4 ms·

From the outside, this all seems rather cultish. Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrar

by Veen 9y ago

From the outside, this all seems rather cultish. Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary? It brings to mind the famous Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

alexandercrohde 9y ago
Or maybe they're just all pretending to, because they're all saying this in the company facebook discussion, knowing it's trackable back to them, so they're trying to prove loyalty. It's a disconcerting system.
munificent 9y ago
> Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary At best, we only have evidence that the subset of employees who chose to comment on that internal thread and whose comment was chosen by the journalist to be included in the article feel this way. One of the things that media and aggregation have really accelerated is the cognitive fallacy where we assume the most interesting data points are the most frequent when in reality the inverse is almost always true — common is boring. If you were to go by the news, men bite dogs way more often than dogs bite men. But that's only because "man bites dog" is worth reporting and "dog bites man" is not.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
I thought the point of "culture fit" was to make sure one only hires employees who truly believe in the company and its ~~religion~~mission.
conanbatt 9y ago
> in spite of all the evidence to the contrary? evidence of the contrary? What is your evidence to measure the value of Facebook is not outweighted by its costs?
Antifragile1 9y ago
Just because a bunch of idiots on the internet are convinced that FB did something wrong by creating a platform to target ads... which in turn led to takedown of their crooked hag in the election, it doesn't mean all FB employees will buy into that nonsense. These "concerns" were never hidden from anyone.

by Veen 9y ago

alexandercrohde 9y ago

Or maybe they're just all pretending to, because they're all saying this in the company facebook discussion, knowing it's trackable back to them, so they're trying to prove loyalty. It's a disconcerting system.

munificent 9y ago

> Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary At best, we only have evidence that the subset of employees who chose to comment on that internal thread and whose comment was chosen by the journalist to be included in the article feel this way. One of the things that media and aggregation have really accelerated is the cognitive fallacy where we assume the most interesting data points are the most frequent when in reality the inverse is almost always true — common is boring. If you were to go by the news, men bite dogs way more often than dogs bite men. But that's only because "man bites dog" is worth reporting and "dog bites man" is not.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

I thought the point of "culture fit" was to make sure one only hires employees who truly believe in the company and its ~~religion~~mission.

conanbatt 9y ago

> in spite of all the evidence to the contrary? evidence of the contrary? What is your evidence to measure the value of Facebook is not outweighted by its costs?

Antifragile1 9y ago

Just because a bunch of idiots on the internet are convinced that FB did something wrong by creating a platform to target ads... which in turn led to takedown of their crooked hag in the election, it doesn't mean all FB employees will buy into that nonsense. These "concerns" were never hidden from anyone.