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.
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.)
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
Seems like that'd just discourage people from going above and beyond at work. Why do more than the bare minimum to avoid being fired if nothing else you do counts?
>Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
(This is from Office Space for those who don’t know. Hilarious scene with Jennifer Aniston)
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.
No. You should grow professionally outside of work by also following the work-mandated professional development plan. And you will be punished if you don't do it, or you do it at a pace that doesn't match expectations.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I'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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.)
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
I 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.
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).
A few years on a salary like that and you may find that you can live fairly comfortably for a long time… in a place where the cost of living and housing are inexpensive.
I have an aunt who is quite old, who has been living for decades in a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. I suspect few people reading this will think that's any kind of an "escape plan", but I have been jealous of her seemingly contented and relaxed retirement for a long time now.
Perhaps you have to weigh it against, "working in the industry you hate for an other decade or two." Could you enjoy yourself in your retirement in your trailer? Is there something more you need to enjoy your retirement?
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.
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"?
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.
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. 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...
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.
In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.
For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.
Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.
I 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.
These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
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
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
I 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.
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.
> employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
And the location, yes, your physical location as well
Work will even flag you for you using a VPN on your phone, e.g. if you check the company Slack.
Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?
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
Maybe? And yes.
I once got told for an internal promotion I couldn't put anything regarding my current role, responsibilities and achievements in the role. I got told to put any volunteering or previous.
Reason given was it's what is expected at work everything you do in your role, you need to show above and beyond.
Seems like that'd just discourage people from going above and beyond at work. Why do more than the bare minimum to avoid being fired if nothing else you do counts?
>Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
(This is from Office Space for those who don’t know. Hilarious scene with Jennifer Aniston)
You're 100% supposed to grow professionally outside of work.
Yep.
One time my manager did a hour long lecture for our team on how personal growth is important and that we all should expand our horizons and learn new stuff.
When I tried to reserve 2 hours A WEEK for studying tasks I got push back that I should do it on my own time. It was a complete joke.
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.
If you can afford it, set up a proper trust fund for them.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.
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
In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.
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.
Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
Sure, but using the above comment as reference, I think it is increasingly a lot of things that are off-putting in the industry.
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."
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.
I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
> how many more years do I need to work in tech?
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
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.
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.)
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
I 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.
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).
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!
$$$,$$$
more like $,$$$,$$$.$$
All the more reason to head out.
A few years on a salary like that and you may find that you can live fairly comfortably for a long time… in a place where the cost of living and housing are inexpensive.
I have an aunt who is quite old, who has been living for decades in a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. I suspect few people reading this will think that's any kind of an "escape plan", but I have been jealous of her seemingly contented and relaxed retirement for a long time now.
Perhaps you have to weigh it against, "working in the industry you hate for an other decade or two." Could you enjoy yourself in your retirement in your trailer? Is there something more you need to enjoy your retirement?
You're saying the average dev at Meta is making 7 figures?
> I genuinely don't understand...
Really? Its quite obvious to me. They get astonishing resume and salary. That is until they get fired or burned.
> astonishing resume
Not sure about that one.
You need to be more cruel if you actually want these people to quit.
Make them fear for their professional and personal reputations.
Make them embarassed to show their face or state their place of employment.
We need to treat these people like Nazis.
I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.
But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like: engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.
Money and/or visa sponsorship obviously. Some things are more important than internet cool points.
Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels. Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?
There is more to life than money. I've turned down FANG roles my entire career, especially Meta. There is lot of work out there.
Have you tried finding a new job recently?
Yes, and I found one. It pays enough for having a very stable life, and in a company with ethics!
No reason to be that sarcastic, the job market is not dead (at least not in Europe).
If you can hang, it pays great. I don't work there but I know some who do.
Spy camera manufacturer workers complaining about office cameras....
In the end, most people choose money.
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.
Money. Even I would put up with this if they paid me enough.
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. 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...
Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)
Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.
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.
But the opt outs will, of course, be tracked. Choose to do it and it will go on your performance review.
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.
Opt outs lower your KPI by a fixed value
The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.
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.
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.
O'Brien turning off the Telescreen.
"You can..."
"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever"
boot/server
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
30 whole minutes?! How generous.
Right.
Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.
And who knows who gets to see the tick against your name as "opted out".
I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.
Meta: Just as incompetent as Microsoft, but somehow more evil!
If you don't walk out after such rules, then what would you make to do so?
Sick company environment.
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
I don't think there are legal concerns with employee tracking. I suspect it would still be legal if they didn't provide an opt-out.
This is the United States, land of the free and home of the slaves. Workers are subhuman here.
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta
I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours
If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak
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.
Working as a dev at Meta has become like working a call center. Zuck lost the plot.
Why would they care about software developers when they're busy replacing them with AGI?
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.
The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?
oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.
Surely they can't be serious?
It's part of meta-mating, we would not understand.