11 ms·

I just don't understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying "hey, wait, isn't this an insane thing to do?". I would guess it's som

I just don't understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying "hey, wait, isn't this an insane thing to do?". I would guess it's some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn't they trust us, we're Facebook!".

AndyMcConachie 8y ago
Move fast and break things!
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Preferably other peoples things!
leCapitalist 8y ago
Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this. The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation. Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they're trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it's all said and done, over $1M is wasted. Welcome to life at a big tech company.
- starbugs 8y ago
  Your summary hits the nail on the head. But you forgot the most important thing: What happens once upper management reads an article like this and realizes they f*cked up badly again? Yes, more of the same hierarchy, compensation, promotions, and "culture". Welcome to "efficient" big corporate hierarchies.
- Traster 8y ago
  I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there's no reason facebook needs to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nstart 8y ago
    That's exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It's a rough world out there and it's better to get in line than lose your pot of gold. Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      There's a book about the process by which this happens: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds > Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference.
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        The book Moral Mazes also deals with this topic.
      - pmontra 8y ago
        Companies are not democracies. Is it a contradiction that we both praise democracy and spend our working time in dictatorships? Probably but we usually don't even notice it.
- emilsedgh 8y ago
  This story you wrote seems like something that happened a couple of years ago at Lenovo. Facebook's would most probably not call it off. Or just resurface the same thing at another time with another name or excuse.
- dininski 8y ago
  I partially agree with you. When I used to work at one of the big five, PMs for my team would regularly disregard the engineers' output on most matters (apart from occasionally letting us make purely technical decisions). This, of course, ultimately led to almost the entire team leaving, including me, and the rest transferring internally. It's not all the engineers' fault. One can push back as much as one wants, but it rarely changes anything at all. However the PMs' success is measured based on delivered features and projects. In most big enterprises the engineers are just worker bees, for the queen PM bee and if they don't perform or don't want to do something, they can be somewhat easily replaced with someone who will. And don't forget that a lot of the engineers might be on a working visa, for example. And why would they jeopardize their job and their way of life on moral grounds, instead of keeping their head down and just going through the motions. I'm not saying that I agree with them, but putting all engineers in the same basket seems unfair. Now that's why realistically it is much rarer for a group of engineers to take a stance than you'd think. This is why cases like the Google engineers who refused to work on military contracts got so much attention. As inspiring and empowering as it might seem, in reality it (almost) never happens.
- robteix 8y ago
  I mostly agree but don’t underestimate the effect that drinking the kool-aid can have on your ability to tell if something is wrong or not. I’ve worked in these megacorps and I understand how easy is to believe everything they do is awesome. “We’re just doing it to make it easier for our users” or “we’re Facebook, we know how to securely handle their passwords” It’s very easy to _believe_ these things when you’re in the inside being showered with money and being told how amazing you are all the time.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    But frankly, when you think about it, the only amazing thing about FB is how it got popular, that's all. As for the user experience it's very far from amazing, in spite of all the tech used. It's slow, and on mobile not only slow but also resource hungry, it has several glitches, plus there is a ton of things that annoy users. Now, I can understands that someone working for SpaceX can think they're all amazing, but if you work for FB? It's like working for MS in late 90s - maybe good for you cash-wise, and that's pretty much it.
    - doubletgl 8y ago
      React and other JS projects gave them a largely positive reputation as tech employer in that field.
    - amyjess 8y ago
      It's sad, because Facebook wasn't like that when it started out. It was clean and light and fast, unlike MySpace which was often described as a messy, bloated pig.
- short_sells_poo 8y ago
  The finance industry gets (often rightfully) vilified for having flexible morals and reckless profit seeking, but this is not something unique to finance. Finance was traditionally the environment that enabled this sort of behavior, but the root cause is that fundamental human behavior is still fairly reptilian in nature. As technologists we like to think that we are above this behavior, but we are not. All it takes is someone to wave enough dollar bills in front of our eyes and we'll mostly justify our actions with a mixture of whataboutism and by saying "I'm just a lowly cog in the machine". I'm seeing a great many parallels in the short term predatory and risky behavior in the financial machinations of the past and the behavior of tech firms including FAANG today. Even with the best intentions, the system eventually evolves to a point where the show is being run by fundamentally the same sort of people in both industries. Perhaps it is because it is these sort of people who strive in a cut-throat corporate environment that is itself in a cut-throat capitalist environment. I'm not saying this as some sort of hard line leftist either - hell, I work in systematic trading so I'm as much part of the system as one can be. Yeah sure, I should hold true to my morals, but what about all the others who are willing to replace me at a moments notice? I'm just a cog in the machine, my action will not make an ounce of difference and only cause hardship for myself. Oh the irony!
  - luckylion 8y ago
    I agree partially. First of, I don't think the finance industry gets vilified for having flexible morals, they attract hate for having no morals at all. Certainly, you're right that we depend on each one to say "no, I won't do that", but I feel like there's a difference in quality: evil intent vs willful ignorance/negligence. There might be borderline illegal tax-dodging with large tech companies, there might be irresponsible data security, but there's not a lot that is comparable to the cum-ex-trades that large banks engaged in: no active defrauding of the government and/or citizens. Granted, it may happen once tech corporations have as strong a grip on governments as banks do, and feel secure enough that they won't have to face repercussions if it blows up. Plenty of banks, and not just the large, global ones have actively engaged in tricking their customers by selling them junk and hiding and/or downplaying important details to get their sales provision, and it wasn't something that was "only known at the top". I've yet to hear of scandals of a similar magnitude in tech. Chrome doesn't contain any hidden crypto-miner, and if it ever will, I doubt that an investigation would reveal everybody on the team knew about it - it would likely just reveal a security breach or a small amount of people subverting the processes. I do completely agree that tech isn't all sunshine, however. Behind pretty much every large scale data leak is an engineer that said "well okay if you want me to put this database server on the public internet and remove the password, I'm happy to do it" instead of refusing, and behind every horrible overreach in surveillance is an engineer that just blocks out the impact his work has on real people. There are people working on killer drones after all, and I don't think any of them are naive enough to believe that "they only target the bad guys".
- matwood 8y ago
  This is why control > salary for me. I would much rather (and do) work at a smaller company making less money, but where I have real input in the company itself. We routinely have clients ask for more tracking data on users and we explain/teach why it is a bad idea. In some way these FB stories help me, because I can point to these articles and ask 'do you want to end up associated with this?'
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    That's great when you have the ability to forego potential salary. It's also why manufactured scarcity (especially in housing) enables people who wish to apply engineering effort in unethical ways. If 10 engineers are bidding on 5 houses, the 5 highest-paid ones will get it. Any pay raise they get will get dumped in to their house - give them all 100k raises and the house will go up by whatever another 100k a year in mortgage payments gets you (I simplify, but not that much) Not only that, those 5 highly-paid engineers who got the houses have every incentive to make it illegal to build more. It's hard to stick to your principles when it means getting kicked out of your home, pulling your kids out of school, your spouse having to move away from their job, etc. It's not just housing, of course, it's a huge part of it. The engineer with a $750 a month mortgage will have a MUCH easier time saying "fuck off this is evil" than one with a $7500 a month mortgage.
    - matwood 8y ago
      First, no one is talking about getting paid incredibly less (especially if you factor in COLA). It's more generally about not maximizing for only salary. Second, unless you want to work in one of the big companies, why work where it is only engineers bidding on houses? Engineers have the luxury right now of taking less pay and still making much more than a large majority of the population.
      - i_am_proteus 8y ago
        He's describing, hyperbolically but not wholly inaccurately, the Bay Area housing market.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  > Welcome to life at a big tech company. Most of this is, as you've correctly spelled out, just due to perverse incentives, and there's not really any intentional malfeasance. The REAL problems start when you get a neurotic psychopath with a modicum of power, and an agenda to climb the ladder, who pushes through ideas they KNOW are bad for the company, as a whole, in the long run, but do so anyway because they know it will help their career in the short run. I've been powerless to try to stop this from happening at two Fortune 250's.
  - cujo 8y ago
    > there's not really any intentional malfeasance I would argue that the people at the top making these decisions are not ignorant about what is going on.
- moorhosj 8y ago
  Is it possible the private sector (free market) is not as infallible as I was lead to believe?
- engineerworks 8y ago
  Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem. It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions. Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess. I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management. Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders. It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see. Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems! Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure. There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical. If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that. I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.
  - petre 8y ago
    In my country there was a joke running about the communist establishment. It went like this: You can't? We'll help you! You don't know how to? We'll teach you! You don't want to? We'll force you! I guess these companies work pretty much like totalitarian regimes but at least you can quit without being shot.
- mic47 8y ago
  true, apart from I would expect this to go from growth team (making signup as friction less as possible), not from anti-fraud team.
- h3ckr 8y ago
  This. You nailed it
Simple_Guy 8y ago
Why is this insane? It's just asking. If you don't want to, don't give your pw to facebook. You make a proposition to an entity, they evaluate the risk-benefit and respond. Unless of course, you think adults are actually childiren and should be protected from themselves by the technocrats.
- unionpivo 8y ago
  Ignoring their recent fail at logging passwords. It has been established as minimal practice, that NO ONE should be asking you about your password. If this would become a normal, it would also make regular people more likely to give out their passwords. And email is key to your online kingdom, so it's a big deal, if it gets compromised.
  - rogual 8y ago
    At the very least, your mail client has to ask you for your email password. Might sound like I'm splitting hairs but I don't think most users have a strong sense of why that's different from Facebook doing it. And with wizzy online features crammed into more and more desktop software (seen Photoshop lately?) you can't really fault them for it.
    - aquaticsunset 8y ago
      Especially when most users are probably using the same password for both, or are just warming up to the concept that you shouldn’t do that.
    - luckylion 8y ago
      Your mail client isn't a company, that's not the same. You're right that the wording is important, and we do a bad job explaining what passwords actually mean, and how to treat them. A simpler analogy: Don't give your house keys to strangers, McDonald's has no business asking you for your keys to confirm your order. I don't think users need to understand why, they just need to understand what to do / not to do. I've taught my mother to never give anybody her passwords, not even me, and if anyone asks her for her password to call me. She's mildly annoyed when I'm helping her with something and I tell her to please input her password, but she's gotten used to it. Did it work? It did. The representatives for a car sharing company were poorly trained and asked her to write her email and her password into a form. She refused, walked out and called me because she was worried that they were trying to get into her bank account. Turns out they wanted her to choose a password for their service, and were just very bad at wording it (and had the terrible idea to have customers hand-write it into a form and let somebody transcribe it into the computer system) and the guys working in the office had only been handed a script, they didn't actually know what information they were supposed to get. I'm certain that they accidentally harvested a good number of valid email/password combinations since it's a leading company that is owned by a major car manufacturer and has a good reputation.
ndnxhs 8y ago
People with any sense of ethics don't work at Facebook.
- shadowbannedtoo 8y ago
  Most people only have ethics when money is not involved. (I'm shadowed banned by the Donger?)
- pas 8y ago
  Maybe, but that's very counter-productive actually. If you want to do ethical stuff FB is a perfect place to try to influence what happens.
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    Unless you have been doing deeply corrupt work for them for years you are not going to be making any change at that megacorp. I know someone who worked there and they just remove anyone who does not conform.
    - pas 8y ago
      Changing them can be done with market forces and political will from the outside and through participation on the discussions on the inside. Probably all approaches are needed. I'm simply stating, that if no one is on the inside, then we're missing out on a possible interaction channel that could help changing FB.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    At the same time, you help Facebook do what it currently does, i.e. unethical stuff. I dont think an individual engineers ability to influence a company they dont own outweighs their contributions.
    - pas 8y ago
      Not necessarily. You don't have to lie during the recruitment/interview. If you get in you get in. And you can resign when they ask you to do something you feel you should not participate in. Simply trying to get in to be on the inside - without lying, is better than not even trying. Of course, trying to advocate for better political control (privacy, transparency, lower barriers to enter the market) is important, and can and should be done while trying to engage with FB, trying to get close to their internal decision making process. And, naturally, not everyone has the affinity to work at FB, but since it's a spectrum, likely there are a lot of software engineers that do have some ethical concern with regards to what and how FB does, and they shouldn't be discouraged from working at FB, but they should be very much empowered to be able to stand up and leave when their moral compass signals.
gvand 8y ago
That's why they prefer young people? Yep, they could be smart like anyone else, but they also care/need more about money for obvious reasons and in the long run they tend to fall in line more easily.
jonathanstrange 8y ago
LinkedIn has been doing this for years. It's the reason why I don't use it (and the spam they send is the reason why everybody hates them).
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  You mean emails? I've managed to turn them all off; if that doesn't work, you can file a complaint with the EU who have strict laws against e-mail spam, and the requirement to unsubscribe with as few actions as possible.
  - mosselman 8y ago
    Where can I file these complaints? I have looked for this before, but wasn’t able to find out
    - palunon 8y ago
      IANAL, but usually you file a complaint with your national regulator, so it would depend on your country (of residence, I guess).
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    Yeah i've managed to stop all emails with my active LI account, they do occasionally add stuff that triggers them again so I just go into the settings and they're gone. LI are awful for many reasons, but they do honour these things.
- ams6110 8y ago
  LinkedIn asks for email passwords? I knew they encouraged uploading your contacts, but didn't realize they wanted your email too. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. If their's any major social media platform less ethical than Facebook it's probably LinkedIn.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm not seeing where all this moral indignation is suddenly coming from. Asking for email passwords has been a staple for social networks since the beginning.
usrusr 8y ago
"If it's good enough for immigration, it's good enough for account setup. Isn't facebook something like a nation?" Maybe they hired someone who worked at border controls?
_pmf_ 8y ago
> and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way" I have never had a higher level person worrying at all about security except as a nuisance when prodded.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I have seen security worried about but even then it is often ironically misaimed like attempted DRM or bad password policies.
akerro 8y ago
Developers did it for whatever reason.
netwanderer3 8y ago
I would love to take a peak into the meeting where they formulated this idea. With all the shit being fired at Facebook from all directions these days, I just want to see the faces and reactions of those who thought "Yep, that's a good idea!" when this concept was originally brought up. It's really stretching my curiosity and imagination to the point where I start wondering what type of people they are hiring at Facebook these days. Is there a name for this phenomenal in psychology where one would insist on doing the exact same things other people are criticizing them, but with an increasingly higher intensity the more they get criticized for it? This is exactly what it is.
- peteradio 8y ago
  Perhaps they are being eaten headfirst. Each bite leaves them a little less scrupulous and a little dummerer
shados 8y ago
There was also probably some "Well, financial sites/tax softwares do it and they have much higher security requirements than we do!". Let's not underestimate the power of precedents: someone else said it was crazy at ANOTHER COMPANY, didn't get their idea through, and now other companies are copying it. Additionally, a lot of people in the comments mentioned how engineers are ignored. Being able to convince your peers (like a product manager) of something is a skill, one that is fairly uncommon among "top tech talent", but happens to be a minimum requirement for roles like PMs. Saying "We can't do that, it's crazy!" and expecting everyone to just agree with you because you're awesome at coding just isn't going to cut it. Yeah, maybe the PM should have realized it was insane on their own. But let's consider that given hundreds or thousands of people in a company, crazy ideas might get deflected thousands of times, but it only take one "failure" for it to slip in.
jsonne 8y ago
Facebook also asked users in Australia for their naked photos. This isn't even the weirdest privacy invading request that they've had recently. This is business as usual. https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2017/11/08/news/a-facebook-test-in-australia-is-asking-for-nude-photos-to-help-block-revenge-porn-1182928/ https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2017/11/08/new...
MichaelSalib 8y ago
I worked at FB briefly so maybe I can explain. FB has a corporate culture that really discourages critique. When things are broken, especially internal things, people look at you funny if you speak up about it. A big part of that is that quarterly bonuses are given for "making an impact" and your group's status (and part of your bonus) is based on delivering a consistent set of "impacts" over time. So it is better for your comp to do things badly really fast since you get (1) did something super fast! and (2) get to record a big impact a few months later when you fix the obvious brokenness. Pretty quickly, people learn to keep their mouth shut. Also, many, many FB engineers are early-career folk who are fresh out of school. More senior folk are few and far between and are even more strongly incentivized to keep their mouth shut, because their bonuses are bigger.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Yesterday, this same rationale came up with why Google keeps launching new products and then abandoning them over and over and over. I guess this is what happens when a startup gets big. They keep all the toxic baggage of startup culture (edit: "move fast and break things") while gaining the impact on people's lives that big companies have. I think Apple is the only one of the FAANG that's jettisoned startup culture, and I think that's why they're doing so incredibly well.
dwighttk 8y ago
It was probably A/B tested and yielded the highest conversion rate.
abawany 8y ago
I was once in a conflict with a bunch of people at a larger e-commerce tech company because I railed against the practices and requirements of one of the stupidest projects that I was pushed into. The 'wisest' amongst the group, justifying his subservience, stated as an argument: 'they debate, they decide, we deliver'. I felt a visceral sense of disgust at hearing that and never spoke to this person again. He is doing quite well slithering up the corporate ladder, last I heard. The stupid project in question cost the company millions and died a well deserved whimpering death within a few months.

AndyMcConachie 8y ago

Move fast and break things!

tinus_hn 8y ago
Preferably other peoples things!

leCapitalist 8y ago

Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this. The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation. Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they're trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it's all said and done, over $1M is wasted. Welcome to life at a big tech company.

starbugs 8y ago
Your summary hits the nail on the head. But you forgot the most important thing: What happens once upper management reads an article like this and realizes they f*cked up badly again? Yes, more of the same hierarchy, compensation, promotions, and "culture". Welcome to "efficient" big corporate hierarchies.
Traster 8y ago
I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there's no reason facebook needs to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nstart 8y ago
  That's exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It's a rough world out there and it's better to get in line than lose your pot of gold. Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    There's a book about the process by which this happens: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds > Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      The book Moral Mazes also deals with this topic.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      Companies are not democracies. Is it a contradiction that we both praise democracy and spend our working time in dictatorships? Probably but we usually don't even notice it.
emilsedgh 8y ago
This story you wrote seems like something that happened a couple of years ago at Lenovo. Facebook's would most probably not call it off. Or just resurface the same thing at another time with another name or excuse.
dininski 8y ago
I partially agree with you. When I used to work at one of the big five, PMs for my team would regularly disregard the engineers' output on most matters (apart from occasionally letting us make purely technical decisions). This, of course, ultimately led to almost the entire team leaving, including me, and the rest transferring internally. It's not all the engineers' fault. One can push back as much as one wants, but it rarely changes anything at all. However the PMs' success is measured based on delivered features and projects. In most big enterprises the engineers are just worker bees, for the queen PM bee and if they don't perform or don't want to do something, they can be somewhat easily replaced with someone who will. And don't forget that a lot of the engineers might be on a working visa, for example. And why would they jeopardize their job and their way of life on moral grounds, instead of keeping their head down and just going through the motions. I'm not saying that I agree with them, but putting all engineers in the same basket seems unfair. Now that's why realistically it is much rarer for a group of engineers to take a stance than you'd think. This is why cases like the Google engineers who refused to work on military contracts got so much attention. As inspiring and empowering as it might seem, in reality it (almost) never happens.
robteix 8y ago
I mostly agree but don’t underestimate the effect that drinking the kool-aid can have on your ability to tell if something is wrong or not. I’ve worked in these megacorps and I understand how easy is to believe everything they do is awesome. “We’re just doing it to make it easier for our users” or “we’re Facebook, we know how to securely handle their passwords” It’s very easy to _believe_ these things when you’re in the inside being showered with money and being told how amazing you are all the time.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  But frankly, when you think about it, the only amazing thing about FB is how it got popular, that's all. As for the user experience it's very far from amazing, in spite of all the tech used. It's slow, and on mobile not only slow but also resource hungry, it has several glitches, plus there is a ton of things that annoy users. Now, I can understands that someone working for SpaceX can think they're all amazing, but if you work for FB? It's like working for MS in late 90s - maybe good for you cash-wise, and that's pretty much it.
  - doubletgl 8y ago
    React and other JS projects gave them a largely positive reputation as tech employer in that field.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    It's sad, because Facebook wasn't like that when it started out. It was clean and light and fast, unlike MySpace which was often described as a messy, bloated pig.
short_sells_poo 8y ago
The finance industry gets (often rightfully) vilified for having flexible morals and reckless profit seeking, but this is not something unique to finance. Finance was traditionally the environment that enabled this sort of behavior, but the root cause is that fundamental human behavior is still fairly reptilian in nature. As technologists we like to think that we are above this behavior, but we are not. All it takes is someone to wave enough dollar bills in front of our eyes and we'll mostly justify our actions with a mixture of whataboutism and by saying "I'm just a lowly cog in the machine". I'm seeing a great many parallels in the short term predatory and risky behavior in the financial machinations of the past and the behavior of tech firms including FAANG today. Even with the best intentions, the system eventually evolves to a point where the show is being run by fundamentally the same sort of people in both industries. Perhaps it is because it is these sort of people who strive in a cut-throat corporate environment that is itself in a cut-throat capitalist environment. I'm not saying this as some sort of hard line leftist either - hell, I work in systematic trading so I'm as much part of the system as one can be. Yeah sure, I should hold true to my morals, but what about all the others who are willing to replace me at a moments notice? I'm just a cog in the machine, my action will not make an ounce of difference and only cause hardship for myself. Oh the irony!
- luckylion 8y ago
  I agree partially. First of, I don't think the finance industry gets vilified for having flexible morals, they attract hate for having no morals at all. Certainly, you're right that we depend on each one to say "no, I won't do that", but I feel like there's a difference in quality: evil intent vs willful ignorance/negligence. There might be borderline illegal tax-dodging with large tech companies, there might be irresponsible data security, but there's not a lot that is comparable to the cum-ex-trades that large banks engaged in: no active defrauding of the government and/or citizens. Granted, it may happen once tech corporations have as strong a grip on governments as banks do, and feel secure enough that they won't have to face repercussions if it blows up. Plenty of banks, and not just the large, global ones have actively engaged in tricking their customers by selling them junk and hiding and/or downplaying important details to get their sales provision, and it wasn't something that was "only known at the top". I've yet to hear of scandals of a similar magnitude in tech. Chrome doesn't contain any hidden crypto-miner, and if it ever will, I doubt that an investigation would reveal everybody on the team knew about it - it would likely just reveal a security breach or a small amount of people subverting the processes. I do completely agree that tech isn't all sunshine, however. Behind pretty much every large scale data leak is an engineer that said "well okay if you want me to put this database server on the public internet and remove the password, I'm happy to do it" instead of refusing, and behind every horrible overreach in surveillance is an engineer that just blocks out the impact his work has on real people. There are people working on killer drones after all, and I don't think any of them are naive enough to believe that "they only target the bad guys".
matwood 8y ago
This is why control > salary for me. I would much rather (and do) work at a smaller company making less money, but where I have real input in the company itself. We routinely have clients ask for more tracking data on users and we explain/teach why it is a bad idea. In some way these FB stories help me, because I can point to these articles and ask 'do you want to end up associated with this?'
- CalRobert 8y ago
  That's great when you have the ability to forego potential salary. It's also why manufactured scarcity (especially in housing) enables people who wish to apply engineering effort in unethical ways. If 10 engineers are bidding on 5 houses, the 5 highest-paid ones will get it. Any pay raise they get will get dumped in to their house - give them all 100k raises and the house will go up by whatever another 100k a year in mortgage payments gets you (I simplify, but not that much) Not only that, those 5 highly-paid engineers who got the houses have every incentive to make it illegal to build more. It's hard to stick to your principles when it means getting kicked out of your home, pulling your kids out of school, your spouse having to move away from their job, etc. It's not just housing, of course, it's a huge part of it. The engineer with a $750 a month mortgage will have a MUCH easier time saying "fuck off this is evil" than one with a $7500 a month mortgage.
  - matwood 8y ago
    First, no one is talking about getting paid incredibly less (especially if you factor in COLA). It's more generally about not maximizing for only salary. Second, unless you want to work in one of the big companies, why work where it is only engineers bidding on houses? Engineers have the luxury right now of taking less pay and still making much more than a large majority of the population.
    - i_am_proteus 8y ago
      He's describing, hyperbolically but not wholly inaccurately, the Bay Area housing market.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
> Welcome to life at a big tech company. Most of this is, as you've correctly spelled out, just due to perverse incentives, and there's not really any intentional malfeasance. The REAL problems start when you get a neurotic psychopath with a modicum of power, and an agenda to climb the ladder, who pushes through ideas they KNOW are bad for the company, as a whole, in the long run, but do so anyway because they know it will help their career in the short run. I've been powerless to try to stop this from happening at two Fortune 250's.
- cujo 8y ago
  > there's not really any intentional malfeasance I would argue that the people at the top making these decisions are not ignorant about what is going on.
moorhosj 8y ago
Is it possible the private sector (free market) is not as infallible as I was lead to believe?
engineerworks 8y ago
Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem. It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions. Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess. I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management. Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders. It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see. Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems! Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure. There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical. If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that. I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.
- petre 8y ago
  In my country there was a joke running about the communist establishment. It went like this: You can't? We'll help you! You don't know how to? We'll teach you! You don't want to? We'll force you! I guess these companies work pretty much like totalitarian regimes but at least you can quit without being shot.
mic47 8y ago
true, apart from I would expect this to go from growth team (making signup as friction less as possible), not from anti-fraud team.
h3ckr 8y ago
This. You nailed it

Simple_Guy 8y ago

Why is this insane? It's just asking. If you don't want to, don't give your pw to facebook. You make a proposition to an entity, they evaluate the risk-benefit and respond. Unless of course, you think adults are actually childiren and should be protected from themselves by the technocrats.

unionpivo 8y ago
Ignoring their recent fail at logging passwords. It has been established as minimal practice, that NO ONE should be asking you about your password. If this would become a normal, it would also make regular people more likely to give out their passwords. And email is key to your online kingdom, so it's a big deal, if it gets compromised.
- rogual 8y ago
  At the very least, your mail client has to ask you for your email password. Might sound like I'm splitting hairs but I don't think most users have a strong sense of why that's different from Facebook doing it. And with wizzy online features crammed into more and more desktop software (seen Photoshop lately?) you can't really fault them for it.
  - aquaticsunset 8y ago
    Especially when most users are probably using the same password for both, or are just warming up to the concept that you shouldn’t do that.
  - luckylion 8y ago
    Your mail client isn't a company, that's not the same. You're right that the wording is important, and we do a bad job explaining what passwords actually mean, and how to treat them. A simpler analogy: Don't give your house keys to strangers, McDonald's has no business asking you for your keys to confirm your order. I don't think users need to understand why, they just need to understand what to do / not to do. I've taught my mother to never give anybody her passwords, not even me, and if anyone asks her for her password to call me. She's mildly annoyed when I'm helping her with something and I tell her to please input her password, but she's gotten used to it. Did it work? It did. The representatives for a car sharing company were poorly trained and asked her to write her email and her password into a form. She refused, walked out and called me because she was worried that they were trying to get into her bank account. Turns out they wanted her to choose a password for their service, and were just very bad at wording it (and had the terrible idea to have customers hand-write it into a form and let somebody transcribe it into the computer system) and the guys working in the office had only been handed a script, they didn't actually know what information they were supposed to get. I'm certain that they accidentally harvested a good number of valid email/password combinations since it's a leading company that is owned by a major car manufacturer and has a good reputation.

ndnxhs 8y ago

People with any sense of ethics don't work at Facebook.

shadowbannedtoo 8y ago
Most people only have ethics when money is not involved. (I'm shadowed banned by the Donger?)
pas 8y ago
Maybe, but that's very counter-productive actually. If you want to do ethical stuff FB is a perfect place to try to influence what happens.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Unless you have been doing deeply corrupt work for them for years you are not going to be making any change at that megacorp. I know someone who worked there and they just remove anyone who does not conform.
  - pas 8y ago
    Changing them can be done with market forces and political will from the outside and through participation on the discussions on the inside. Probably all approaches are needed. I'm simply stating, that if no one is on the inside, then we're missing out on a possible interaction channel that could help changing FB.
- anoncake 8y ago
  At the same time, you help Facebook do what it currently does, i.e. unethical stuff. I dont think an individual engineers ability to influence a company they dont own outweighs their contributions.
  - pas 8y ago
    Not necessarily. You don't have to lie during the recruitment/interview. If you get in you get in. And you can resign when they ask you to do something you feel you should not participate in. Simply trying to get in to be on the inside - without lying, is better than not even trying. Of course, trying to advocate for better political control (privacy, transparency, lower barriers to enter the market) is important, and can and should be done while trying to engage with FB, trying to get close to their internal decision making process. And, naturally, not everyone has the affinity to work at FB, but since it's a spectrum, likely there are a lot of software engineers that do have some ethical concern with regards to what and how FB does, and they shouldn't be discouraged from working at FB, but they should be very much empowered to be able to stand up and leave when their moral compass signals.

gvand 8y ago

That's why they prefer young people? Yep, they could be smart like anyone else, but they also care/need more about money for obvious reasons and in the long run they tend to fall in line more easily.

jonathanstrange 8y ago

LinkedIn has been doing this for years. It's the reason why I don't use it (and the spam they send is the reason why everybody hates them).

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
You mean emails? I've managed to turn them all off; if that doesn't work, you can file a complaint with the EU who have strict laws against e-mail spam, and the requirement to unsubscribe with as few actions as possible.
- mosselman 8y ago
  Where can I file these complaints? I have looked for this before, but wasn’t able to find out
  - palunon 8y ago
    IANAL, but usually you file a complaint with your national regulator, so it would depend on your country (of residence, I guess).
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Yeah i've managed to stop all emails with my active LI account, they do occasionally add stuff that triggers them again so I just go into the settings and they're gone. LI are awful for many reasons, but they do honour these things.
ams6110 8y ago
LinkedIn asks for email passwords? I knew they encouraged uploading your contacts, but didn't realize they wanted your email too. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. If their's any major social media platform less ethical than Facebook it's probably LinkedIn.
hackinthebochs 8y ago
Yeah, I'm not seeing where all this moral indignation is suddenly coming from. Asking for email passwords has been a staple for social networks since the beginning.

usrusr 8y ago

"If it's good enough for immigration, it's good enough for account setup. Isn't facebook something like a nation?" Maybe they hired someone who worked at border controls?

_pmf_ 8y ago

> and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way" I have never had a higher level person worrying at all about security except as a nuisance when prodded.

Nasrudith 8y ago
I have seen security worried about but even then it is often ironically misaimed like attempted DRM or bad password policies.

akerro 8y ago

Developers did it for whatever reason.

netwanderer3 8y ago

I would love to take a peak into the meeting where they formulated this idea. With all the shit being fired at Facebook from all directions these days, I just want to see the faces and reactions of those who thought "Yep, that's a good idea!" when this concept was originally brought up. It's really stretching my curiosity and imagination to the point where I start wondering what type of people they are hiring at Facebook these days. Is there a name for this phenomenal in psychology where one would insist on doing the exact same things other people are criticizing them, but with an increasingly higher intensity the more they get criticized for it? This is exactly what it is.

peteradio 8y ago
Perhaps they are being eaten headfirst. Each bite leaves them a little less scrupulous and a little dummerer

shados 8y ago

There was also probably some "Well, financial sites/tax softwares do it and they have much higher security requirements than we do!". Let's not underestimate the power of precedents: someone else said it was crazy at ANOTHER COMPANY, didn't get their idea through, and now other companies are copying it. Additionally, a lot of people in the comments mentioned how engineers are ignored. Being able to convince your peers (like a product manager) of something is a skill, one that is fairly uncommon among "top tech talent", but happens to be a minimum requirement for roles like PMs. Saying "We can't do that, it's crazy!" and expecting everyone to just agree with you because you're awesome at coding just isn't going to cut it. Yeah, maybe the PM should have realized it was insane on their own. But let's consider that given hundreds or thousands of people in a company, crazy ideas might get deflected thousands of times, but it only take one "failure" for it to slip in.

jsonne 8y ago

Facebook also asked users in Australia for their naked photos. This isn't even the weirdest privacy invading request that they've had recently. This is business as usual. https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2017/11/08/news/a-facebook-test-in-australia-is-asking-for-nude-photos-to-help-block-revenge-porn-1182928/ https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2017/11/08/new...

MichaelSalib 8y ago

I worked at FB briefly so maybe I can explain. FB has a corporate culture that really discourages critique. When things are broken, especially internal things, people look at you funny if you speak up about it. A big part of that is that quarterly bonuses are given for "making an impact" and your group's status (and part of your bonus) is based on delivering a consistent set of "impacts" over time. So it is better for your comp to do things badly really fast since you get (1) did something super fast! and (2) get to record a big impact a few months later when you fix the obvious brokenness. Pretty quickly, people learn to keep their mouth shut. Also, many, many FB engineers are early-career folk who are fresh out of school. More senior folk are few and far between and are even more strongly incentivized to keep their mouth shut, because their bonuses are bigger.

amyjess 8y ago
Yesterday, this same rationale came up with why Google keeps launching new products and then abandoning them over and over and over. I guess this is what happens when a startup gets big. They keep all the toxic baggage of startup culture (edit: "move fast and break things") while gaining the impact on people's lives that big companies have. I think Apple is the only one of the FAANG that's jettisoned startup culture, and I think that's why they're doing so incredibly well.

dwighttk 8y ago

It was probably A/B tested and yielded the highest conversion rate.

abawany 8y ago

I was once in a conflict with a bunch of people at a larger e-commerce tech company because I railed against the practices and requirements of one of the stupidest projects that I was pushed into. The 'wisest' amongst the group, justifying his subservience, stated as an argument: 'they debate, they decide, we deliver'. I felt a visceral sense of disgust at hearing that and never spoke to this person again. He is doing quite well slithering up the corporate ladder, last I heard. The stupid project in question cost the company millions and died a well deserved whimpering death within a few months.