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Gen Z doesn’t seem to carry the millennial “making the world a better place” sensibility. They are all hustle culture, all the time. While I appreciate a lot of their culture this is the aspect that makes me nervous about the future.

by soared21 hours ago|

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The person responsible for high level corporate strategy at Meta is surely not Gen Z but boomer or millennial.

by WD-4211 hours ago|

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That person is surely a lizard person, generation or wider societal norms don't matter.

The point I was trying to make is it's becoming easier to staff companies with dubious moral standings.

by SoftTalker20 hours ago|

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Gen X

by devin23 hours ago|

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The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.

by esseph23 hours ago|

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> The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.

Yep. Once a couple of nerds got rich, it's what that segment pointed their money finders at. Advertising / marketing went with them.

It was a much nicer place for everyone when it was just the nerds who "had love for the game" :(

by dwayne_dibley16 hours ago|

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The same can be said about those working in the weapons industry etc.

by refulgentis23 hours ago|

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I'm 37, single, no family or extended family b/c of an...interesting...childhood.

Every day I understand more and more that I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't. (as with all things, it has its downside: nothing matters!)

I refused to get "stuck" in my hometown, which motivated me from college dropout to FAANG. Once I got there, it was novel to me that even rich people get "stuck" due to inability to imagine losing status, and also responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)

by deaux23 hours ago|

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Of course they have a choice, just like you do. You're making excuses for them that they don't need. They're actively choosing the "work at Meta and maintain lifestyle" rather than "don't work at Meta and maybe slightly change lifestyle". Every day, they make that choice.

Take all the people who get and got laid off. Their life goes on.

> responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)

99.9999% of people in the world who are married with kids, don't work at Meta.

by ipython22 hours ago|

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Unfortunately, because 99.999% of people in the world are “customers” of Meta, making profit for Meta, the 0.001% of people who do work at Meta are paid like relative kings.

by refulgentis22 hours ago|

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I think you're arguing with a point I didn't make. I'm not excusing anyone. I'm describing a mechanism in response to "I cannot comprehend why." Here, why people stay in situations they might privately find distasteful. That's a different project than assigning moral grades.

"They have a choice" is of course literally true. It's also not very interesting? Everyone always has a choice in the tautological sense. The question the parent raised was how do people live with it, and the answer is: the same way people live with all kinds of things. Incrementally, surrounded by context that makes it feel normal, with stakes that feel high relative to their baseline, not yours.

Your 99.9999% stat kind of makes my point for me. Those people also didn't get a $400k offer from Meta. The trap isn't marriage+kids, it's young + don't know better + land there + marriage + kids+a lifestyle calibrated to a specific income, plus the identity that comes with it. The golden handcuffs thing is a cliché because it's real.

None of this is a defense of working on things you find unconscionable. It's just that "they could simply choose not to" has never once in history been a sufficient explanation of human behavior.

by deaux21 hours ago|

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Your phrasing just didn't match your point.

> I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't

People working at Meta are almost without exception, people who have more luxury of choice than nearly anyone on the planet. It's very important to keep repeating this, and not say the direct opposite as you did. You can make your point without doing so.

by refulgentis21 hours ago|

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You keep restating that Meta employees are enormously privileged as though that contradicts me. It doesn't - it's the premise. The entire phenomenon I'm describing, in response to "I cannot comprehend why", is that privilege and felt optionality are different things, and the gap between them is where people get stuck.

by Dylan1680720 hours ago|

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So what you have over them isn't freedom of choice, it's knowledge of your freedom of choice. That's a very important difference.

by refulgentis19 hours ago|

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Partly, but that flattens it. It's not just awareness, the actual cost of exit is different. Me walking away from a job means I’m a little more lonely, that’s it. I never sold any stock until I left, I’m down $5K total in 3 years. A Meta engineer with a family walking away means pulling kids out of school, selling a house, a spouse's life getting upended. Those aren't the same choice with different levels of self-knowledge. They're materially different choices.

by jmye22 hours ago|

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> how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul

I mean, they don’t. There isn’t a single decent person who has ever worked at Meta, and that started long before this nonsense. The entire company is about the social destruction of its users. Everything anyone there works on drives towards that goal.