facebook tech workers even according work company

Why Facebook Staffers Won’t Quit Over Trump’s PostsRead: How Facebook works for TrumpEven so, Facebook seems to have crossed the line of tolerable abhorrence forsome tech workers. Inside the business, nextplayism may offer the best, andmaybe the only, way for them to show their distaste. “The vast majority ofpeople I know at the director-and-up level, when they are leaving a companyand looking for a new gig, they’re Never Facebookers,” McCarthy, who is alsoan occasional collaborator of mine, said, referring to senior-level roles.“They’re offended if you even offer to do introductions to someone atFacebook.”But that is a privileged attitude. Much of the magical operation of onlineservices is driven by rote laborers, such as moderators, AI-trainingwranglers, and gig workers. They aren’t counted as members of the industry,except perhaps as its casualties. Among skilled, white-collar tech workers,nearly three-quarters were not born in the U.S., according to some reports.For those on work visas, work choices are determined almost entirely by theirimmigration status: According to the tech workers I spoke with, they tend tochoose larger companies for stability, hoping to turn work sponsorships intogreen cards. Even if some workers disapprove of what their company is doing,quitting a job can mean losing their immigration status and running the riskof getting deported. The product manager at the large tech firm alsospeculated that immigrant engineers might not understand or care aboutuniquely domestic social issues, such as the specific history of antiblackracism.Even among American citizens, some tech workers are in the business simply tomake money, gain power, and solve problems—even if they create just as manynew ones in the process. These “equity engineers,” as I’ll call them by one oftheir goals, cashing out, might have studied computer science in order tosolve problems, or to live a good life. It would be a caricature to say thatthese archetypes don’t care at all for politics, but their radicalism tends tobe an inward-facing one, lured by technolibertarian fetishes such asblockchain. For this group, technology is politics, and seeing the two at oddsbecomes incoherent.That leaves only a small group in a clear position to speak up. Many of thesefolks represent the top of the workers’ food chain (though the venturepartners still cast long shadows overhead). Probably white, probablyengineers, and probably American-passport holders, they have plenty of otheroptions both in and out of the Valley.Take Timothy Aveni, the 22-year-old Facebook engineer who quit the companylast week in disgust after Zuckerberg’s failure to act in response to Trump’sposts. Aveni, according to a post on his LinkedIn page, graduated from theGeorgia Institute of Technology in 2019 with a 4.0 GPA in computer science (aprogram in which I teach), and worked for two summers as a Facebook internbefore taking a full-time job at the company. He’s young, white, and American.In an email, Aveni acknowledged that he is privileged, well compensated, andburdened by few personal obligations or commitments. Leaving his job wasn’t aneasy choice, but he is keenly aware that it wasn’t as hard as it might havebeen for someone else.