Slashdot Mirror
Some Engineers Are Turning Down Tech Recruiters in Silicon Valley Over Concerns About Corporate Value (ieee.org)
Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have faced growing internal unrest from employees who raise ethical concerns about how the companies deploy their high-tech services and products. That chorus of dissent is now growing louder as outside engineers voice their concerns to recruiters working for those tech companies. An anonymous reader shares a report: The protests of tech workers have proven persuasive because Silicon Valley firms compete fiercely to recruit and retain relatively scarce engineering talent. For example, Google's leadership sought to reassure employees by declaring it would not renew its Pentagon contract and by issuing a set of ethical principles for future uses of Google-developed technologies. By the same logic, engineers who are approached by tech recruiters also have leverage. "I might be a one-off example, but it could be different if Amazon gets a lot of people emailing them saying, 'Hey I won't work for you because of this,'" Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, who declined a job offer from Amazon, says.
Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.
Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.
Amazon has it's 100 hours a week issues!
computer janitors and stack exchange code copy paste artists yes, engineers, fuck no
this is so stupid
... have been simply not bothering and/or avoiding a number of these firms for years.
...for every one person like that there are a thousand who would like to work for Google.
You might not work for them, but rest assured there is someone right behind you with the right lack of moral scruples they're looking for.
Right... Because it is unethical for America — uniquely among the world's nations — to fight its enemies and enforce its borders.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
>Google's leadership sought to reassure employees by declaring it would not renew its Pentagon contract
Yes because they are now in bed with the authoritarian tyrannical Chinese communist government.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/googles-china-plan-isnt-just-evil--its-bad-for-business/2018/08/09/143046be-9c12-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0f116e06ecbb
but it wasn't about that. Google contacted me and I told them that I wasn't seeing a cultural fit.
I highly recommend reading the filings in the James Damore lawsuit: https://www.dhillonlaw.com/law...
You can see the statements from Googlers in their own words. To say that it's incredibly disturbing that they have created and promoted such a toxic work-place culture would be an understatement.
Avoid like the plague unless you are a blue-haired harpy trying to work out her daddy issues by hating on men.
Earth is a single point of failure.
The subject's title is, "Engineers Say 'No Thanks' to Silicon Valley Recruiters, Citing Ethical Concerns." And then the article calls out 4 companies: Amazon, Google, Facebook, & Microsoft. 2 of those 4 are headquartered in the Seattle area, not Silicon Valley. How about some simple fact checking?
My userid is prime!
expand h1b to fill the jobs americans won't do
Did you become an engineer to get rich? Engineering pays quite well, but to get rich you're better off in finance.
Most people become engineers to solve problems. To make life better for everyone. When corporate culture goes against that motive, engineers tend to rebel. This doesn't just apply to Silicon Valley.
I'm intrigued that engineers in Silicon Valley feel they are empowered enough to make such demands. Most engineers just bitch to management about not doing what's in the customer's best interest and move on.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Another nail in the coffin for the poo ridden metropolis known as San Fran and Silicon Valley.
If engineers want to put up silly excuses like this, then companies should move to regions where engineers don't care about how its business makes money and are happy to work.
The sooner the bay area returns to its pre 1960s normalcy the better.
I'm glad to hear more people have ethics - now in SV.
I've been turning down Amazon recruiters for a while and did list my complaints about how warehouse workers are treated. It is also why I limit myself to a couple purchases a year - for things I can't find anywhere else.
Google... the hiring culture is definitely a bust for me. Guess I have to make a startup for them to buy...
captcha: pariah
Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, recently made a point of turning down an Amazon Web Services recruiter by citing her personal opposition to Amazon’s role in hosting another tech company’s service used by U.S. government agents to target immigrants for detention and deportation.
Good thing she left an opening for me just because she's too stupid to know the difference between an immigrant and an trespasser. Worse yet is that her idiotic dedication to a faulty ideology encourages the continued abuse of illegal immigrants by unscrupulous employers who wield their worker's illegal status as a weapon. The only thing worse than a moron is a self-righteous moron.
With the Zuck in the news recently, speaking to Congress, and generally coming off like an a$$. I decided to delay my scheduled interview with Facebook. When I was asked why, I told them "I wasn't sure that Facebook was the type of company I could work for, based on recent news." The said they understood, and the recruiter let it slip that they had heard the same thing from many people. She said I could reschedule when I felt the time was right.
So later I did reschedule, did the day long interview, (which wasn't so horrible, but definitely in Seattle go on a rainy day, their building gets super hot in the interview rooms on hot sunny days.) got rave reviews, and was made an offer. The offer would be fine if I was applying for a starting position. But I've been doing this for 20+ years now, with 10 years of iOS development under my belt. Apparently they lowball people according to my friends, and then put them through the blender for two years, and see if you'll stick with it, then give you the real salary you should have gotten initially.
When they wouldn't budge, I told them, "This isn't enough to work in your environment, on essentially what is a gossip app." That didn't go over too well. Unfortunately FB's office environment has almost no privacy, and everywhere you look there is someone, you can't possibly stop from over hearing people talking about things you are also interested in. The only possible way to get work done, is to wait for your co-workers to go home, (except that they never go home,) or get there early (remember that they never go home?)
Life is too short to work for a company that makes a gossip app, tests your loyalty, and pays you just enough. They have some great opportunities for learning, but those are outweighed by how they really treat their employees.
I live in the Seattle area and know lots of current /former "Softies" and "Amazombies". Those large tech companies have huge turn over and incredible burn out rates Both companies threw out Stack ranking some years ago, https://whatis.techtarget.com/... but the mentality that put it in place is still ingrained in the corporate manta. Ie: "for you to get ahead, someone else must fail". It's the major reason pay is so high, you have to pay ridiculous money to keep good people.
As an engineering in Silicon Valley, I'm here for the paycheck and stocks (RSU + ESPP).
When I want to play SJW I do it on my own time. Although typically I support animal shelters instead of concerning myself much about my fellow human.
After the toxic culture at Google came to light during the Damore incident, why would anyone want to join a company that boos you when you get hired if you're not a SJW darling? You may get paid well but there are so many non hostile workplaces that you would be much happier in. Do you really want to work at a place where people claim they sexually identify as an expansive ornate building, and your employer gives them a microphone?
Curious, none of them would dare be seen taking a position like "I don't want to work with a company that relies on H1B visas."
If you want to talk ethics and activism, I have news for you. All that bullshit about diversity your corporate HR departments spew about hiring and visas is just a smokescreen around the fact that our immigration system is subtly more pernicious than indentured servitude.
Indentured servants had full recourse to the King's Justice in the colonies. H1bs don't have the equivalent of that in the United States.
This is why your corporation and its leadership support all of that immigration. It's to pit you and the immigrants against each other in a race to the bottom that lets them suck up that tasty arbitrage to achieve dizzying new levels of profit without having to pay you any more.
But sure, piss and moan about drones while supporting a company that makes great use of a system that is closer to the Peculiar Institution than a free market labor economy.
Most people become engineers to solve problems. To make life better for everyone.
I couldn't get into medical school.
And I didn't want to ask, "Would you like room for cream?" while paying on my student loans if I got a degree in something I was interested in.
So, I have a well paying job that provides me with plenty of benefits: I have my therapist and my Effexor. I blew past the insurance max and it's now all out of pocket.
So, if I followed my interests and what I'm actually good at, I would have been ahead -financially: the pills and therapist are pretty expensive.
In the meantime, I design lame-ass consumer shit that provides no value to humanity at all - just more consumerism. Actually, the World would be much better off if my employer went out of business. facebook, google, Micro$haft, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, SUN, ... all fall into that category. (Kids, demand $500,000 a year and a 5 year contract to work for those fuckers. On your first day, they fire you? That'll be $2.5 million assholes!!)
Playing guitar in some shit-ass coffee shop would do more for people and humanity than what I do. Singing, "quack quack quack" to all the little shits that came with their parents would be more valuable.
I work 80+ hours a week, I'm 200+ lbs at 5' 7" and no woman. I'm lonely. I got a nice nest egg but WTF is it good for? I'm gonna be dead before I can use it.
Some morning, my dream will come true and I won't wake up.
...Once upon a time, the best and brightest of the engineering, math and science students didn't dream of working in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. They dreamed of NASA, JPL & NOAA. Academia and government service. The reward was working on interesting, important things rather than stock options and snack rooms. Maybe that thinking is starting to come back.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The Pentagon contract involved adding AI to analyze photographs. People who want to make it seem worse than the same tech being applied to their Facebook pages to find friends made up the story about "AI to control drones", and continue to propagate it.
Yeah, it's a real shame that you can't act like a giant douchebag at work these days.
From the source you are responding to:
“You can’t talk about sexual differences between men and women, (although) it’s OK if they favor women,” laughs Tierney. “You can say men are more likely to commit crimes, but you can’t suggest that there might be some sexual difference that might predispose men to be more interested in a topic.”
Yeah, you can act like a giant douchebag, but only to men. Pointing that out gets you fired. Standing up for yourself gets you fired. Not following a radical political agenda gets you fired...but only at a handful of insane corporations with too much power and not enough ethics.
I'm sure Amazon treats its tech workers MUCH better than its warehouse workers.
And I'm sure Bezos' inner circle would have made your working conditions look like shit.
Just say'in.
Working as an engineer in the bay area I get unsolicited emails to my (relatively unpublished) personal email account directly by all sorts of companies, not to mention 10+ recruiter contacts a week via linkedin, etc.
I don't hesitate to let them know if a particular republican venture capitalist that financially backed Trump's presidential campaign that has invested in their company, has turned me off from their company (pick one, there's a couple of high profile ones). Or if they're heavily in bed with the defense industry, or tangentially attached to some other cause I'm against (there's a couple of banks that come to mind), I will let them know. Having enough experience in the industry to have options, it's nice to be able to flatly turn down offers. Obviously there is someone who will sell their soul to get their foot in the door, I am not slowing down their hiring process by any measurable degree, but it does mean that they will have to struggle to grow with less talented or less experienced talent. I'm ok with this.
Most of my friend share at least a somewhat similar view. But we've been here long enough to pick and choose our next job. There's a lot of immigrants from other parts of the world that will take the more morally ambiguous jobs in tech just to get here.
moox. for a new generation.
Unlike many others we, if we observe carefully, know exactly how and when we can be replaced. And when not. This gives us massive leverage and a few critical points. "I don't like your business model" is a very neat audible objection by someone who has a rare and demanded skill. Tech illuminates are in the sweet spot of being able to do a bit of a priests job in deciding who gets my skills and experience and who gets the finger.
I like that we have some confident and self aware engineers. Keep it up!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I had a job offer from a certain tech company - one of the big, big personal data dogs. It was for a lot of money. Make me rich kinds of money.
In the end, I was not comfortable with their business model. I took a job at a company paying me barely a third of what that company would have. In reality the gap is lower than it seems from that ratio because I can live in a low CoL area, but the gap still exists and it is significant. I am not doing as well financially as I would have, for the other company who preys on people and traffics in the results of profiling and "analytics".
Yet I feel ever stronger I made the right choice. I have no hand in the building of "surveillance capitalism". The company I work for now is not all sunshine and rainbows, but their core business model is ethical and does not prey on normal people simply wanting to live their lives who don't understand the microscope the have been placed under. I am working on interesting projects with smart people. I am not driving a luxury car and I am not living in a McMansion and I own no yachts or airplanes, but I feel I am much happier than if I took the other road where I get to own those things. I am still living quite comfortably in a nice house... and ethically.
When my grandkids ask me how we got the world of mass surveillance that we got, I'll honestly be able to say that I didn't have a hand in building it.
Anyone working for surveillance capitalism firms, and you know who you are... you need to take a long, hard look at what you are doing to the world you are handing down to your grandkids. The average person lost all pretense of privacy and control over their data because of what you are doing. Stop rationalizing it away. "If I don't do it, someone else will". "We're not the worst offender." "We give people (the illusion of) control". There are countless ways to rationalize it. Don't..
Serves them right
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/foreign-born-engineers-dominate-bay-area-tech-jobs-says-joint-venture-silicon-valley
About half of the skilled professionals in Silicon Valley are foreign born. They are not going to be loyal to the USA. Of course they oppose helping the USA military, or deportation of illegal aliens. Silicon Valley elites were complaining that the travel ban, prevented bringing in Iranian computer programmers.... After being western educated, those Iranians are going to go back home, and help their defense industry.
If I were a Chinese strategist, evaluating the strong and weak points of each side:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...I suspected the major reason engineers are turning down Silicon Valley is that nobody can freaking afford to live there anymore!
I think some of these tech giants went from being neutral to deciding they must influence everything. Sort of like the made scientist who wants to control everything. I think they have made too much a effort to please everyone nd end up pleasing few. Social networks will always contain good and bad of people. We need to go back to accepting not everyone thinks the same.
The real reason they can’t get people is nobody want to live in shithole California.
It goes both ways. I believe in national defense, and in protecting our borders. I'd be happy to work for a defense-related company, or for a company with neutral politics.
I wonder how many people would rather not work for companies whose management lobbies for liberal causes, and/or clearly prefers candidates who are not straight, white, conservative, and/or men.
FTFY
...as far as their options.
No greater hive of scum and villanry than an engineering school. Fuck you guys and your repressed sexuality and your kowtowing to invisible gods.. PATHETIC.
Youre such a pathetic fucking slave. No wonder you altrighters hate blacks so much - they actually had the balls to fight your masters.
...that working for the large tech companies is now a dead end job. I have been recruited by Best Buy, Apple, Facebook and high-speed trading houses (whom I absolutely loathe). I would not work for Amazon or Google. I have been ostracized by local recruiters for rejecting the deplorable jobs. I am okay with this. In a similar vein, I will not deal with SBIRs or the NSA or NRO as a matter of principle. I may not make as much in a second-tier job but then I like the person that I see in the mirror each morning. #TechWontBuildIt
Amazon - privacy issues
Facebook - privacy issues (entire business model is based on getting personal info in places where they shouldn't be)
Microsoft - privacy issues (purposeful backdoors in OS and Office suite, outlook/ PRISM)
Google - privacy issues (everything they do, including PRISM)
Tesla - privacy issues - Constantly calling home when your car is on the road
Mozilla - privacy isssues - Calling home, forced DNS, and to Google (via "safe browsing") , Geo tracking feature enabled by default
What ethical problems?
Sure, more deregulation is what's needed...
I told their recruiter that I couldn't work for them because of how they work poor people damn near to death and they end up with permanent disabilities after working there. They just sound like a sweat shop in the vein of all these corporate weasel fucks. Hopefully my response added to others and they are starting to get the point. However, I really really doubt it. If there was one statement I could attribute to corporations it's "We don't give a fuck."
Their request -and my response - on July 6.
XXXXXX XXXX
Production Engineering @ Facebook!
Hi XXXXX,
I’m a recruiter with the Production Engineering(PE) team at Facebook. I've reviewed your profile - your Linux systems and coding skills and your interest in solving large scalability challenges really aligns to the type of work we do within PE at Facebook. I think you might really enjoy the unique type of massive scale systems problems we work on. We're currently hiring for our main campus in Menlo Park, CA, and our office in Seattle, WA.
If you're interested, let's set up a time to chat over the phone about opportunities in Production Engineering. Either way, I'd really appreciate hearing back from you.
PE Job Description (Hiring for ALL experience levels):
https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000MoPiQUAV
Facebook PE 2-minute video:
https://www.facebook.com/facebookcareers/videos/2152646278355388/
Facebook Page for PE:
http://code.facebook.com/pe
BONUS: December 7th, 2016 Tech Talk (45 minutes) - Building a Billion User Load Balancer
Patrick Shuff, Production Engineer
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/presentation/shuff
Best,
XXXXXXX XXXXX
Technical Recruiter | Facebook, Inc
XXXXXXX@fb.com
408-XXX-XXXX
=== MY RESPONSE ===
XXXXX sent the following message at 4:08 PM
View XXXXXXX’s profile XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
4:08 PM
While I probably could make a ton of money, and I'm looking for a job - I have a specific hate for the evil that your company does and don't want to be involved with what you do.
pretty much most of this stuff that pays well is now evil. you know the rest of us still have to live in a society of mindless zombies slaved to their phone?
I've argued we in the tech industry need to do it for a long time. It shouldn't look exactly like older professions like engineering, law, and medical because those industries are tied the established formal education. We have the power to ground airlines, shut down power grids, automate out co-workers, sell snake oil security, and skew research data. When we are faced with ethical dillemas we should know we can fall back on professional regulation to refuse on ethical grounds and our employers will lose a massive amount of face and business if they don't respect that.
That said, this also remains one of the few knowledge industries where it is still possible for a highly intelligent individual and dedicated individual who is totally impoverished to avoid bias and debt in academia and to not only learn enough to practice but even become a leader in our field with nothing but a low end computer and an internet connection. We will never eliminate the advantages of being born to privilege but this has always been one field where the odds are more even for someone who is underprivileged but the merit and raw capacity that defines the right to be at the top.
"Some American Workers Try to Live Their Ethical Values"
Regardless of whether or not you agree with those values--and from the modding it looks like a lot of people hovering around this article don't--it is newsworthy that some engineers are willing to turn down lucrative, prestigious jobs because the work they'd be doing, or the company they'd be doing it for, doesn't mesh with their sense of right and wrong.
Of course, in a better world, this wouldn't be newsworthy at all.
Thanks for admitting immigrants undermine American values.
It is precisely this sort of indentured-servitude style employment of immigrants (illegal, quasi-legal (H1-B scam), and legal newbies) that has so dramatically damaged the employment scenario for US citizens.
Suddenly they have values when they lose an election
If a whole union exhibited a political bias to employers that might be a problem, but since individual employees are at such a disadvantage I see no problem with your behavior. The converse, where an employer discriminates or supports employees in discriminating against individuals with a certain set of politics is not OK.l, because the massive power imbalance in that direction.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The best engineers have unfair bargaining power because each such engineer is practically unique but there are multiple big tech firms that he could work for. To address this unfairness, I propose the big tech firms form a union and force these engineer to choose between a fair contract or no contract at all.