They collect their pay at the end of the month either way, as long as they don't get laid off of course. Do most people actually care about the 'mission' of the company or do they just want a nice pay at the end of the month and to enjoy the work/journey along the way.
Personally if i got paid well, enjoyed the work and got to play around with tech that i thought was interesting, I wouldn't care if Meta itself was successful in what it was trying to do, i'd only be a small cog in that machine.
Why do people want to be a part of something successful?
Becuase its frustrating to put effort and energy into building something only to see it discarded or destroyed.
Yes on the big timeline we're all building castles in the sand but most of us would like to be able to stand back and look at it while its finished before the ocean washes it away.
Equating this with parenthood is short-sighted. I have no children and will not have children in the future (indeed, I have taken medical steps to make this so). Nonetheless, work is money. To the extent I care about what I'm working on, it's due to a preference to avoid working on objectively evil projects. (Even then, I'm not sure whether there's a difference between working at, say, Microsoft, versus working at a hedge fund -- in either case, you're really just working to build the wealth of billionaires, after all.)
For sure, at least for me I don't have children etc, but fulfilment comes from the things that i want to do and work on in whatever way is intreasting and exciting to me, it's going to be very difficult for that to match exactly with a job, so my best hope is that the work itself is enjoyable enough, pays what i need to do what i want and then fulfilment comes with the things i do outside of work.
If you work at Meta and the Metaverse fails, I personally would not care beyond the immediate impact on my job, the part I had to play amount thousands of people would be of so little importance that I am not really that invested in it, as long as the day to day was enjoyable for me, I liked playing in that world and then i had the projects in my own life that were all on me, i'd be good.
I admit that I’m quite cynical about the fact that the whole IT tech space is almost entirely occupied with little bro boys wanting to play with their tech toys, without a care in the world for the larger (negative) impact on our world.
Would you have preferred to work on the Chevy Corvair or the Porsche 911? One was the most maligned car of its time and the other was revered as one of the greatest cars in history. The paycheck was the same. They both presented interesting engineering challenges. Yet one you could look back with pride and say yeah, I helped create that!
