this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:
Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.
Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.
THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.
The saddest thing is how nobody in either of those groups ever seems to have even the most basic principles or ethics. If they did, they wouldn't be working for Meta.
Oh well, you should actually talk to some of them sometime. A lot of very bright, otherwise decent kids go straight from college to Meta and they think they’ll be doing good. One guy I knew spent his entire job working at keeping ISIS from using Facebook to organize. He didn’t go home at night thinking he was a terrible person.
Of course Meta is just a caricature of an evil corporation from a distance but it becomes more complex the closer you get to it.
With the great reality distortion field they had going there, the problem for a lot of staff was not ethics but perception. They were good people thinking they were doing good work but lacked perspective (not ethics themselves).
Of course someone can say “everyone should know FB is evil, there’s no excuse” but this is a classic case of “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever think something different than what I think.” Which, in itself, is just a lack of perspective. Funny how basically all humans suffer from that. You can chip away at this problem by asking yourself “why would a reasonable person think that?” instead of just going around saying “well then you’re stupid / evil” anytime anything outside your POV comes along.