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
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.
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.
It's been obvious for a long time that if you get a tech salary you should be saving for financial independence, meaning saving aggressively (above 50%) and investing that in a low fee tracker fund. Like planting a fruit tree, the best time to start was a decade ago and the second best time is now.
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.
The professions with the least negotiating power will have the most draconian "oversight". Imagine a cashier graded in real time on how many customers they smile at. Or tracking how many glasses in a restaurant are empty.
The Stasi of East Germany are a good example of old-school totalitarianism, where there was ambition to know every thought, word, and deed of the entire population, but there were severe limitations imposed by the available manpower. Roughly 1.5% of the population were informants, so you had okay odds of getting off easy in any given interaction, but patterns of behavior would inevitably be reported.
In AI supervised workplaces, you will be written up for a first or only offense. There may be enforcement thresholds that mean you don't hear about it immediately, but your every action is kept on record for when you do pass those thresholds. This sounds nightmarish, but you can always quit. The trouble is that billionaires dream of free economic zones and entire countries run this way, where they can finally feel "safe".
If Meta employees think these 30 minute surveillance breaks will actually be honored, think again. Just using one may trigger increased surveillance. Put yourself in your paranoid employer's shoes. If your employee says, "Hey, could you please not watch what I'm doing for the next little bit", that's when you make sure the hidden microphones and surveillance cameras are pointed right at them. Maybe you don't show anyone the evidence you collect during these surveillance "breaks", but you can always use other infractions to deal with employees for what they do when they think they're not being watched.
I work at Meta, on a key system in one of the main products.
I think when I went in, it was too interesting a system/opportunity to not do it. I was open to many roles and interviewing, and I just really wanted to understand how it works.
I don't touch ads, I don't touch integrity, or any of the "dodgy" stuff. I used to hate Facebook (and then Meta), and not have accounts on any of their platforms (bar Whatsapp), until I joined. I care about doing good and making a positive impact in the world (don't think I'll do much at Meta though). I'm probably the closest to a 180 on this you can imagine.
And... I don't have a good answer to why I still work there? It's an interesting anthropological exercise? My everyday is working with great people on a facet of a product that is entirely wholesome and inoffensive? When I came in, I found that my coworkers (locally, in my team/sister teams) were extremely talented, hard working, and cared a lot about the systems being good. Yes we are all pissed off by the recent changes, a couple people left (not mainly due to these changes though). I mean, the people just seem entirely normal? I don't imagine it's so different to working elsewhere. People are not obsessed with money or in any kind of dire situation, they are not grappling with hard moral questions about the value of money versus corrupting the world.
I guess I just feel like I'm not contributing to the awful stuff? I think you tend to get used to your everyday life and see the stuff around you in your little bubble. I guess if my part of the product gets better, Meta sells more ads and then has an incentive to do bad stuff, I suppose?
Anyway, yeah. Open to other convincing opinions about why I should feel awful for what I do and quit my job, and the right way to think about this (genuinely!).
Well I used to be pretty passionate about the work I was doing, and especially because I was learning from some incredible people.
....but both of those are gone to layoffs and restructuring, so it's basically just money, and I'm hanging on by an actively fraying thread of cowardice and burnout.
It's because it's a job that is known to pay very well, I don't know what's so difficult to understand about it? Like someone is just going to give up their $300K - $500K job over something like that; the kind of thing they'll put hand over heart and claim they'll do in posts like this one, but in practice people won't actually do, because the money is good.
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 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.
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).
139 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 83.7 ms ] threadMeta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.
I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.
"You can..."
"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"
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.
In AI supervised workplaces, you will be written up for a first or only offense. There may be enforcement thresholds that mean you don't hear about it immediately, but your every action is kept on record for when you do pass those thresholds. This sounds nightmarish, but you can always quit. The trouble is that billionaires dream of free economic zones and entire countries run this way, where they can finally feel "safe".
If Meta employees think these 30 minute surveillance breaks will actually be honored, think again. Just using one may trigger increased surveillance. Put yourself in your paranoid employer's shoes. If your employee says, "Hey, could you please not watch what I'm doing for the next little bit", that's when you make sure the hidden microphones and surveillance cameras are pointed right at them. Maybe you don't show anyone the evidence you collect during these surveillance "breaks", but you can always use other infractions to deal with employees for what they do when they think they're not being watched.
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!
I think when I went in, it was too interesting a system/opportunity to not do it. I was open to many roles and interviewing, and I just really wanted to understand how it works.
I don't touch ads, I don't touch integrity, or any of the "dodgy" stuff. I used to hate Facebook (and then Meta), and not have accounts on any of their platforms (bar Whatsapp), until I joined. I care about doing good and making a positive impact in the world (don't think I'll do much at Meta though). I'm probably the closest to a 180 on this you can imagine.
And... I don't have a good answer to why I still work there? It's an interesting anthropological exercise? My everyday is working with great people on a facet of a product that is entirely wholesome and inoffensive? When I came in, I found that my coworkers (locally, in my team/sister teams) were extremely talented, hard working, and cared a lot about the systems being good. Yes we are all pissed off by the recent changes, a couple people left (not mainly due to these changes though). I mean, the people just seem entirely normal? I don't imagine it's so different to working elsewhere. People are not obsessed with money or in any kind of dire situation, they are not grappling with hard moral questions about the value of money versus corrupting the world.
I guess I just feel like I'm not contributing to the awful stuff? I think you tend to get used to your everyday life and see the stuff around you in your little bubble. I guess if my part of the product gets better, Meta sells more ads and then has an incentive to do bad stuff, I suppose?
Anyway, yeah. Open to other convincing opinions about why I should feel awful for what I do and quit my job, and the right way to think about this (genuinely!).
....but both of those are gone to layoffs and restructuring, so it's basically just money, and I'm hanging on by an actively fraying thread of cowardice and burnout.
"You reap what you sow".
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
"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.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).