Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno

by reconnecting • 2 months ago

777 746 2 months ago

30 whole minutes?! How generous.

aquir• 2 months ago

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

qingcharles2• 2 months ago

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?

polyterative• 2 months ago

Sick company environment.

epsteingpt• 2 months ago

But the opt outs will, of course, be tracked. Choose to do it and it will go on your performance review.

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

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.

p0w3n3d2• 2 months ago

Opt outs lower your KPI by a fixed value

moffkalast• 2 months ago

I would bet that the 30 minute windows are tracked even more closely, just secretly.

yabones• 2 months ago

The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.

fnordsensei• 2 months ago

Right.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

igleria• 2 months ago

Surely they can't be serious?

dude250711• 2 months ago

It's part of meta-mating, we would not understand.

afavour• 2 months ago

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.

new_account_1044• 2 months ago

Meta: Just as incompetent as Microsoft, but somehow more evil!

netsharc• 2 months ago

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!

steve-atx-7600• 2 months ago

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.

majorbugger• 2 months ago

The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?

outside1234• 2 months ago

I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours

scandox• 2 months ago

O'Brien turning off the Telescreen.

"You can..."

"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"

skywal_l• 2 months ago

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever"

TheOtherHobbes• 2 months ago

boot/server

everdrive2• 2 months ago

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.

jryan492• 2 months ago

I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.

rwmj2• 2 months ago

I know someone who was a DBA and became an electrician and now retired after about 10 years doing that. By all accounts he loved it, spent his days doing odd jobs for old people while chatting with them over many cups of tea. However (here in the UK) you do have to obtain and keep up with certification.

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

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

inoffensivename• 2 months ago

In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.

fullshark3• 2 months ago

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.

wombat-man2• 2 months ago

Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.

andy99• 2 months ago

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.

JKCalhoun4• 2 months ago

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."

customguy• 2 months ago

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.

spicyusername2• 2 months ago

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.

Bnjoroge3• 2 months ago

None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere

rkozik1989• 2 months ago

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.

bdcravens• 2 months ago

I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.

fontain• 2 months ago

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.

_ZeD_• 2 months ago

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

9rx3• 2 months ago

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.

baggachipz4• 2 months ago

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.

rootusrootus3• 2 months ago

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.

JKCalhoun4• 2 months ago

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.)

mountain_peak• 2 months ago

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!

zingababba• 2 months ago

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.

scottious2• 2 months ago

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.

__MatrixMan__2• 2 months ago

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.

sollewitt• 2 months ago

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.

elevation• 2 months ago

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.

freakynit2• 2 months ago

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/

MattDamonSpace2• 2 months ago

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?

ar_lan• 2 months ago

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?

jmye3• 2 months ago

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?

taude7• 2 months ago

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).

coldtea3• 2 months ago

and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements

How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?

siren202617• 2 months ago

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.

corps_and_code• 2 months ago

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.

hgoel3• 2 months ago

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.

mrhottakes6• 2 months ago

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.

harimau7774• 2 months ago

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.

siren202617• 2 months ago

People want to make 500k$/year without the inconvenience of having a job.

grogers• 2 months ago

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.

sevenzero• 2 months ago

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.

alistairSH• 2 months ago

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.

gaoshan• 2 months ago

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.

anticorporate6• 2 months ago

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.

HugoTea• 2 months ago

That's lovely

moralestapia• 2 months ago

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.

reconnecting• 2 months ago

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.

feedyourhead• 2 months ago

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!

ryandrake9• 2 months ago

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.

9999000009994• 2 months ago

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.

Otterly99• 2 months ago

Sounds like you found peace. Good for you brother/sister.

What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.

deadbabe• 2 months ago

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.

adamtaylor_132• 2 months ago

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.

fuzzfactor• 2 months ago

What if you were a brilliant young engineer and you wanted to work for a growing company that is being run by sophisticated business leaders who are financially successful enough, and who respect and value their employees so highly that they can afford not to do any of this degrading employee tracking at all?

Is it too late for that already?

jm44• 2 months ago

Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.

dyauspitr7• 2 months ago

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.

dyauspitr7• 2 months ago

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.

ryandrake9• 2 months ago

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.

kilroy123• 2 months ago

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.

leetrout• 2 months ago

Hello! I am in the same boat. Got a kid under 10 too. But I have no regrets yet. The time off was priceless and we never know what tomorrow will hold. My dad was dead when I was 11 so I never planned on playing it safe to try to retire early or even on time.

Hang in there and stay with it.

phyzix5761• 2 months ago

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.

harimau7774• 2 months ago

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.

Hasz• 2 months ago

save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill

5701652400• 2 months ago

probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.

burner0003333• 2 months ago

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.

Mattwmaster58• 2 months ago

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?

fullstop• 2 months ago

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.

xXSLAYERXx• 2 months ago

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!

PlunderBunny• 2 months ago

I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed... Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!

m463• 2 months ago

Maybe you can stay in tech, but help undoing all the nonsense that's been done.

Make a dumbphone (that is actually smart and works for you). An open-source television. local AI models. A browser that doesn't spy on you.

rwmj2• 2 months ago

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.

anadem• 2 months ago

I'm SO happy to have retired a few years back!!

jordemort• 2 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 2 months ago

I was thinking of those eyelid holders from Clockwork Orange. That way you won't waste time blinking.

crispyambulance• 2 months ago

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.

tamimio• 2 months ago

employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded

And the location, yes, your physical location as well

kelseydh3• 2 months ago

Work will even flag you for you using a VPN on your phone, e.g. if you check the company Slack.

p0w3n3d2• 2 months ago

Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?

chaosharmonic• 2 months ago

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

Hamuko• 2 months ago

Maybe? And yes.

chrismustcode• 2 months ago

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.

taude7• 2 months ago

You're 100% supposed to grow professionally outside of work.

veber-alex• 2 months ago

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.

javcasas• 2 months ago

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.

mikeyinternews• 2 months ago

Or grow professionally during work hours using a personal device.

yoyohello135• 2 months ago

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.

Onavo• 2 months ago

If you can afford it, set up a proper trust fund for them.

apimade• 2 months ago

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.

fragmede• 2 months ago

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.

eecc2• 2 months ago

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"

izacus• 2 months ago

And yet the appratchiks will tell you "just bring another laptop", "just bring another phone", "just don't have health insurance" as the moat closes and you're being exploited on every step.

macNchz2• 2 months ago

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.

schnitzelstoat• 2 months ago

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.

mannanj2• 2 months ago

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.

wl2• 2 months ago

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.

caymanjim2• 2 months ago

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.

stingraycharles• 2 months ago

I think the keyword is “can”.

It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.

sunsetSamurai• 2 months ago

if it's a device provided by your company, it's very likely it'll have some spyware on it.

jbuhbjlnjbn4• 2 months ago

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.

catlifeonmars• 2 months ago

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.

jimmydddd• 2 months ago

I wonder if the AI's that replace us will be periodically web surfing and checking HN as part of their daily work flow?

daveshistory3• 2 months ago

Only on their 30-minute breaks, perhaps.

Nasrudith2• 2 months ago

Given the complaints about data-usage from LLMs, they'll be not only checking it but doing so frequently enough to make you look like an utter slacker as the near zero marginal cost means they can index it just in case it happens to have a useful answer to an obscure question.

prmoustache4• 2 months ago

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.

mrhottakes6• 2 months ago

You bring a personal laptop to work with you?

Qem• 2 months ago

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?

paradox242• 2 months ago

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.

mywittyname3• 2 months ago

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.

dheera• 2 months ago

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.

isodev• 2 months ago

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.

giancarlostoro• 2 months ago

(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.

flippyhead• 2 months ago

Or, the tracking won't change much, it'll be the big-brothering that will dramatically accelerate

phreeza• 2 months ago

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.

ZiiS• 2 months ago

Reading hacker-news is work; and never tell my Boss otherwise.

Balgair• 2 months ago

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.

alterom2• 2 months ago

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.

nonethewiser2• 2 months ago

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"

fullshark3• 2 months ago

What a relief, it won't be 100% but just to the extent that Amazon does it in their warehouses.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

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.

alsetmusic2• 2 months ago

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.

jasondigitized• 2 months ago

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.

ryandrake9• 2 months ago

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.

thinkingtoilet2• 2 months ago

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.

gausswho3• 2 months ago

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.

_-_-__-_-_-• 2 months ago

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.

ipsento6062• 2 months ago

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.

stephenhuey• 2 months ago

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.

pjmlp• 2 months ago

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,...

fnordpiglet• 2 months ago

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.

egorfine2• 2 months ago

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.

Esophagus4• 2 months ago

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.

mns• 2 months ago

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.

bubbleRefuge• 2 months ago

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.

simplyluke2• 2 months ago

Objectively I've always viewed this as the right approach, even just from an organization perspective. It's been something I haven't really adhered to in practice due to employers being pretty friendly with their tracking/policies while I've been there. It makes offboarding from a company way more disruptive when I have to remember to save my tax documents from the work laptop before I turn it in.

I do view it as having a certain level of discipline around work, and I think that can trigger a bit of insecurity leading to some of the hostility in replies you get to suggesting it as a pattern of behavior.

kstrauser• 2 months ago

Above all else, don’t work on personal projects on work machines. Even in California, with decent worker protections, that’s enough to potentially give your company ownership of your personal projects (because you developed them using your employer’s resources). Especially if you think there’s a nonzero chance your job would find your personal work useful or financially worthwhile, keep that stuff off your work laptop.

jlarocco2• 2 months ago

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.

rightbyte2• 2 months ago

Does that work with https and dns over https?

itake• 2 months ago

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.

mjanx123• 2 months ago

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.

rzz3• 2 months ago

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.

nonethewiser2• 2 months ago

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.

thatmf• 2 months ago

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?

th0raway• 2 months ago

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)

johannes12343212• 2 months ago

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.

This is all nice and good, till the employer needs a reason to fire an employee, then suddenly all such things become relevant. Maybe a bit less in at-will employment situations where there are low barriers for kicking people anyways.

reactordev4• 2 months ago

If you touch it, in any way, it’s probably tracking

toasty228• 2 months ago

With AI, this changes significantly

If the only reason you're free is because machines aren't good enough to get you yet you're fucked. You should be protected by laws, not by technological limitations.

simplyluke2• 2 months ago

We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking

I think framing it as inevitable is one of the biggest lies in the current AI narrative.

No, I think the companies that are likely to be successful in the next decade are the ones who respect the basic decency of their employees and treat them as competent and responsible professionals, just as I thought the same thing in decades past when friends told me of mega-corp jobs where they installed mouse-togglers to keep the spyware on their work laptops happy while they were AFK.

It's very similar to drug tests. I've always viewed them (outside of gov/clearance work) as a great sign of a culture that doesn't respect employees and sort of a lower-status portion of the industry.

Meta has made it very clear where they're headed, and it looks a lot like getting a job at Cisco in 2012. I wish them the best of luck in being able to hire the talent they'll need from Gen Z (now well into their 20s) to be successful in AI and other emerging technologies.

cheriot• 2 months ago

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.

beloch• 2 months ago

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.

LucidLynx5• 2 months ago

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!

SoftTalker2• 2 months ago

$$$,$$$

baggachipz4• 2 months ago

more like $,$$$,$$$.$$

Alifatisk• 2 months ago

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.

nicce2• 2 months ago

astonishing resume

Not sure about that one.

new_account_1044• 2 months ago

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.

foobar_______2• 2 months ago

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.

__MatrixMan__2• 2 months ago

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.

keybored• 2 months ago

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...).

fullshark3• 2 months ago

Money and/or visa sponsorship obviously. Some things are more important than internet cool points.

brk2• 2 months ago

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"?

not_the_fda2• 2 months ago

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.

mrhottakes6• 2 months ago

Sometimes you need to realize you need to choose between having the cake and eating it.

crymeth0t• 2 months ago

Have you tried finding a new job recently?

LucidLynx5• 2 months ago

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).

wombat-man2• 2 months ago

If you can hang, it pays great. I don't work there but I know some who do.

root-parent2• 2 months ago

Spy camera manufacturer workers complaining about office cameras....

nicce2• 2 months ago

In the end, most people choose money.

u1hcw9nx• 2 months ago

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.

matheusmoreira2• 2 months ago

Money. Even I would put up with this if they paid me enough.

jjulius11• 2 months ago

Ick.

officehero2• 2 months ago

I'd down vote this if I could.

yodsanklai3• 2 months ago

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...

yojo• 2 months ago

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.

poisonborz• 2 months ago

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.

jjulius11• 2 months ago

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.

fourside• 2 months ago

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.

rafterydj3• 2 months ago

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.

cute_boi• 2 months ago

Meta is still better than 80% of the companies. Other company spies on you, do micromanagement and still pay way less.

Pick your poison.

LucidLynx5• 2 months ago

Then I would prefer the 20% that pay less, but do something good for humanity.

rybosworld• 2 months ago

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

singron• 2 months ago

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.

lbrito4• 2 months ago

Those are easy choices, but unrealistic. Its also not like offer packages are a click away from showing into your email inbox, they are excruciating and highly random.

More realistic choices are: - $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

- 150k/year for 3 years followed by being laid off due to runway ending, Meta out-competing your company, or whatever. Despite you not helping build the thing meant to replace you, it still got built.

georgeburdell• 2 months ago

Maybe you should be asking that question on 1.3 acres and not here

jjulius11• 2 months ago

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.

AndrewKemendo2• 2 months ago

I used to think there was a solution to this but theres not:

There is no limit to human greed

yubblegum5• 2 months ago

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'?

siren202617• 2 months ago

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).

unethical_ban• 2 months ago

The solution is for a country to have decent baseline social services. The idea of hoarding money to ensure you don't die on the street or working a menial job at age 75 would diminish somewhat.

LucidLynx5• 2 months ago

I am very very sad reading that, indeed.

It is absolutely not what I think about "job" and "contributing to society": I would prefer to be paid less but work in an ethical company than the other people of this thread...

This is maybe why I am feeling so "disconnected" with Tech and devs today.

Computer0• 2 months ago

The comp-sci crowd has disgusted me since about when I graduated college. I do feel a certain sick sense of glee when these people who gloated they don't need worker protections and unions suddenly are left out in the cold. I hope the industry comes around, and stops acting 'better than' everyone who doesn't make 6 figures and get free catered lunch everyday.

jojobas2• 2 months ago

Well now it's money for doing something bad AND getting fucked, so something may change.

11101010010001• 2 months ago

There isn't a giant leap between the workers and the users. Stop using meta products period.

dfxm12• 2 months ago

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.

ryukoposting4• 2 months ago

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!

zeroonetwothree9• 2 months ago

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.

siren202617• 2 months ago

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!

DonsDiscountGas• 2 months ago

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

sidcool3• 2 months ago

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.

shimman3• 2 months ago

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.

spacechild14• 2 months ago

OP is not talking about the working conditions but the negative effects on society.

sidcool3• 2 months ago

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!"

josh_carterPDX3• 2 months ago

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.

spacechild14• 2 months ago

You just keep telling yourself, "I just do this one little thing." And that's enough to convince yourself that it's ok.

This is how I would have imagined most of these people think (except for the true sociopaths who just don't care).

Saying that, I'm sure if more of them had options they'd jump in a heartbeat.

Are you saying the people who have been working for Meta had no other options? That would be a ridiculous claim.

The point is that there have been many, many options and yet they chose to interview for Meta and take the offer.

roncesvalles• 2 months ago

Imposter syndrome is extremely common and a lot of people in high-paying tech jobs don't believe they can get something just like this elsewhere.

Also, Meta interviews are generally not regarded as too difficult, which further fuels the imposter syndrome (everyone has a sense that they're overpaid considering how easy it is to get in). I almost suspect this is a deliberate strategy.

ergocoder2• 2 months ago

Company devices are always tracked 100% of the time.

I don't understand why this is news.

vander_elst2• 2 months ago

The kind of issues that you might face if you have dependants could be something along the lines: well Timmy, we'll need to cut your leg instead of trying solution x that might save it, because I preferred not to accept a job that would have allowed to pay for that, due to the fact such a job didn't follow my ethical standards.

This is of course a very extreme and hopefully rare case, but I think that there's a large range of cases where unfortunately money does make a difference I a significant way. Additionally, I think that it also does make a huge difference if you are the only one affected by you decisions or someone else is.

I think when going for a decision for such a position, these and other points that consider the more practical implications might weight in.

tencentshill• 2 months ago

I would take a fat raise to work on some dumb tracking feature that probably won't make it to production. It's a huge bureaucracy, most people probably coast (as shown in HBO's Silicon Valley) and do very little actual work.

metamate100000• 2 months ago

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!).

yoyohello135• 2 months ago

Even if you're not working on the 'bad part' you are still contributing to the success of the company as a whole. When you work for a company, it is tacit agreement with 'everything' the company does. If Meta is doing something you don't agree with, it behooves you to quit or try to change it. If you continue to work, head down then you are complicit in everything they do.

glaslong• 2 months ago

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.

baddie_twoshoes• 2 months ago

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.

OrangeMusic• 2 months ago

Which non profit do _you_ work for?

jryan492• 2 months ago

Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)

iwontberude• 2 months ago

Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.

foobar_______2• 2 months ago

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.

jjulius11• 2 months ago

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_am_tiberius• 2 months ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 months ago

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...

gaiagraphia4• 2 months ago

If you look at idioms, human nature has never really changed. Most of our culture and outlook was defined by the Sumerians.

"You reap what you sow".

new_account_1044• 2 months ago

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.

lionkor2• 2 months ago

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.

1121redblackgo2• 2 months ago

best I can do is incoherent muttering about illegals and blaming all problems on them.

lionkor2• 2 months ago

or voting for the evil person as protest against the lack of options, also super effective

rootusrootus3• 2 months ago

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).

ProofHouse• 2 months ago

Working as a dev at Meta has become like working a call center. Zuck lost the plot.

new_account_1044• 2 months ago

Why would they care about software developers when they're busy replacing them with AGI?

alexfoo• 2 months ago

Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

xnorswap• 2 months ago

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.

rvz• 2 months ago

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).

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.

root-parent2• 2 months ago

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?

righthand• 2 months ago

Client side react with three state changes that makes the violin janky.

zeroonetwothree9• 2 months ago

Pretty sure Meta isn’t screen recording your laptop 24/7

jojobas2• 2 months ago

It's buying the recordings from consented third parties.

greenavocado3• 2 months ago

If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak

kennywinker4• 2 months ago

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

greenavocado3• 2 months ago

70% of their day is journaling, meditating, and eating.

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

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.

chinathrow• 2 months ago

If you don't walk out after such rules, then what would you make to do so?

dgrin91• 2 months ago

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.

flossly• 2 months ago

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.

throwawa12• 2 months ago

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".

kennywinker4• 2 months ago

Requires a functional legal system, so it seems unlikely to come into play.

throwawa12• 2 months ago

Fact.

IncreasePosts• 2 months ago

Can't you just use your own personal device and avoid the tracking entirely?

metalliqaz• 2 months ago

I'm looking forward to the HN story sometime next year about employees being let go for opting out of tracking.

Kye• 2 months ago

In 1984, high ranking members of the party could turn off their telescreens for 30 minutes without suspicion.

skywhopper• 2 months ago

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.

taco_emoji• 2 months ago

They need to unionize.

moi2388• 2 months ago

AI? What happened to the Metaverse? I thought that was the future, mr Zuckerberg? What happened?

zeroonetwothree9• 2 months ago

“When the facts change, I change my mind.” - Zuck, probably

rickcarlino• 2 months ago

2015 satirical article from The Onion: "HR Director Reminds Employees That Any Crying Done At Office Must Be Work-Related."

notnullorvoid• 2 months ago

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.

analog8374• 2 months ago

Meta has written itself into a solid tyrant role. A million aspiring rebels are happy to play along.

omnifischer• 2 months ago

do the meta employees that code these stuff also get tracked?

LurkandComment• 2 months ago

Just enough time to...

bux93• 2 months ago

Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?

dredmorbius7• 2 months ago

So long as you're optimising, take your device with you and opt for 30 quality minutes at another activity.

yubblegum5• 2 months ago

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.

HlessClaudesman• 2 months ago

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.

defmetrix• 2 months ago

30 minutes of freedom! Hell yeah, sounds like a great place to work.

jabedude• 2 months ago

At what point does this company undo their name change that was aligned with them pivoting to the metaverse and virtual reality?

latexr• 2 months ago

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.

kennywinker4• 2 months ago

This is a perfect reason to unionize. Individual action is never as powerful as collective action.

Supermancho• 2 months ago

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.

0x59• 2 months ago

Back to work slaves!

alsetmusic2• 2 months ago

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?

Danox• 2 months ago

Meta where anything goes absolutely for making money...

khriss• 2 months ago

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.

menomatter• 2 months ago

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.

gaiagraphia4• 2 months ago

I'm sure there's more to your story, but...

It's quite amusing imagining somebody working in a cybersecurity firm wondering why he's being questioned by security for opening up Tor at work. heh.

Surely your post effectively reads as an ad?

storus• 2 months ago

The movie Antitrust but on steroids in real life. Also the Crossover white collar sweatshop ended up as trendsetter.

bluelightning2k• 2 months ago

Somehow this is way more dystopian than not having an opt out at all.

wg0• 2 months ago

That's very generous.

lukan• 2 months ago

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.

zeroonetwothree9• 2 months ago

“It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour.”

BrenBarn• 2 months ago

Heh, came here looking to see if anyone had made this reference yet. Mega disturbing.

zaik• 2 months ago

Spoiler: In the end it is revealed that the surveillance screen wasn't actually switched off. Let's see how it works out in Meta's case...

cat_plus_plus• 2 months ago

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.

neilv• 2 months ago

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.)

quaddoggy• 2 months ago

Meanwhile… Alan Dye breathes a sigh of relief and resumes another 30 minute session of Minesweeper.

palmotea• 2 months ago

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!

jesse_dot_id• 2 months ago

How considerate

wegwerper• 2 months ago

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!

aaroninsf• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway7356• 2 months ago

Very generous and 30 minutes more than Meta allows non-employees to opt out of Meta's tracking. A clear company benefit!

schaefer• 2 months ago

If this is how they treat their employees, I hate to think how they treat their customers.

sys_64738• 2 months ago

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.

Havoc• 2 months ago

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

staplung• 2 months ago

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.

'''

baliex• 2 months ago

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!

lovich2• 2 months ago

If you can meet their goals, that just means there is more they can squeeze out of you. The incentive structure for our corporations means there is literally never enough and they will always demand more.

PaulHoule2• 2 months ago

It's the kind of list an LLM might make up.

jessetemp3• 2 months ago

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!

micromacrofoot6• 2 months ago

or you know, naming your company PALANTIR

Dependance2• 2 months ago

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.

ribosometronome2• 2 months ago

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.

jaggederest• 2 months ago

Funnily enough, Snow Crash was the origin of the metaverse as a term.

semiquaver3• 2 months ago

Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”

Dependance2• 2 months ago

Weirder than having a character just named Y.T. ?

OJFord3• 2 months ago

I haven't read it, but if it's written in the first person with the narrator referring to themself as 'YT', then it's at least consistent? If yours truly suddenly referred to my mother, or indeed if I referred to yours truly's mother, that would be more jarring I think?

jordanb2• 2 months ago

I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!

michaelt2• 2 months ago

Isn't that Stephenson driving home the faceless drone, cog-in-the-machine characterisation of YT's mom?

I mean, literally not giving the character a name fits right in with the alienating working conditions of the quote above, and the fact YT's mom is working on a software cog with no understanding of the machine it fits into.

thinkingtoilet2• 2 months ago

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.

deltoidmaximus• 2 months ago

I was reminded of this sequence when one of my required trainings not only had a quiz but also a required minimum time limit. It wasn't enough knowing the material I needed to waste time on it as well.

And then I remembered people in jobs that pay less than mine are already viciously harassed for not acting like identical automatons.

JambalayaJimbo• 2 months ago

Yep. I was timed when working at the drive through at a fast food restaurant.

grog454• 2 months ago

occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section

No eye tracking in this dystopia I guess.

GS523523• 2 months ago

Was going to reply the same. These authours don't spend enough time thinking their fantasies through.

Cytobit• 2 months ago

Literally the next two sentences describe eye tracking.

The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading.

Dansvidania• 2 months ago

so many cyberpunk tropes are coming true...

stuxnet792• 2 months ago

What makes this even more hilarious is that Meta's rebranding was in part inspired by the metaverse concept in Snow Crash. You can bet that Zuckerberg, along with many other tech executives, have read this exact passage while mining the book for ideas. Life imitating art?

redsocksfan45• 2 months ago

Tech corp execs also read the rest of Snowcrash, unfortunately, so besides the metaverse crap we also got Snowcrash's "gig economy" labor hellscape.

See also, Jennifer Government, numerous works of PKD, etc.

taude7• 2 months ago

Did everyone like this Stephensen in this thread? I read Cryptonomicon and Seveneves, mostly. They slogged for me a bit. But I love what he writes about, so willing to try another one (even if he doesn't have an editor). It sounds like this could be topical 2027 read. I have a long summer ahead of me.

eunoia• 2 months ago

Big fan of Snow Crash. For background I liked Cryptonomicon a lot but also found Seveneves to be a bit of a slog.

I would check out The Diamond Age as well if you’re generally taking Stephenson book recommendations.

Avicebron2• 2 months ago

I actually think Snow Crash is iconic for what it was conceptually, I don't know how I would actually stack the writing up now that I've gotten older and would probably pick something else.

I can see it feeling tropey now despite being an originator of many of the tropes. It's been a decade(s)+? since I read it last though, still highly recommend.

michaelt2• 2 months ago

Stephenson's writing is great if you like lengthy asides that add to the world and to your understanding of the characters, but add nothing to the plot.

If you want to read six pages of detailed musings on how the character learned ballroom dance and their design for a special milk-dispensing spoon for eating cereal without it getting soggy, establishing the character is the kind of person who designs spoons in their mind as they eat breakfast, then Stephenson is for you.

If you want the character to get to the damn ball and get told the secret coordinates so we can get moving with the plot already, Stephenson might not be for you.

scantron42• 2 months ago

Give Fall: Dodge In Hell a try. It has a few characters from Reamde but nothing to do with it so you don't need to read that one. Its an amazing idea about realistically what building the singularity could look like. Starting with one digitized mind.

PeterStuer• 2 months ago

I loved Cryptonomicon and most of his early work. I didn't care too much for his Baroque Cycle.

nicbou• 2 months ago

Neil Stephenson is weirdly prescient in some of his novels. The people getting beamed the worst kind of slop on Fall has also been on my mind a lot recently.

swordsith• 2 months ago

I loved this book, especially the release of tension at the end.

oblio• 2 months ago

Is this even legal in the EU?

BigTTYGothGF• 2 months ago

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)

akomtu• 2 months ago

Meta-stasis

freejazz• 2 months ago

A taste of their own medicine. Turns out it is bitter.

mystraline2• 2 months ago

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.

richard___• 2 months ago

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

honeycrispy• 2 months ago

Don't you realize that by using Codex or Claude, you are providing data to them that they will also use in an attempt to replace you?

ge96• 2 months ago

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

joelthelion• 2 months ago

What a wonderful world we live in. And to think that all of this is largely self-inflicted...

deafpolygon• 2 months ago

The cynic in me says Meta is culling the herd.

Refreeze5224• 2 months ago

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.

andsoitis• 2 months ago

Dystopia is a real place.

lo_fye• 2 months ago

"Trust us, we're not tracking you for the next 30 mins. Do whatever you want on your screen in that time. We won't peek."

stephc_int13• 2 months ago

There is not enough pushback against this.

I don't think anyone is fully comfortable with it but it is considered "standard practice".

It wasn't such a huge issue until recently because processing all of this was a burden, but obviously this can be automated very well now.

The trend is genuinely dystopian.

groby_b• 2 months ago

Given it's Meta, I'd put roughly zero trust in the opt out actually being respected.

Santosh83• 2 months ago

1. Continue tracking me 2. Pause for 1800 seconds

hackerbeat• 2 months ago

I'm sure sleazy Zuck doesn't get tracked.

ergocoder2• 2 months ago

It's to allow employees to confidentially browse the soft-core-like reels while at work. Nobody wants to be tracked while doing that.

andyjohnson0• 2 months ago

Devious. Its somehow more oppressive than the potential of constant surveillance. It says: we are watching you the rest of the time.

See also: Learned Helplessness; Stockholm Syndrome.

boombapoom• 2 months ago

fuck you zuck. no one likes you anyways

jongjong• 2 months ago

The tracking is horrible. I often leave my computer for up to 30 minutes to brainstorm or think about a difficult problem. I do this even more now with AI than I did before because the nature of my work has changed and requires more foresight. So the idea that my mouse movements are tracked would force me into counter-productive patterns and narrow-minded thinking by staying at the computer.

The best ideas I've had came to me overnight or over the weekend while my mind was at rest. Those ideas are those that keep paying dividends.

But I also need frequent breaks day-to-day, especially if using an LLM to code; I need to step back and refine my approach. I don't want to let the LLM seamlessly vibe-code me into a bad decision.

I've never met anybody who could come up with good ideas in a rapid-fire way. The stress associated with the need to churn out a steady stream of work makes you fall prey to sunk cost fallacy because you don't pause to reflect on anything you do and it gets worse over time. You end up creating unnecessary problems without even realising it because your mind is subconsciously trying to fill the time with work. The goal takes a backseat.

The taboo is awful because I see the effect in my junior colleagues sometimes, leading to over-engineering and I just want to tell them to take more frequent breaks to let the idea rest but it feels like something I'm not supposed to say.

ebbi• 2 months ago

It's very shameful that this company continues to exist.

philjohn• 2 months ago

I worked on Child Safety for a time at Meta ... I'm guessing all of the people working on that will be exempted, lest they train the model on actual CSAM.

oliver236• 2 months ago

how is meta different from google? im confused

u64cellar2• 2 months ago

Reminds me of 1984 when Winston gets surprised that O'Brien can turn off the telescreen.

u64cellar2• 2 months ago

Which probably was a lie.

ares623• 2 months ago

we laugh and make fun and shake our heads at this. We did the same when Elon did what he did during the Twitter take over. Then every other company followed suit.

This is coming for all of us.

anotherevan• 2 months ago

Why does this feel worse?

alex1138• 2 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg is as he always was, a sociopath

madhacker• 2 months ago

Eating your own dog food Facebookers! U reap what you sow.

newtonianrules• 2 months ago

Maybe have some respect for yourself and others and opt out of working at Meta.

quantum_state• 2 months ago

Monitoring employee at work is a shady business .. we all should say no to it.

b3ing• 2 months ago

If they want to know what you were doing for 20 min take a picture of an unflushed toilet each day, it will put an end to that right away

thewileyone• 2 months ago

Good enough for a relaxing sh*t break.

ev0lv• 2 months ago

Am I the only one that sees the irony of people working for creepy adtech like meta having to endure being tracked?

mbgerring• 2 months ago

UNION.

ornornor• 2 months ago

Look. You CHOSE to join Facebook. One of the most psychopathic and damaging companies to society. You don’t get to whine now that it also affects YOU personally. You made your bed, either finally own up and quit or enjoy a taste of your own medicine.

rsynnott2• 2 months ago

So… how is this company retaining senior employees? I mean, between this and all their other recent nonsense, you’d think those who could would just… leave.

gverrilla• 2 months ago

Proud slaves.

markandrewj• 2 months ago

Sounds like an absolutely terrible work environments for a knowledge worker to be in.

poulpy123• 2 months ago

Our overlords are truly generous

Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

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