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> This long article doesnt address the most critical point. > If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit? The article opens wi

by paulgb 6y ago

> This long article doesnt address the most critical point. > If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit? The article opens with a story of someone who quit.

DannyB2 6y ago
You're right. He quit. However he seems to be the exception.
- paulgb 6y ago
  Maybe, I guess it's hard to know without knowing their retention metrics. As one anecdote, I was in the negotiation phase of an Oculus offer earlier this year and turned it down the same weekend of that infamous post[1] and I know a few people in my network whose employment status has quietly changed away from Facebook. [1] Less because I was certain they should moderate it, and more because I thought it was weak how Zuckerberg threw Jack Dorsey under the bus, and how cynically the company steers the conversation to free speech to avoid taking responsibility for the adverse effects of product decisions. artfulhippo made the point I'm trying to make up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929769
ciarannolan 6y ago
It took him 9 years of collecting a fat paycheck and enabling Facebook to find his moral compass. Is it wrong to be skeptical of these millionaire developers who ride off into the sunset to retire but leave a final "oh btw, lots of problematic stuff at my former employer" message?
- paulgb 6y ago
  It's not wrong to be skeptical. I do think there's a sort of boiling frog effect, though. Internal company culture never matches public perception, and you're always able to tell yourself a story that the public misunderstands what drives the company. After all, you hang out with your colleagues and you know they aren't bad people. But then some big controversy snaps you out of it and you realize that the company's internal collective fiction is no more accurate than the public perception, and perhaps you are the baddies after all.
  - mxawng 6y ago
    hello, i'm the ex-employee in question and can speak authoritatively on the subject of myself :) i joined FB for the first time as an intern almost a decade ago. i suspect i have a substantively different view of the company and the people who built it—even compared to many other employees, and certainly compared to folks who have not been in the ~room where it happens~ (heh). even accounting for some amount of insider bias, i think there's still a material discrepancy between how the public viewed certain major FB "scandals"—via the lens of media spin and profitable reporting—and how many folks like myself, who were privy to additional context and private information, viewed them. to some people, the recent discord around hate moderation might seem like just more of the same FB badstuff. not so for me! even folks at FB who don't work directly on certain products and policies are often immersed in discussion about them (unless they aggressively unsubscribe). these discussions, again, have their bias, but i hope we can concede that it's still a lot of passive brain cycles being spent swimming among these topics. folks develop deeper intuitions for how troubling X or Y publicized issue actually is, relative to all the things (of all flavors) that happen at FB and among its users. there's also a ton more discussion of legitimately positive societal work and how to extend those successes, whereas those rarely make good media narratives. the good doesn't cancel out the bad—that's never how it works—but you do have to consider both together at every decision point. in the leaked audio of my internal video post, i say that my long road to the door started in 2019. i still stand by that inflection point, and feel that before the, FB—while clearly on the back foot for some time due to rampant abuses by powerful groups of its product—was on balance moving in a direction i supported. you may have made a different choice—or you may feel you would make a different choice, though you may not have the full slate of inputs right now to be sure you would, in situ. but, at least for me, i have reasons why the questions around the 2016 election or fake news or data breaches were things which, to me, seemed categorically different from the questions concerning hate moderation. feel free to DM any earnest questions about why these things don't all congeal into one mass of problem for me (and i suspect other current and former FBers).
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      Thanks for this, Max. Easy upvote. I'm still of the opinion that you chose personal gain over doing what you knew to be the right thing. It's something everyone (me included) does many times over. But the scale of wrongdoing by Facebook is exceptional. Equally as possible is that our intuitions about "the right thing" are wildly different. I think that democracy, societal cohesion, and personal privacy are important and that Facebook has permanently damaged all three. Which do you think it is?

by paulgb 6y ago

> This long article doesnt address the most critical point. > If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit? The article opens with a story of someone who quit.

DannyB2 6y ago

You're right. He quit. However he seems to be the exception.

paulgb 6y ago
Maybe, I guess it's hard to know without knowing their retention metrics. As one anecdote, I was in the negotiation phase of an Oculus offer earlier this year and turned it down the same weekend of that infamous post[1] and I know a few people in my network whose employment status has quietly changed away from Facebook. [1] Less because I was certain they should moderate it, and more because I thought it was weak how Zuckerberg threw Jack Dorsey under the bus, and how cynically the company steers the conversation to free speech to avoid taking responsibility for the adverse effects of product decisions. artfulhippo made the point I'm trying to make up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929769

ciarannolan 6y ago

It took him 9 years of collecting a fat paycheck and enabling Facebook to find his moral compass. Is it wrong to be skeptical of these millionaire developers who ride off into the sunset to retire but leave a final "oh btw, lots of problematic stuff at my former employer" message?

paulgb 6y ago
It's not wrong to be skeptical. I do think there's a sort of boiling frog effect, though. Internal company culture never matches public perception, and you're always able to tell yourself a story that the public misunderstands what drives the company. After all, you hang out with your colleagues and you know they aren't bad people. But then some big controversy snaps you out of it and you realize that the company's internal collective fiction is no more accurate than the public perception, and perhaps you are the baddies after all.
- mxawng 6y ago
  hello, i'm the ex-employee in question and can speak authoritatively on the subject of myself :) i joined FB for the first time as an intern almost a decade ago. i suspect i have a substantively different view of the company and the people who built it—even compared to many other employees, and certainly compared to folks who have not been in the ~room where it happens~ (heh). even accounting for some amount of insider bias, i think there's still a material discrepancy between how the public viewed certain major FB "scandals"—via the lens of media spin and profitable reporting—and how many folks like myself, who were privy to additional context and private information, viewed them. to some people, the recent discord around hate moderation might seem like just more of the same FB badstuff. not so for me! even folks at FB who don't work directly on certain products and policies are often immersed in discussion about them (unless they aggressively unsubscribe). these discussions, again, have their bias, but i hope we can concede that it's still a lot of passive brain cycles being spent swimming among these topics. folks develop deeper intuitions for how troubling X or Y publicized issue actually is, relative to all the things (of all flavors) that happen at FB and among its users. there's also a ton more discussion of legitimately positive societal work and how to extend those successes, whereas those rarely make good media narratives. the good doesn't cancel out the bad—that's never how it works—but you do have to consider both together at every decision point. in the leaked audio of my internal video post, i say that my long road to the door started in 2019. i still stand by that inflection point, and feel that before the, FB—while clearly on the back foot for some time due to rampant abuses by powerful groups of its product—was on balance moving in a direction i supported. you may have made a different choice—or you may feel you would make a different choice, though you may not have the full slate of inputs right now to be sure you would, in situ. but, at least for me, i have reasons why the questions around the 2016 election or fake news or data breaches were things which, to me, seemed categorically different from the questions concerning hate moderation. feel free to DM any earnest questions about why these things don't all congeal into one mass of problem for me (and i suspect other current and former FBers).
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    Thanks for this, Max. Easy upvote. I'm still of the opinion that you chose personal gain over doing what you knew to be the right thing. It's something everyone (me included) does many times over. But the scale of wrongdoing by Facebook is exceptional. Equally as possible is that our intuitions about "the right thing" are wildly different. I think that democracy, societal cohesion, and personal privacy are important and that Facebook has permanently damaged all three. Which do you think it is?