opening up a new technical manual and acquainting themselves with new stuff.
I think it's import to differentiate; networking with managers and going to industry-specific (or even company specific) seminars offers next to zero enticement for me, but I usually always have the time to read about a new language or tech.
In other words: If a growth opportunity arises, i'd rather it be personal growth.
Maybe? And yes.
It's like a law of technology. As technology increases the ability to surveil increases. Then we learn why we weren't surveiled in the first place. It was just a lack of ability - not laws, benevolence of government, etc. I cannot imagine a world 100 years from now without much more surveillance.
Literal thought police is not a crazy idea. That might only require more usage of something like nueralink and progress in processing signals from your brain.
I wonder if the AI's that replace us will be periodically web surfing and checking HN as part of their daily work flow?
Only on their 30-minute breaks, perhaps.
I don't think AI introduces anything new. In theory, manager could pull the reports of their 4-12 people to see which programs are active and what websites they are using for how long once a month, targeting individuals that they are looking for a reason to bump. No AI needed.
Ridiculous tracking happened before AI too. Go read the book about Bridgewater, describing, among other things, how internal security worked when it was led by James Comey (yes, the one you know from the news, and was later FBI director)
What you’re concerned about doesn’t stop at the employer.
Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.
Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.
The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.
How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.
This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.
Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...
In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?
We’re in weird times.
Well, at the risk implying intention and thus anthropomorphizing Larry... you know sharks don't eat, they simply consume food, like a fire consumes wood, this is what Larry Ellison advocates for:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
That smart TV you just got has ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), which takes a screenshot of what you're watching, twice a second, and sends it off to data brokers.
Why would you do that on the employer-provided device? I just use another laptop and my smartphone. I am even using headphones if I want to listen to something for privacy, no idea if my company would go as far as recording from my microphone but I am not willing to take the risk.
You bring a personal laptop to work with you?
I have been working from home for the last 8 years but when meeting the team onsite I have seen people bringing small personal laptops and ipads so it seems quite common. Those days at the office were so sporadic that I could do with my smartphone only.
I've never seen anyone do that across almost two decades in tech, it's a security risk that would absolutely get you the wrong kind of attention in an organization that takes itself seriously.
So I assume your company that take itself seriously ask you to leave your personal smartphone at home.
Personal laptops go on guest wifi with zero access to company resources, just like personal phones
+ everybody working in tech has a large mobile data plan, no reason to even connect to the wifi guest network.
Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.
> With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing
Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.
This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.
> Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
What else am I supposed to be doing while Cursor does its thing?
In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.
When AI takes all the jobs, it will also need to take care of supplying all the demand/customers, as humans will no longer have the resources for that.
Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.
And employees will employ robots to do hyper realistic work like activities to game the system. Here's an idea...... find good leaders who understand team building and culture and let the score take care of itself.
With companies enrolling AI to help look over the shoulder of their employees, I wonder how hard it would be to do some prompt injection just changing what is displayed in the surveiled screen for it to see. Potential for a new vulnerability vector?
Reading hacker-news is work; and never tell my Boss otherwise.
Or, the tracking won't change much, it'll be the big-brothering that will dramatically accelerate
> (IT pros tend to not talk about it much) > In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.
In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.
> however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines
I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.
If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.
Other than adding buzzwords to a features list, I don't see AI really moving the needle here. As you've said, it's always been the expectation that employers are watching over their networks.
There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.
> employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
And the location, yes, your physical location as well
Work will even flag you for you using a VPN on your phone, e.g. if you check the company Slack.
If you can afford it, set up a proper trust fund for them.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
You realize as a worker you're allowed to demand better working conditions right?
which is why unionization and labor groups exist... because a worker demanding things does jack shit by itself.
Sure, I'll get right on that.
> but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America
I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.
The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.
Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.
The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.
> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
You got this!
> now at a community-owned grocery co-op
I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?
Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!
>I had been used to six figure salaries
Great post but this is what it reduces to.
99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.
This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
That's lovely
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
The best way to unionize is to follow what Mahatma Gandhi did: Non-cooperation movement.
It consists of two broad strategies:
1. Consumer Non-Cooperation (Boycott): Boycott of stuff sold, or given by these companies, irrespective of how attractive it is.
2. The Constructive Program (Self-Reliance): Building and supporting alternatives, even if they cost you a little bit more.
All it needs is little self-discipline and a very very tiny bit of sacrifice on daily basis.
https://www.nextias.com/blog/non-cooperation-movement/
Massive individually coordinated group actions only work is very dire circumstances which means for most everyday things they cannot be relied upon.
We are headed there.
A heavily unionized tech industry over the last 30yrs would be an interesting counterfactual.
IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers
Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
This is a flawed argument, the current system gets rid of good performers all the time, and we have evidence of wage suppression, so employees don't get to negotiate on fair terms. You just get stuck in your pay band.
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
Enrolment in computer science skyrocketed five-fold from 2009 to 2024. Dropped 15% since, for obvious reasons.
> IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
Even Non-FAANGs have banded, bounded comp. I remember discussing a compensation increase at a smallish, medium sized company, and was given the usual "The book says the comp for your role is between $X and $Y, and you're at $Y." They even showed me The Book! Like, ok so you're just willing to lose me over this stupid book then? (Narrator: There were willing to) I dipped over to FAANG for a pretty nice increase. I guess FAANG uses a different book...
It's just a larger book, yes. No matter how much value you deliver the most important value is that you are Smaller than the Big Guy, and at google he makes a lot more money.
It would be a hard model to pick up and move over and just drop into place. The trades that have union halls for carpenters, electricians, etc., aren't normally working in anything as unstable or dynamic as tech startups. If I try and think back to how things were thirty years ago I don't think it really applies. Unions are for big shop floors where bosses could fire you on a dime and replace you and then you're SOL. Skills in high demand 30 years meant fine, you could just go work somewhere else just as easily. Who expects to be in the same place for 35 years anyways?
A union is merely a group of people who agree to work together for a shared benefit. That doesn't mean that there cannot be individual negotiation, nor does it mean you can't get rid of bad performers. There is no reason why it would need to hurt the startup ecosystem either.
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
Isn’t Collective Bargaining a cornerstone of the Union pitch?
Take the National Basketball Players Association as an example. They represent NBA players and collectively bargained for a minimum wage, benefits, and processes to address grievances with management. NBA players aren't all paid the same, and they don't have identical terms in their contracts. The union sets the floor.
For a more down to earth example, my graduate school student union also only negotiated the floor of pay and benefits. The compensation for graduate students varied easily by 50% over this floor, even students in the same department.
Yes, but that does not preclude layering individual bargaining on top. The collective bargain could simply be something like "you may not track employees", while still leaving each individual employee to negotiate the compensation they seek. If the workers would rather be completely hands-off they could defer all negotiations to a negotiator, but, again, the workers make up the rules. It's whatever they want.
>IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
Why in the world are you convinced that you as an individual have a stronger bargaining position than the entire labor pool?
How in the world does that work in your head?
> I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
Then don't? How is this a union issue?
OP is just using "union" as a way of articulating that he's extremely unhappy with current corporate behavior, and also that he wants there to be some sort of at-scale, easy-ish way to correct that behavior.
> bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China
I don't strive for 996. Is this really the bar we want to meet?
The funny thing most Americans don't realize about 996 in China is that the Chinese, while very hard workers, don't work the same way as Americans do. For example lunch is expected to be good (and taken pretty seriously) and followed by an in office nap. This is not some secret thing either but typically encouraged by the company (most office works will have blankets, pillows, eye masks etc at their desk).
Even the Chinese don't believe you can grind at your desk non-stop for 12 hours.
Don't get me wrong, 996 is awful, but the American re-imagining of it is even worse.
> can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI
This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
Right, let's do absolutely nothing so we can fire Joe, who's been underperforming for the last two quarters (because of healthcare issues, life affordability, lack of direction, burnout, etc).
> or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
In my native country unions have crippled the job market and most of my peers don’t see any benefit from them, we actually hate them for the most part.
Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians.
Tons of evidence out there, especially in EU.
> In my native country unions have crippled the job market
We have to think about this critically. If there were no unions, do you believe there would be more jobs for everyone? If so, what is happening to those jobs? What is happening to the demand that would support those jobs? I'm missing some of the logic here, so want to understand better.
My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
Perhaps you mean "fire" not "lay off"? Generally layoffs are structured to avoid discrimination risks.
But your performance reviews don’t have anything to do with age, so I don’t see how that could be.
Any review that's not a hard metric can be gamed to be about anything the reviewer cares about.
They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.
And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
Sure, but using the above comment as reference, I think it is increasingly a lot of things that are off-putting in the industry.
Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.
I dream about it everyday.
I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.
It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
> I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends.
> experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table.
Sorry for the dark humor, but I'm imagining you meant collecting the pocket change that fell out on the operating table.
None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere
From what I've observed, the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy. By comparison, in most service sector jobs you have no authority or autonomy but also little responsibility. In other engineering disciplines you have a lot of responsibility but also much more authority and autonomy.
You really put it succinctly and very accurately, I imagine you read this somewhere?
> the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy
Very apt description of "Big Tech". That's why I decided to leave as well. This combination just creates a lot of stress and it was negatively impacting my health.
Came here to say exactly this.
If people don't like building tech that's one thing.
But the problems most of this thread are discussing are just people and organizational problems.
If you want to live and make money you're probably going to have to put up with some level of bullshit.
Find the company with the least of it and enjoy the rest.
This is the kind of attitude that keeps the world the way it is.
That makes no sense. They didnt provide any specific reasons they dont like the tech industry. All of their reasons can be applied to just about any industry lmao. The core issue is and always will be capitalism
Yeah my job sucks shit too, I just make 1/3rd as much as MANGO software engineers.
Should’ve learned to program. At least writing python scripts with Claude has automated a lot of my job away.
Anyway, there’s a support group for your shitty job, it’s called the bar, and we meet daily.
When it comes to the shit imposed to the rest of society, and the shit imposed on office workers, it's worse in this industry.
I'd challenge you to point out specifics that are industry wide, not just one company that happens to abuse its employees.
Agile is used to create a perpetual sense of crunch since you are never more than ~2 weeks away from your deadlines.
No it’s not unless you’ve never interacted with people in other industries. It’s just as bad there, unless you have specific reasons for tech
I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
People want to make 500k$/year without the inconvenience of having a job.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
When I was younger (50ish now) I could juggle full time work with side projects but I just can't now, especially with family demands. Full time work is pretty much burning me out. I'm close to leaving and starting a mobile food cart.
When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life.
I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.
I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
how much have you been saving so far? I talk to a lot of people that saved 10M$ and still feel this is not even close to enough.
If $10M or, hell, even $2M doesn't seem close to enough then there is no amount to satiate one's thirst for more money.
>and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements
How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Why does everyone absolutely need insurance?
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that. But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
In my case, I need to get a head MRI every 6-12 months for the rest of my life, and regular oncology visits forever. I'm still going to investigate the feasibility of going without insurance; the possible ER visit is what really has me worried.
I’m with you but my partner doesn’t really agree so here I am paying the $40k/yr.
Feels so insane reading those kind of numbers as a Canadian.
Yep, I could probably retire already if it wasn't for the crippling cost of health insurance and healthcare in general (Thanks, USA).
Did you think about doing procedure abroad where they routinely cost 5% of the US cost?
The concern isn't really about the cost of one-off procedures (which ARE ridiculous and potentially financially bankrupting in the USA), but the low burn of everyday office visits and specialists. $50 office visit here, $250 specialist visit there, $1000 in blood tests there... Without any chronic health problems, my family's out of pocket $5-10K a year or so with insurance. Without insurance (or on a crappier plan), it'd be even worse.
It really depends. I went without insurance for a couple years. I was able to bring every single price with the provider directly. As soon as I told them I wanted to pay cash in advance they had discount and other incentives.
In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year).
There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).
Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
100 is no big deal
I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.
I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
Do you live in a city? That's my number one concern. I don't need a lot of luxury but living in a major cosmopolitan city is a non-negotiable for me.
You could live anywhere. Just need to budget for it. Obviously living in Williamsburg is going to be a different than living in Houston.
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
Nothing solid, but if I have to spend 55-62 pouring beer at my local pub to cover medical insurance, I won’t be sad.
Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
Is that research still happening?
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
Fair point. I don't know the answer to that question but we definitely live in one of the worst timelines right now.
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill
I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
> but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts
And what job class was this?
probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.
I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.
I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents.
At least that’s what the CEOs seem to expect.
Interesting that they never seem to think the executive suite is overpaid -- for some reasons it's always everyone _else_ who is overpaid.
Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
> how many more years do I need to work in tech?
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!?
Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...
Let just Meta die!
The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
One of my good friend "Metamate" argument is that "if he doesn't do it, another engineer will do it. Might as well take the money".
But at least they all seem to acknowledge it is a terrible company and they know they are working on something terrible (which is beyond me why you would accept to do that).
Your friend's argument holds no water. None at all. That's not how morality and ethics work.
It doesn't matter, money is money. Without it your pretty much screwed in this world.
I used to think there was a solution to this but theres not:
There is no limit to human greed
I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
> Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
Pixels? Everywhere? Pre-installed FB mobile apps that harvest contact info and build shadow profiles of non-FB users?
Doesn't seem like serious analysis. Raising a family is important, but so is how you fund it, right? Still ok to fund it if you're robbing banks, but it pays for college? That is your logic it seems.
There are many, many ways to provide for one's family, Meta is but one. And I say this as a father providing for mine.
Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger I saw the petroleum industry as evil, but if there was no demand there would be no supply. Who is to blame? Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
> Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
So you changed your beliefs to ease some cognitive dissonance and help yourself sleep at night. Seems normal and expected to me, people do that all the time. These companies actively advertise and lobby to get their product into more peoples hands and quash alternatives.
When the entire world has been built around requiring you to use petroleum to go places and build certain things, and requires you to use certain software to interact with everyone, I have sympathy for users whose hands are often tied from the get-go. I can't blame them when "the system" (a reductive phrase, but it works for this response) is setup as such.
That there's demand isn't necessarily the fault of the user, in many cases it's the fault of industry. At this point, at least for petroleum, it's a feedback loop - we built infrastructure around it, people became dependent upon it because alternatives are limited, the dependence creates demand, and that demand is used to justify continued production.
The petroluem industry then just has to work hard to squash alternatives, as it very much has, thereby leaving the user with little to no choice.
Well, this fellow is a programmer, that's his trade and at his level he would be working for one of the fangs or whatever they are called these days and they're all creepy as far I am concerned. Which one of them is 'responsible'? Google and its pervasive tracking and selling of our data to all and sundry? Microsoft and "let's make our AI addictive"? Working for Amazon and contributing to the gutting of small businesses and bookstores? ... Really, you speak as if you have slept through the past 26 years in this field.
> Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
Really? It's like me complaining that my pot and smoking habits were due to evil designs of their vendors. I take full responsibility for taking those initial puffs knowing full well that they were addictive and not good for me.
p.s. my general point is this: The entire industry was pushing developers to think nothing of 'ethical concerns' and 'just move fast and break things'.
And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
(Anyone working for "AI" companies here complaining about Meta? ...)
>And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
This particular discussion is about Meta, hence the focus in these comments. My views (and I'm sure the views of many others here) do, however, apply broadly to much of what you refer to.
That comment about me sleeping through the past 26 years? I'd say the same about all of the companies you cited, they've all had their own broad negative impacts.
Edit: Further, the marijuana comparison is a bit weak (as an aside, I'm a former pothead myself, who made the choice to start and stop). The world hasn't structured itself to the point where most people are required to smoke pot to do everything they need to do. The world has structured itself to require Meta products be used in many instances, lest you lose access to information from certain sources or the ability to communicate with others. "The system" pushes people to it, and it tries it's damndest to keep you there once you arrive.
I agree other comapnies are just as culpable as Meta, but you think it's childrens fault they get addicted?
We barely know the damage social media does yet, it's not comparable to taking the first hit of drugs at all.
Agreed that tech workers need to take a look at themselves too, but also it's the execs and governments more too blame.
If you are trying to say that it's not just Meta but all tech giants, you have an oddly defensive way to make that point.
Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!
Come on now. You make it sound like this guy is “just scraping but trying to provide for his kids.” You don’t need an obscene salary to do that.
There are no other companies that would pay your friend?
Facebook is forcing people to use Facebook. If there were realistic alternative social network systems that allowed account migration with contacts and messages, Facebook would be dead in the water.
You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.
There are tons of good reasons to work for Meta. You can work on interesting projects, build your resume and network, work on interesting engineering problems, learn from other people, and of course, they pay very well. People do need to support their family, secure their retirement and so on...
Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.
Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...
Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption.
If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately.
Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix.
Amazon has hollowed out local retail/is also bad for society, though not on Meta’s scale. But you sell your soul more cheaply there.
not to defend zuck but its a common misconception that meta sells data
advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement
There is no misconception. Meta also sells data, next to selling advertising space.
no, it doesn't sell user data. or, where can I buy some?
Brokers. Acxiom and Experian for starters.
Heck, you can buy facebook datasets right now from brightdata.
https://brightdata.com/products/datasets/facebook
Don't you recall the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Meta sells your data. You're a fool to think otherwise. Data makes dosh, you can see any data for a price.
Apply for a job in the ci and a maybe?
They literally don't. Data is their moat; selling it would be counter to their financial success.
Well not in bulk to its advertisement competitors as you seem to suggest. But as a different revenue stream, data collectors sell the collected information. Don't be naive, of course they do, first customer are governments.
Why should anyone at all care about this distinction?
i care that my data isnt being sold
i dont really care that i get targeted ads, in fact i prefer targeted ads vs. ones that are of no use to me
Why wouldn't Meta also directly sell data if nobody cared about this distinction?
This is a pretty uncharitable perspective. Most folks I know working at Meta or Amazon aren’t morally bankrupt. They just have kids, debt, poor parents with health problems, etc. They work at Meta to support their loved ones. And it’s not like you can walk onto the street and just wave down a morally superior job with similar pay and benefits. Blame the tech oligarchs, not the workers.
"Supporting their loved ones" is doing a lot of moral heavy lifting here, though.
History's littered with people trotting out this line when they've valued luxury and status over morals.
The more you interact with something, the more you are part of it and help it prosper. "Blame the kings!" is a little bit too simple, imo.
When you are paid $500,000+ a year you lose the right to use the "I'm just supporting my family" excuse.
You sold your morals for a wheelbarrow of money, that is the end of the story.
There are many, many tech jobs at many companies (at least there used to be, until very recently).
“I work for one of the most evil institutions on the planet today because it is the only way I can support my sick parents” is an absurd excuse.
It's not actually that hard, most companies are morally superior to Meta. Even the other evil ones.
Hey, at least you're open and honest about being okay with contributing to such a global net negative as long as you get something out of it.
This an ad company that proveably, willingly targeted insecure children. You could write the same things about Northrop Grumman or Palantir. I mean corporations were never angels, but how software engineers can work anywhere else with similar features... just why.
Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
Meta isn't nowhere near cigarettes manufacturers in terms of damage. Tobacco kills millions every year. Meta may need even more regulation, and you can argue that social medias aren't the greatest invention, but I don't think they are that bad.
There's no mental gymnastics here. I draw the line differently than you, that's all. I'm not a big fan of Meta and their products, I would be happy to work there anyway for the reasons I mentioned. But I wouldn't work for let say Marlboro.
I think one could make a hypothetical case that working at a cigarette company in 2026 is a more morally justifiable position than working at meta in 2026, because cigarettes as they're regulated today generally only affect adults, only affects those who opt in, and kills people on average near the end of their lives.
Meta's decisions affect everyone, even non-users, because of their outsized impact on society. But they also have way more users than cigarettes, and deliberately prey on children and teens in ways that could affect them their whole lives (see recent lawsuit).
I would struggle to judge anyone working for either of these companies. I think the blame lies at the top, or is shared by all of us for failing to build a better society which prevents such exploitation.
Measuring damage to society, or the degree of moral bankruptcy in a company's leadership, is a very difficult thing to quantify.
So, I agree with you that these are personal choices, and everyone will draw the line differently based on who they're comfortable working for and what they're comfortable contributing to.
Maybe not in the millions, but Meta is certainly not free from bloodshed. For example, in efforts to promote "engagement," they left the rollout of Facebook in Myanmar dangerously unmoderated, and (at least according to claims by Amnesty International[1]) are at least partially responsible for the genocide of the Rohingya there, which saw the tens of thousands of deaths.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/5933/2022/en/
People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you
After 5 years, you'll have an extra $1M in savings, and you can safely pay yourself 4% or $40k each year in perpetuity without doing any work.
This is also a really extreme version of the prisoners dilemma. In the standard formula, there are 2 prisoners, so it's somewhat practical to not defect, but there are hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates for working at Meta in these roles, so your personal decision to defect or not has likely no effect on the ultimate outcome. I.e. for the second option to work, you actually need to organize a unified labor movement with no defectors, which is probably impossible.
This is a tough one because I've been there. I have worked for orgs that don't align with my values, but when you're in there you aren't thinking that you are contributing to the absolutely horrible crap they're doing. You just keep telling yourself, "I just do this one little thing." And that's enough to convince yourself that it's ok. You're keeping your values and morals intact.
Saying that, I'm sure if more of them had options they'd jump in a heartbeat.
One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is.
Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.
This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!
But if you work in tech your rent barely makes a difference?
If you are a senior engineer and make 350k$/year (Meta is more like 500k$/year) and you pay 5000$/month for rent and could potentially pay 2500$/month instead in a MCOL, that's only 30k$/year of savings? Negligible compared to your income.
And on top of that most companies will cut your income for moving to a MCOL/LCOL by more than those savings.
If anything it is an argument to stay in SV!
Apart from housing the costs aren’t that much more. You pay the same to travel. You pay the same to buy stuff online. Food is maybe slightly more but it’s not that significant.
Once you get past being able to afford housing it’s insanely lucrative. It’s harder for entry level people of course.
I have had that discussion multiple times with people. They all seem to think you absolutely need to live in a 5 bedroom 5m$ house in Palo Alto (because how else are you going to live?).
But if you rent a normal 2BR for 4000$ in the Bay area, and could potentially rent the same for 1500$ in a LCOL, that is a minimal saving compared to your income. Everything else stays mostly the same. An on top of that most companies will give you a paycut.
But for some reason people think you are going to be a king just by moving to LCOL. I think it is the opposite
Now, if you get bamboozled into buying a 5000 sqft house like the average american does, then yes, big savings in a LCOL.
Gavin Belson:
The Scene: Gavin’s development team complains that his new tech ("The Box") is antiquated. He fires back in frustration: "Why did you all take my money then, you entitled little pricks? You all think you’re John Lennon until someone waves a dollar in your face!"
Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels. Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?
There is more to life than money. I've turned down FANG roles my entire career, especially Meta. There is lot of work out there.
Of course there is more to life than money, but people still need some base amount of money to live safely, especially if you have a family. If you are working in SV then your "big" salary does not go very far, I know lots of developers making $350K and have very little savings cushion, and these are not people just blowing money.
Most big enterprises get really good at paying you just enough to live comfortably, but not enough to give you financial autonomy. This makes the "why do you still work there" question land as naive most of the time.
Lol you've turned down offers or recruiter reach outs? Two very different things lololol.
I turned down a 285k/yr +MM RSU staff engr offer from Google in 2021.
I’d probably still be in that job and would have a few million in the bank (instead of $10,000) if I had taken it, but I would have sold out my principles.
So yes some of us live by principles
Lol you went through the entire interview loop and only discovered at the end that you were interviewing at Google? Ya I totally believe you lol
Edit: lolol you've served in the military but Google is a step too far Jesus Christ poster child for irony.
Sometimes you need to realize you need to choose between having the cake and eating it.
Spy camera manufacturer workers complaining about office cameras....
I think this is a unrealistic point of view. If Meta really were as draconian and toxic as many people make it seem, most smart people would have left. Market is tough right now, but then there were other times when jobs were booming. And people still joined Meta. Money is one big aspect.
I am not saying Meta is a paradise. I completely want Meta to face their reckoning for what they have done to the world, but painting it as like a prison camp is misplaced I feel.
How can you say the smart people haven't already left? The only people comfortable working at Meta are comfortable with a company that enabled then profited off a genocide, has mass teenage girl misery machines, invested in companies whose products caused users to kill themselves, worked on systems that helped erode democracy across the world.
I'm sorry but if you're at meta it's not because you are smart, it's because you are a human that derives money from ruining lives. Thinking has very little to do with situation outside of deciding how much greed you're entitled to for the human misery you personally create by enabling such a system.
I understand your point of view. It's not possible to execute a high growth company like Meta without extremely smart, high IQ individuals. And they are OK with the harm Meta is doing. My point was that Meta is bad, but the perception that it routinely abuses employees is misplaced.
Median pay at Meta is $380k. Median. I'm sure it's high variance but I would put up with a lot for that kind of money
$$$,$$$
more like $,$$$,$$$.$$
All the more reason to head out.
A few years on a salary like that and you may find that you can live fairly comfortably for a long time… in a place where the cost of living and housing are inexpensive.
I have an aunt who is quite old, who has been living for decades in a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. I suspect few people reading this will think that's any kind of an "escape plan", but I have been jealous of her seemingly contented and relaxed retirement for a long time now.
Perhaps you have to weigh it against, "working in the industry you hate for an other decade or two." Could you enjoy yourself in your retirement in your trailer? Is there something more you need to enjoy your retirement?
Most people at Meta (or other FAANGs) are caught up in the game. I have witnessed this first hand in the bay area.
They forgot what the end-goal is. They are just on the hamster wheel waiting for the next vest or next promo so they can brag they were made "staff" or "director". Every other discussion was about artificial levels and other corporate BS that those companies put in front of you to keep you grinding.
Meanwhile when you ask why not retire now that they saved 10M$. Most of them have no idea what they would spend their time doing. Their biggest achievement and satisfaction is to play that artificial money game.
The mean became the end. Very sad.
You're saying the average dev at Meta is making 7 figures?
I'm exaggerating for (poor) comedic effect, as Meta has to pay more to attract people. Every time they've ever tried to recruit me I've lol'd at them and said I would never work there under any circumstances.
There are quite a few making that much yearly but not the average. Median swe at meta is almost surely >1MM net worth at least and maybe even 2.
I mean... their stock is up more than 1,000% since 2014. Anyone who has been there for a few years should have multiple refreshers that have grown significantly in value.
This seems like rhetorical question where you know the answer.
Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.
Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.
If you can hang, it pays great. I don't work there but I know some who do.
Have you tried finding a new job recently?
Yes, and I found one. It pays enough for having a very stable life, and in a company with ethics!
No reason to be that sarcastic, the job market is not dead (at least not in Europe).
Money. Even I would put up with this if they paid me enough.
Ick.
I'd down vote this if I could.
Why not sponsor my free software work instead of downvoting? I wouldn't have to choose between getting rich and doing the right thing if I was making 200kUSD/year on my AGPLv3 programming language work. I'm currently making around $24/year.
https://github.com/sponsors/matheusmoreira
In the end, most people choose money.
Maybe you should be asking that question on 1.3 acres and not here
Money and/or visa sponsorship obviously. Some things are more important than internet cool points.
You need to be more cruel if you actually want these people to quit.
Make them fear for their professional and personal reputations.
Make them embarassed to show their face or state their place of employment.
We need to treat these people like Nazis.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like: engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
We need to make Nazis fear for their personal safety.
We need to make engineers who work in surveillance or advertising ashamed enough to avoid putting that work on their resume.
I think that's a pretty big difference.
Nazis or not, I’m pretty fed up with that glaze of a quote that goes something like the most brilliant minds of my generation are occupied with optimizing ads. There’s no condemnation, just a wistful yearning for the big brains to be unfettered from their big wage enslavement to save us. It speaks to a craven culture where intelligence is the only praiseworthy trait and character is not even a concept.
You think people raised in such a culture will save you? More likely they’ll be hooked by the next moneybag or hoodwinked by some insane philosophy (Libertarianism, AI Singularity, Effective Altruism...).
In the US, if you quit your job, you lose access to many benefits, including affordable health care. It might be hard to get a loan for a car, to find an apartment, etc. This is systemically set up this way, including making sure employment doesn't get too low, which would give more power to employees.
Meta is still better than 80% of the companies. Other company spies on you, do micromanagement and still pay way less.
Pick your poison.
> I genuinely don't understand...
Really? Its quite obvious to me. They get astonishing resume and salary. That is until they get fired or burned.
> astonishing resume
Not sure about that one.
Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)
I'm trying to have sympathy for those who work there and are opposed to this, but the irony is so thick that it's a struggle.
I don't think they deserve your sympathy. I don't think there is an employee there that couldn't find another great job somewhere else.
I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.
These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.
I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.
Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???
I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...
All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.
And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...
If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...
If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...
If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...
Etc...
Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.
Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.
I think it's appropriate that a surveillance company should surveil its employees so they can get a taste of what they are contributing to.
2015 satirical article from The Onion: "HR Director Reminds Employees That Any Crying Done At Office Must Be Work-Related."
But the opt outs will, of course, be tracked. Choose to do it and it will go on your performance review.
I would bet that the 30 minute windows are tracked even more closely, just secretly.
Opt outs lower your KPI by a fixed value
If they give you shit for being opted out every day around lunchtime they would just find something else to give you shit about anyway.
O'Brien turning off the Telescreen.
"You can..."
"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever"
boot/server
The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.
By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
I have a friend that worked in NYC in part of the DOE (not a teacher, but something adjacent). Its a union position, so during COVID when everyone was getting remote, her profession got remote too.
53 minutes per week.
53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.
This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.
This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.
I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.
Broken record here to announce that there are countries that have labor laws that protect employees, which you can take an example from or move to.
best I can do is incoherent muttering about illegals and blaming all problems on them.
or voting for the evil person as protest against the lack of options, also super effective
Or just other companies. Not every company does this insane level of tracking. People at Meta put up with it for the salary. There are lots of insane things people pursuing FAANG comp seem okay with enduring. There are plenty of much more relaxed environments where you may only earn a couple hundred grand a year, which of course is just awful (/s).
The world smallest violin will be rendered in React... Why do these employees get this generous toggle, when we got zero minutes and a shadow profile?
Pretty sure Meta isn’t screen recording your laptop 24/7
Client side react with three state changes that makes the violin janky.
If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.
So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.
Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)
Is it not obvious to the Meta employees that the purpose of this data is to replace them? Combined with the job cuts... surprised they haven't revolted or unionized already
Very generous and 30 minutes more than Meta allows non-employees to opt out of Meta's tracking. A clear company benefit!
What a wonderful world we live in. And to think that all of this is largely self-inflicted...
Part of me says that they have no grounds to be upset considering how much large scale surveillance and tracking they impose on their users and so many other people online. (The rest of me understands that this is bogus and that it's important to nip this in the bud now)
So employees unhappy about being tracked are expected to explicitly draw attention to the times their doing something where they’re uncomfortable about being monitored?
This has got to be something a blue haired HR person came up with
If your company provides a phone or computer, you should never use it for anything other than work. Not because of any moral obligation, but because it's a big security risk for you.
Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.
Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.
The best part? Strikes work!
These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.
And who knows who gets to see the tick against your name as "opted out".
I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.
Meta: Just as incompetent as Microsoft, but somehow more evil!
They should just create a leaderboard of how many minutes opted out this week/month...
Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!
> Now, according to Reuters, external, new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!
30 whole minutes?! How generous.
No one mentioned Orwell so far?
Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
“It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour.”
Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
At what point does this company undo their name change that was aligned with them pivoting to the metaverse and virtual reality?
The cynic in me says Meta is culling the herd.
If you are being tracked all day long, just create a lot of discovery for lawyers in the future: "Mark asked me to x", "Mark asked me to do y".
Requires a functional legal system, so it seems unlikely to come into play.
Fact.
Is Metas tracking more obscene than the traditional tracking suites at large corps like Crowdstrike? In 2017 I recall on launching a tor browser and in 15 mins physical security came to me that something fishy was going on.
This degree of worker surveillance ought to be considered an active 2A situation.
Right.
Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.
If this is how they treat their employees, I hate to think how they treat their customers.
Meta isn't alone in the strategy, but are probably the most effective in implementation. JPMC has extensive monitoring and I don't think they have any restriction.
30 minutes of freedom! Hell yeah, sounds like a great place to work.
Man I was at a job where you had to install TimeBro and all 8 hours had to be accounted for, was annoying af thank f I don't work there anymore
The movie Antitrust but on steroids in real life. Also the Crossover white collar sweatshop ended up as trendsetter.
If you don't walk out after such rules, then what would you make to do so?
Sick company environment.
A taste of their own medicine. Turns out it is bitter.
This does make me chuckle. The workers for facebook inc. who make write the very software that spies on everybody is up in arms about being spied on. They forget what a grifter that the Zuck is.
In 1984, high ranking members of the party could turn off their telescreens for 30 minutes without suspicion.
That's generous!
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
This is great, I hope the people at Meta suffer as much as possible while working for them. They should introduce mandatory eyeball sanders next.
I was thinking of those eyelid holders from Clockwork Orange. That way you won't waste time blinking.
Working as a dev at Meta has become like working a call center. Zuck lost the plot.
Why would they care about software developers when they're busy replacing them with AGI?
Meta-stasis
Meta where anything goes absolutely for making money...
I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta
We already have a solution to this, though. It's called criminal law. Where do you draw the line if you monitor people doing HR?
AI? What happened to the Metaverse? I thought that was the future, mr Zuckerberg? What happened?
“When the facts change, I change my mind.” - Zuck, probably
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
I don't think there are legal concerns with employee tracking. I suspect it would still be legal if they didn't provide an opt-out.
This is the United States, land of the free and home of the slaves. Workers are subhuman here.
Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.
Ah, hyperbole. You must be from Reddit.
Since Meta workers are slaves, no one can blame them for their work or employer though, as you no doubt agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
They need to unionize.
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?
I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
That's very generous.
When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
How considerate
Back to work slaves!
do the meta employees that code these stuff also get tracked?
Just enough time to...
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours
Just don't blame me if your coding agent curses CEO and bypasses presubmits with dirty hacks a year later, I never volunteered to be a role model.
I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
Meanwhile… Alan Dye breathes a sigh of relief and resumes another 30 minute session of Minesweeper.
Work stuff stays on work property.
Home stuff stays on home property.
Work wants me to use a phone for work, they get me a work phone. Or I dont do it.
Why? If you have ever had to go through discovery, Youd know. Company I worked for got sued by Oracle for bullshit licensing (aws RDS licensed oracle is evidently NOT for commercial use, sigh).
And know what they do for all engineers maintaining? They subpoena EVERYTHING.
If you did personal stuff on work machine, your personal stuff is now in lawsuit scope.
Meta has written itself into a solid tyrant role. A million aspiring rebels are happy to play along.
I'm looking forward to the HN story sometime next year about employees being let go for opting out of tracking.
Can't you just use your own personal device and avoid the tracking entirely?
If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak
Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department
Somehow this is way more dystopian than not having an opt out at all.
The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?
Is this even legal in the EU?
Who in their right minds would trust this...?
Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.
So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.
> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.
This is a perfect reason to unionize. Individual action is never as powerful as collective action.
oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.
Surely they can't be serious?
It's part of meta-mating, we would not understand.
30 minutes??
That's too long!
Every minute of their time should be accounted for. They've signed up their life to Zuck's AI. How else we gonna get that Zuck AI ??
/s