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As a Facebook Employee who watched this thing unfold: His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that dow
by fbthrowaway31FB 6y ago
As a Facebook Employee who watched this thing unfold:
His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down.
He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company.
That said, HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports). FB gives employees access to much more than most companies, so the sort of things HR made secret would not be visible at most US companies.
Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that.
- baby 6y agoDon’t know that specific story but the culture at FB is pretty open and people ask hard questions all the time on workplace and at Q&As. So it’s sad to see some people abusing this knowing that not that many companies are open to such internal dialogues. Tragedy of the common.
- xoxoy 6y agowhat about the engineer who jumped to his death after a bad review?
- baby 6y agoDo you have a specific question? It’s tragic obviously and impacted many of us.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago(different commenter here) Of the handful of people I know who work at FB, all of them are super smart and motivated. Half of them have expressed a lot of anxiety, stress, and imposter syndrome to me over their reviews. I’ve seen this at other companies when a project is failing but I hear about it at FB from A players who are working on successful projects. It gives me the impression the managers must be brutal - like they just push harder than other companies and make people feel they aren’t good enough to get more output. These are my impressions as an outsider. Does it seem fair to you?
- ubermon 6y agoI think not manager but peers. They are mostly over achievers and somewhat competitive.
- Infinitesimus 6y agoIs that because leadership rewards such behavior? I wonder if pressure would be the same If working 12hr days is discouraged and emphasis placed on collaboration and team delivery. Leadership sets the tone and culture so it's always leadership's fault if culture is toxic.
- marta_morena_25 6y agoRe-evaluate life choices if a 400k salary makes you commit suicide? He should have had enough money to do whatever for quite some time. Its tragic that he didn't but there are literally billions of people worse off all around the world and nobody talks about them.
- xoxoy 6y agopretty sure it’s more complicated than that eg H1B status means leave the country if you’re fired, and to assume you cannot he stressed about a job or life because you make a nice salary is a very naive take.
- austhrow743 6y agoWhat about beloved, famous, and rich actor Robin Williams who hung himself?
- devin 6y agocommons
- social_quotient 6y agoIt’s pretty meta to read it as a single “common” if it was on purpose.
- mdonahoe 6y ago“Common” stock? Maybe it was a joke.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- newbie789 6y ago>HR did not take any of it down. & >HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports). Aren't these essentially identical aside from the timeline?
- fbthrowaway31FB 6y agoHR did not take down the reposts (edited for tone) of the fired employee's claims and arguments, including high-level descriptions of specific escalation incidents. HR did remove access to actual "tasks" (similar to email threads at other companies).
- newbie789 6y agoSo, they didn't remove the post, just access to things he specifically cited (for everybody?) ? I don't mean to split hairs here but could you perhaps elaborate on why they would do that? Edit: Or at least your opinion on why they would do that.
- fbthrowaway31FB 6y agoThe reposts were very different in tone and didn't name specific employees or make accusations about intentions or ethics. I have no opinion about why content was hidden. At nearly any other company the same content would have always been secret.
- snowwrestler 6y agoHow confident are you that you know how things work "at nearly any other company?" Is this something that someone told you, or do you have some way of knowing this yourself?
- newacct583 6y agoBut that content is not typically hidden at Facebook? And it's hidden now, precisely when it would provide evidence as to whether or not the alleged executive conduct happened? And you... have no opinion about that? Really?
- sg47 6y ago"His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down. He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company." - I thought free speech meant one could say whatever they wanted. Why is HR being the arbiter of decency here? "Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that." - that's what people do 'on' Facebook all the time and no action is taken.
- itsEtai 6y agoFree speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media. Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you want without consequences. Arguably, one purpose of HR is to help employees work well together. It is in their literal job description to be arbiter of decency.
- sg47 6y ago"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media." - Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person.
- vosper 6y ago> Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person. You've gone way off topic, missed the point of the people you're responding to, and seem to have some agenda regarding Facebook that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about Facebook as an employer.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoI think GP is trying to say that Facebook routinely takes the stance that they shouldn't be the arbiter of acceptable speech. So it's notable that they are actively policing speech in this instance.
- currentFB9492 6y agoIt wasn't vicious or demeaning. It was rather bluntly showing that senior leadership (Joel Kaplan basically) bends the rules for their political buddies. He wasn't fired for how he said it. The post was taken down for that. He was fired because he demonstrated that leadership is dishonest. They rewrote norms on the fly to justify firing over normal access to non-user data.
- belorn 6y agoFrom further down the comments: "robber baron, slaver, and plunderer" Calling people by those things in a work environment might not be the best strategy to demonstrate process irregularities.
- dqpb 6y agoThat's how I like to describe Trump. He's not willfully destroying the fabric of our society, he's just prone to process irregularities.
- neilv 6y agoIt seems non-ideal, that the top comment thread comes from a new throwaway account, making assertions that might as well be corporate PR damage control messages, in the moment they'll have the most persuasive impact, with no accountability. Though the comment might well be entirely legitimate and honest, HN participants are collectively giving the top comment, on a corporate PR emergency, to what I imagine is exactly what an underhanded PR operative might do. I think this suggests that HN -- which I believe is managed with some of the best intentions and methods out there right now -- has some of the same vulnerabilities as the subject of this story.
- dang 6y agoThere are quite a few throwaway accounts in this thread claiming to be Facebook employees, arguing different sides of the issue. They can't all be PR. In my experience—and we can confirm this in some cases—people are mostly who they say they are. Of course manipulation is possible, and bad, but so are insinuations of manipulation without evidence, and the latter are (by every indication I've seen) orders of magnitude more common. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... In the long run, if manipulation ends up dominating forums like HN, the only real solution is to do what we ought to all be doing anyway: have a culture in which arguments are answered by better arguments. Since that's the only long-term immunity, we might as well develop it now.
- radegast 6y agoAs a Facebook employee: Facebook has a real left leaning political bias. Nah, I am just kidding, this is the internet and you can write anything on it. The bias thing is real tough to anyone who can read words with more than 3 syllables without using a finger.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago> But you can't go around attacking people like that. You can, and sometimes you should. What looks embarrassing for the person they do this and then act surprised when the people they attacked retaliate, especially if those people are wealthier and / or better connect.
- lmilcin 6y agoUnfortunately, none of this is verifiable and you are posting form account created to post this comment.