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This is sort of surprising information, from my view. The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was

This is sort of surprising information, from my view. The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous. The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.

idunno246 9y ago
It’s also just one tweet. It’s an article based off a single sentence in the nytimes article. Maybe people are transferring, maybe this is a reason or an excuse, but the support in this article is pretty flimsy. having worked in Facebook games in 2012, I think some today forget how much worse for privacy Facebook used to be than it is today
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Also good points - plus, it's not very compassionate to let a knee-jerk negative opinion color my view of other peoples' actions without having heard their opinions.
tinbad 9y ago
Facebook is a huge organization and although to the outside world it's perceived as one, internally it's basically hundreds of separated teams and companies. So to your point, yes probably some are aware of all what's going on around the company, but there's probably an equal amount that are not. I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role. I think your parent's point is that all of this information has been out there even in the news. As he said: >they were very clear about what they were doing
hayksaakian 9y ago
> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries. I think you hit the nail on the head. I doubt it has to do with moral qualms as employees. More to do with your friends and family giving you crap for working at a company that's getting bad press.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  The best way to summarize FB employees, from @numair from 8 months ago: > Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780186
  - galieos_ghost 9y ago
    The issue is people who in the past would have went to wall street are now going to Silicon Valley solely for the money and it has poisoned the culture. Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds
    - CNJ7654 9y ago
      "Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds" This. Right here. I'm convinced this is why we typically don't see this kind of culture pollution in areas of tech where the barrier to entry is still fairly high, requiring an amount of skill and dedication that these people are not willing to invest.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    This is an exceptionally poor way to "summarize" the employees of any large company, including Facebook. Your personal ethics aside, whenever you're about to describe an entire company's staff using phrases like, "these sorts of people" and "mind-virus", you should stop and reconsider what you think you know about the world. You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.
sametmax 9y ago
Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded. And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities. While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.
- teachrdan 9y ago
  That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Exactly. There is no war/enemy here. Only ideals, whose ethics are now openly questioned. I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).
  - IAmEveryone 9y ago
    “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” —- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test
    - ballooney 9y ago
      "Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." -- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer
notjtrig 9y ago
We saw the same thing after Snowden, people were leaving the NSA in mass after the average person became aware of the situation. Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals, the next mass percution can be more specific than race. Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV. As the world becomes more aware of the dangers of algorithms and AI, Facebook engineers are rethinking their career path. It's clear to me that Zuckerberg was entirely too willing to abuse his power from the start, he doesn't seem to have good intentions at all.
- tajen 9y ago
  > Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV. Let’s be honest: What we’re after is Trump voters, Alex Jones/Milo fans, supporters of James Damore, non-feminists, non-supporters of Emmy Awards stances and generally all people who don’t laugh enough at Steven Colbert jokes. It was made very clear, for example at Google, that managers are building blacklists, and that HR supports them.
  - lainga 9y ago
    Trump voters The other groups maybe, but I doubt even Stalin thought the Great Purges would have gone better if he purged 49% of the Soviet Union's population.
    - manjushri 9y ago
      Are you implying 49% of the US population voted for Trump? It was closer to 19% of the population (63,000,000 / 326,000,000)
      - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
        What percentage voted?
    - smelterdemon 9y ago
      Well, it's more like 19% of the population (or 27% of the eligible voter pop.)
KC8ZKF 9y ago
Or perhaps, over time, they have changed their minds. The principle of charity, it seems to me, requires that we take them at their word in the absence of evidence otherwise.
oculusthrift 9y ago
yeah but it wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist to care about these. Now that it’s popular, many people will want to virtue signal and leave the company so others see how much principle they have.
FilterSweep 9y ago
The cynic in me wonders if this is just grandiose self-promotion as a bargaining chip for the next datamining job.
Alex3917 9y ago
> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions Employees rarely flip until the organization stops making them money, then they flip en masse. As long as Facebook's stock remains stagnant, the insider leaks will likely continue.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
> "The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, " Or just giving politically correct reasons that conveniently fit the current broader narrative. Might this be the last straw for some that were already close to leaving? Sure. But it's not the only reason, just the one that's simple to explain and/or easy to spot. That said, I have to wonder how often unintended consequences are discussed at FB, or at any of the other (tech) powerhouses. I mean, targeting ads based on personal info hardly sounds like a big moral / ethical problem, until someone finds a loop hole and attempts to exploit it (in what should have been foreseeable ways?).
mabbo 9y ago
> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries. Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say. These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all of this and say "is this right?". To quote David Mitchell: "Are we the baddies?".
- BRAlNlAC 9y ago
  >These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'? I've understood that Facebook is essentially evil for a decade. People who work there who are jumping ship now either look like they aren't paying attention but are moralizing the company's action or are abandoning a sinking ship, neither are really positive traits in a potential employee.
  - dcole2929 9y ago
    I mean that's good for you and I tend to agree. But it's incredibly naive to think that any significant percentage of the working population is using that criteria to determine where and on what they should work. We tend to think of tech people as being incredibly bright but at the end of the day they are human and FB is a very cool place to work. If you don't take a minute to evaluate the ethics of the work you're doing which might not on the surface be all that questionable it's easy to fool yourself into thinking, you're doing nothing wrong. It's a much easier realization that working for Defense Contractors making missile guidance systems is bad than it is to think hey all this data i'm collecting for my social network features could be put to some very bad uses
  - mabbo 9y ago
    I've quit a job for ethical reasons before, in a similar vein to this issue with Facebook. I don't begrudge those who didn't. Not every issue is black and white.
rout39574 9y ago
I disagree. My basis is the conversations I had when I interviewed there. They did not extend an offer, so read what you will into my own biases. :) But a repeated theme of the conversations was me trying to get inside their heads: I said: "Your job is to figure out when I'm going to be making a decision, purchase or whatever else, and make sure that your advertisers' message is in front of my eyes just as it's occurring to me to make a choice". With creepy consistency, the replies were rejections of this idea. "No, we're connecting the world!". My conclusion was an echo of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" I hope that the quitting phenomenon is real, and that it represents the creme de la creme, with many other options, leaving because they can no longer avoid understanding. If this is happening, then FB's decline will just accelerate.
- CodyReichert 9y ago
  This is just you trying to get an answer you knew you wouldn't get. "Connecting the world!" is indeed the job of almost all employees at Facebook. You can have a large majority of the company focus on this one goal, and also know that the byproduct of that goal allows you to expand another part of a bigger goal: to make more money on ads. A company in a capitalist economy must make money, of course. No one is arguing that and no one is saying that Facebook doesn't want - indeed must - make money. It's like asking an Uber driver what is job is: "to transport people!". Of course, that much is obvious. If you ask someone in the "growth" department (or whatever) what their job is - the description will necessarily be much different.
- rm999 9y ago
  I'm not one to normally defend Facebook, but I disagree. Advertising was not prioritized for a huge chunk of Facebook's history, so I'd argue it's not part of their core ethos (it's a necessary evil, if you will). While a lot of their more recent product decisions have been made around revenue generation, I don't think that's what keeps their leadership up at night. Keeping a monopoly on user attention (euphemism is "connecting the world") is their biggest challenge, especially in the ever-evolving social industry.
freshhawk 9y ago
The cynic in you is obviously right about this one. The best case scenario here is many people simply didn't ever consider the actual ethics of the business that was paying them until everyone else started talking about it. Not thinking about it until someone makes you doesn't make you a terrible person of course, but I won't be throwing any admiration your way.
itakedrugs 9y ago
Maybe it's because the a large portion of the population started to care and it changed their minds

idunno246 9y ago

It’s also just one tweet. It’s an article based off a single sentence in the nytimes article. Maybe people are transferring, maybe this is a reason or an excuse, but the support in this article is pretty flimsy. having worked in Facebook games in 2012, I think some today forget how much worse for privacy Facebook used to be than it is today

leggomylibro 9y ago
Also good points - plus, it's not very compassionate to let a knee-jerk negative opinion color my view of other peoples' actions without having heard their opinions.

tinbad 9y ago

Facebook is a huge organization and although to the outside world it's perceived as one, internally it's basically hundreds of separated teams and companies. So to your point, yes probably some are aware of all what's going on around the company, but there's probably an equal amount that are not. I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role.

BeetleB 9y ago
>I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role. I think your parent's point is that all of this information has been out there even in the news. As he said: >they were very clear about what they were doing

hayksaakian 9y ago

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries. I think you hit the nail on the head. I doubt it has to do with moral qualms as employees. More to do with your friends and family giving you crap for working at a company that's getting bad press.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
The best way to summarize FB employees, from @numair from 8 months ago: > Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780186
- galieos_ghost 9y ago
  The issue is people who in the past would have went to wall street are now going to Silicon Valley solely for the money and it has poisoned the culture. Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds
  - CNJ7654 9y ago
    "Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds" This. Right here. I'm convinced this is why we typically don't see this kind of culture pollution in areas of tech where the barrier to entry is still fairly high, requiring an amount of skill and dedication that these people are not willing to invest.
- dsacco 9y ago
  This is an exceptionally poor way to "summarize" the employees of any large company, including Facebook. Your personal ethics aside, whenever you're about to describe an entire company's staff using phrases like, "these sorts of people" and "mind-virus", you should stop and reconsider what you think you know about the world. You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.

sametmax 9y ago

Exactly. And I doubt it's a mass exodus either. If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices. They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded. And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities. While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.

teachrdan 9y ago
That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)
- r00fus 9y ago
  Exactly. There is no war/enemy here. Only ideals, whose ethics are now openly questioned. I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” —- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test
  - ballooney 9y ago
    "Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." -- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer

notjtrig 9y ago

We saw the same thing after Snowden, people were leaving the NSA in mass after the average person became aware of the situation. Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals, the next mass percution can be more specific than race. Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV. As the world becomes more aware of the dangers of algorithms and AI, Facebook engineers are rethinking their career path. It's clear to me that Zuckerberg was entirely too willing to abuse his power from the start, he doesn't seem to have good intentions at all.

tajen 9y ago
> Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV. Let’s be honest: What we’re after is Trump voters, Alex Jones/Milo fans, supporters of James Damore, non-feminists, non-supporters of Emmy Awards stances and generally all people who don’t laugh enough at Steven Colbert jokes. It was made very clear, for example at Google, that managers are building blacklists, and that HR supports them.
- lainga 9y ago
  Trump voters The other groups maybe, but I doubt even Stalin thought the Great Purges would have gone better if he purged 49% of the Soviet Union's population.
  - manjushri 9y ago
    Are you implying 49% of the US population voted for Trump? It was closer to 19% of the population (63,000,000 / 326,000,000)
    - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
      What percentage voted?
  - smelterdemon 9y ago
    Well, it's more like 19% of the population (or 27% of the eligible voter pop.)

KC8ZKF 9y ago

Or perhaps, over time, they have changed their minds. The principle of charity, it seems to me, requires that we take them at their word in the absence of evidence otherwise.

oculusthrift 9y ago

yeah but it wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist to care about these. Now that it’s popular, many people will want to virtue signal and leave the company so others see how much principle they have.

FilterSweep 9y ago

The cynic in me wonders if this is just grandiose self-promotion as a bargaining chip for the next datamining job.

Alex3917 9y ago

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions Employees rarely flip until the organization stops making them money, then they flip en masse. As long as Facebook's stock remains stagnant, the insider leaks will likely continue.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

> "The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, " Or just giving politically correct reasons that conveniently fit the current broader narrative. Might this be the last straw for some that were already close to leaving? Sure. But it's not the only reason, just the one that's simple to explain and/or easy to spot. That said, I have to wonder how often unintended consequences are discussed at FB, or at any of the other (tech) powerhouses. I mean, targeting ads based on personal info hardly sounds like a big moral / ethical problem, until someone finds a loop hole and attempts to exploit it (in what should have been foreseeable ways?).

mabbo 9y ago

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries. Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say. These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all of this and say "is this right?". To quote David Mitchell: "Are we the baddies?".

BRAlNlAC 9y ago
>These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'? I've understood that Facebook is essentially evil for a decade. People who work there who are jumping ship now either look like they aren't paying attention but are moralizing the company's action or are abandoning a sinking ship, neither are really positive traits in a potential employee.
- dcole2929 9y ago
  I mean that's good for you and I tend to agree. But it's incredibly naive to think that any significant percentage of the working population is using that criteria to determine where and on what they should work. We tend to think of tech people as being incredibly bright but at the end of the day they are human and FB is a very cool place to work. If you don't take a minute to evaluate the ethics of the work you're doing which might not on the surface be all that questionable it's easy to fool yourself into thinking, you're doing nothing wrong. It's a much easier realization that working for Defense Contractors making missile guidance systems is bad than it is to think hey all this data i'm collecting for my social network features could be put to some very bad uses
- mabbo 9y ago
  I've quit a job for ethical reasons before, in a similar vein to this issue with Facebook. I don't begrudge those who didn't. Not every issue is black and white.

rout39574 9y ago

I disagree. My basis is the conversations I had when I interviewed there. They did not extend an offer, so read what you will into my own biases. :) But a repeated theme of the conversations was me trying to get inside their heads: I said: "Your job is to figure out when I'm going to be making a decision, purchase or whatever else, and make sure that your advertisers' message is in front of my eyes just as it's occurring to me to make a choice". With creepy consistency, the replies were rejections of this idea. "No, we're connecting the world!". My conclusion was an echo of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" I hope that the quitting phenomenon is real, and that it represents the creme de la creme, with many other options, leaving because they can no longer avoid understanding. If this is happening, then FB's decline will just accelerate.

CodyReichert 9y ago
This is just you trying to get an answer you knew you wouldn't get. "Connecting the world!" is indeed the job of almost all employees at Facebook. You can have a large majority of the company focus on this one goal, and also know that the byproduct of that goal allows you to expand another part of a bigger goal: to make more money on ads. A company in a capitalist economy must make money, of course. No one is arguing that and no one is saying that Facebook doesn't want - indeed must - make money. It's like asking an Uber driver what is job is: "to transport people!". Of course, that much is obvious. If you ask someone in the "growth" department (or whatever) what their job is - the description will necessarily be much different.
rm999 9y ago
I'm not one to normally defend Facebook, but I disagree. Advertising was not prioritized for a huge chunk of Facebook's history, so I'd argue it's not part of their core ethos (it's a necessary evil, if you will). While a lot of their more recent product decisions have been made around revenue generation, I don't think that's what keeps their leadership up at night. Keeping a monopoly on user attention (euphemism is "connecting the world") is their biggest challenge, especially in the ever-evolving social industry.

freshhawk 9y ago

The cynic in you is obviously right about this one. The best case scenario here is many people simply didn't ever consider the actual ethics of the business that was paying them until everyone else started talking about it. Not thinking about it until someone makes you doesn't make you a terrible person of course, but I won't be throwing any admiration your way.

itakedrugs 9y ago

Maybe it's because the a large portion of the population started to care and it changed their minds