It seems like every tech company is moving towards the sweatshop model pioneered by CrossOver/Trilogy, treating engineers as human CPUs at best, monitored 24/7.
This is going to be a huge chilling factor for employees. You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).
I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.
Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.
If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.
1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company.
2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.
While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.
at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks
> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
How can they legally mandate an exit interview when you resigned? Is it part of the employment contract? What would have happened if you showed them the finger and not participated?
Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.
His eyes glaze over and he just reads that instead in his corner vision instead of listening to
you, and you get snubbed forever more
In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.
No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.
But I also had a different situation where we also decided to hire someone, only to find out that we can't because he's been let go from another company owned by our parent company, and his severance agreement said he can't work for the same group of companies for 12 months. I think he was genuinely unaware that we're part of the same group(if was a huge corporation) and it just never came up in any conversation until HR tried to put together paperwork for him.
What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.
Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.
If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?
I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.
Then they’ll deploy models trained on this, and begin capturing employees using AIs that are good at using AIs to do work.
Repeat a few times and they’ll start capturing the keystrokes from people mashing their heads into keyboards with dispair and exclaiming, “Why can’t these models do anything anymore!!”
I am to speculate that they are going to use this as an excuse to let people go without doing mass layoffs and having to pay severance. Training AI is just an excuse.
White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.
It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.
While it would be a hilarious failure mode to encounter, this is actually a good thing!
These models already have the skills that humans were using them for, so either by training the models to use subagents or simply inlining the work done by the AI, you have a much easier time training the model to perform tasks from a human-distribution. The humans have done the work of making the human-distribution look more like an AI distribution.
Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.
If it is as you say, then eventually the house of cards will crumble. Then we can finally go back to work and quit being inundated with needing to use AI for everything.
Or stuck with HCOL that is the Bay Area. There’s not really any purely “ethical” companies in the Bay Area that pay enough for you to live there.
You’d be surprised how few people actually buy into the corporate culture at these companies. It’s just to get paid because everyone needs a job to pay their expenses.
You want to solve this then lower the cost of housing.
For those saying that this is fine because company computers are company property...
This is like going to work in a drug-lab where everyone is required to strip naked to ensure no "product" can be smuggled out. It's a zero trust environment at first blush, with the added terror of it being used to replace you with AI.
People working naked in a drug lab have more job security than meta employees and an equivalent level of respect and trust from their employer. However, they can't unionize because they have no legal protections. Their employer could literally point a gun at them if they complained. That isn't the case for Meta employees. Just sayin'.
for agent agents we have ACP [0] surely their time would be better spent builing this sort of abstraction for computer use then simple teaching an AI to use a mouse?
The computer UI is the way it is because that is optimal for humans, if your plan is to replace humans why not just replace the whole stack os and all to something these models already know how to use?
For context, when the article says "a list of work-related apps and websites," this includes Google properties like gmail, docs, etc, and social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, with no provision for excluding personal accounts.
No one intelligent should be logging into their personal accounts on their work devices in any case - it's always been the case (at least in the US) that companies can do whatever invasive scanning they want on devices they own.
Meta does require you to have a Facebook account. The expectation is that it is your personal fb that you use regularly. However, it doesn’t need to be. You can create a new fb account with a new gmail account and that’s fine. That’s what I did and some others do as well.
That said, 90%+ of employees end up using their real personal account because the language they use makes it seem like you couldn’t do what I described.
Yeah automatically assume everything on your work computer is available for your employer to see. And everything you do on your own device when connected to their WiFi or VPN.
I’m just saying that they’ve been collecting this info for years. Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given. Employees didn’t have any expectation of privacy - just a hope. Now, it’s clear it’s completely gone and so the hope and goodwill is gone.
It seems like every tech company is moving towards the sweatshop model pioneered by CrossOver/Trilogy, treating engineers as human CPUs at best, monitored 24/7.
This is going to be a huge chilling factor for employees. You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).
I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.
Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.
If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.
1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.
While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.
[delayed]
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I wonder if this is where they are going.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.
There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!
On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.
> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?
[delayed]
>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues
Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?
"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"
>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.
Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.
at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks
Yeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild
I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.
> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
How can they legally mandate an exit interview when you resigned? Is it part of the employment contract? What would have happened if you showed them the finger and not participated?
Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.
His eyes glaze over and he just reads that instead in his corner vision instead of listening to you, and you get snubbed forever more
In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.
What is the blacklist and is it company-specific?
I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.
No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.
But I also had a different situation where we also decided to hire someone, only to find out that we can't because he's been let go from another company owned by our parent company, and his severance agreement said he can't work for the same group of companies for 12 months. I think he was genuinely unaware that we're part of the same group(if was a huge corporation) and it just never came up in any conversation until HR tried to put together paperwork for him.
Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?
What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.
Should have framed it. Good job.
[delayed]
if you use your work machine at Facebook for dissent, you don't deserve a tech-adjacent job.
Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.
If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?
That's not a bug, that's a feature
I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.
Then they’ll deploy models trained on this, and begin capturing employees using AIs that are good at using AIs to do work.
Repeat a few times and they’ll start capturing the keystrokes from people mashing their heads into keyboards with dispair and exclaiming, “Why can’t these models do anything anymore!!”
I am to speculate that they are going to use this as an excuse to let people go without doing mass layoffs and having to pay severance. Training AI is just an excuse.
White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.
It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.
While it would be a hilarious failure mode to encounter, this is actually a good thing!
These models already have the skills that humans were using them for, so either by training the models to use subagents or simply inlining the work done by the AI, you have a much easier time training the model to perform tasks from a human-distribution. The humans have done the work of making the human-distribution look more like an AI distribution.
Doesn't this assume that what humans are current doing with LLM agents is working out? Isn't it a bit early to bet on that to this degree?
Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.
If it is as you say, then eventually the house of cards will crumble. Then we can finally go back to work and quit being inundated with needing to use AI for everything.
Breaknews: Meta makes the ultimate AI version of "Cat sits on your keyboard" simulator
>data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training
And you expect Meta employees, of all people, to believe this?
These are the same employees that willfully code the largest spy network on the planet, so it seems like they are willing to believe a lot
Are they merging with Palantir any time soon?
Meta people used to protest and demand Thiel be removed from the board all the time, in the 2010s. But it’s probably not like that anymore.
Everyone that’s left either buys into the culture or is stuck due to immigration
Or stuck with HCOL that is the Bay Area. There’s not really any purely “ethical” companies in the Bay Area that pay enough for you to live there.
You’d be surprised how few people actually buy into the corporate culture at these companies. It’s just to get paid because everyone needs a job to pay their expenses.
You want to solve this then lower the cost of housing.
In the midst of their 4th straight year of layoffs with another looming 20% cut coming, I'm guessing Meta employees are a tiny but suspicious.
Does not matter? I think the high compensation will be what will drive the compliance.
Original source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
For those saying that this is fine because company computers are company property...
This is like going to work in a drug-lab where everyone is required to strip naked to ensure no "product" can be smuggled out. It's a zero trust environment at first blush, with the added terror of it being used to replace you with AI.
People working naked in a drug lab have more job security than meta employees and an equivalent level of respect and trust from their employer. However, they can't unionize because they have no legal protections. Their employer could literally point a gun at them if they complained. That isn't the case for Meta employees. Just sayin'.
Meta going all in on their brand with this.
Someone had to do it, distasteful though it may be. Could be quite hilarious what it learns in the process.
That people watch TikTok instead of Instagram reels. Quite embarrassing.
It would be really embarrassing if this is what it takes to come to that realization rather than the same way the rest of the world does.
I guess this is why they acquired https://www.limitless.ai/ ?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851242
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851086
I wonder if this screen + mouse + keyboard (+ camera + speaker + mic) interface is really the right level of abstraction to model a “digital entity”
Sure, you can do everything a human can, but it also seems VERY inefficient
As an alternative, maybe you could just do network in/out?
for agent agents we have ACP [0] surely their time would be better spent builing this sort of abstraction for computer use then simple teaching an AI to use a mouse?
The computer UI is the way it is because that is optimal for humans, if your plan is to replace humans why not just replace the whole stack os and all to something these models already know how to use?
[0] https://zed.dev/blog/acp-registry
It's the same approach as Windows Recall, but all data remains sovereign to the company generating it.
For context, when the article says "a list of work-related apps and websites," this includes Google properties like gmail, docs, etc, and social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, with no provision for excluding personal accounts.
No one intelligent should be logging into their personal accounts on their work devices in any case - it's always been the case (at least in the US) that companies can do whatever invasive scanning they want on devices they own.
Meta forces employees to use personal Facebook accounts at work.
This hasn’t been true for 8+ years.
Having both a personal and work Facebook account is against the rules and may lead to getting the account suspended.
Everyone here is slightly wrong.
Meta does require you to have a Facebook account. The expectation is that it is your personal fb that you use regularly. However, it doesn’t need to be. You can create a new fb account with a new gmail account and that’s fine. That’s what I did and some others do as well.
That said, 90%+ of employees end up using their real personal account because the language they use makes it seem like you couldn’t do what I described.
No they do not lol.
They absolutely do, wtf are you talking about.
Also people use their work accounts and laptops to read their w2 and other sensitive info.
It at least used to be true. In order to accept the job offer, you would have to make (or have) a Facebook account.
The W2 is already provided by the employer, is it really sensitive for the employer to see it?
At meta your personal FB account is your work account. I had to create one to get paid. It’s the same identity used in internal systems.
You know you are at work and monitored.
You can browser personal accounts from your phone.
Yeah automatically assume everything on your work computer is available for your employer to see. And everything you do on your own device when connected to their WiFi or VPN.
I’m surprised this needs to be said out loud.
on your phone not connected to corp wifi
That doesn't matter anymore unless they have an SSL proxy. If you have ECH/ODoH anyway.
Lots of those these days. Zacaler has a fair amount of enterprise market penetration.
And Ideally not connected to company WiFi
Data collection isn’t new. The training is.
You don't think collecting this type of intimate information about your employees as a major violation of the social contract?
I’m just saying that they’ve been collecting this info for years. Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given. Employees didn’t have any expectation of privacy - just a hope. Now, it’s clear it’s completely gone and so the hope and goodwill is gone.
Meta can even afford to destroy themselves and their own employees.
More proof that they do not care about you at all. This is Meta's way of moving fast and destroying everything at all costs.