Anecdotally (I have a friend in that situation), no impact as confirmed by their in-house recruiter.

But it might depend on whether they were pre-allocated to a team (which I understand is very rare, but it does happen).

They should start looking for something else as a backup.

If I were you I would tell them to break off contact because Meta is actively causing irreparable damage to society as we know it.

Yeah, and the reply they would receive from their friend would be a polite request to touch grass.

People in the real world use instagram and whatsapp all the time without any moral qualms. The main reason facebook as a product is on a decline is because it is simply not interesting to younger people anymore. And even then, FB still manages to occasionally produce features that capture a lot of the audience back. FB marketplace has been a great hit in terms of replacing craigslist.

I am not a Meta employee, and have never been one. But the hate hard-on some people on HN have against Meta just gets really ridiculous at times. We decry echochambers on social media all the time, but are perfectably comfortable falling into ones of our own, without trying to understand how the world outside is really like.

Marketplace is getting to be a nightmare of scams on both the buyer and seller side.

Stating "you should break contact with the recruiter because Meta is causing irreparable damage to society" is not a "legitimate question of professional ethics." It's like saying "you should be rushing the capitol, because democrats are causing irreparable damage to society by stealing the election", and then claiming it was a legitimate question of ethics of democracy. For both of which, the suggestion to touch grass feels pretty appropriate.

I agree with your take on ethics courses being mandatory for CS or engineering college students though. It was mandatory at my college, and I found it to be pretty useful.

EDIT: as pointed out, i incorrectly used "contract" instead of "contact" in the first sentence. Fixed, as it doesn't meaningfully change my point at all. The part relevant to the point I was making was in the "... because Meta is causing irreparable damage to society" half of the sentence.

Who is talking about breaking a contract? I said breaking contact (with recruiters). Your example provides an equivalency so false, I don't really know where to start with it. If I were to alter your analogy it'd be closer to: "Ghost your recruiter, don't work for the Biden Whitehouse" which, if they actually _were_ evil, would be a reasonable thing to say to a friend IMO.