10 ms·

I have an honest question, hope it is not deemed troll bait. I lurk and read quite a bit here on HN. I think I've come to feel pretty versed in the common anti

I have an honest question, hope it is not deemed troll bait. I lurk and read quite a bit here on HN. I think I've come to feel pretty versed in the common anti-social-media gripes and stances, and that Facebook is one of the leading villains there. But I also read that there are some really smart and empowered/supported people at Facebook and they make some pretty desirable stuff (things like React, etc). On the one hand I picture a classic clueless business people driven culture driving poor demotivated engineers and so stuff like the latest hack happen. But then, I see this other picture where teams of quite functional teams are doing good engineering. I'm not used to these things coexisting well, especially for extended periods. Am I being too naive about that? Or perhaps my simplistic impressions listed above are too naive? What's the real story? And Facebook insiders here who can add insight? (Edit and disclaimer: I am neither Facebook user or a React programmer)

nikanj 6y ago
” Number of employees 52,535 (June 30, 2020)” Plenty of space for both groups
- travisgriggs 6y ago
  So the good and functional engineering teams work on UI toolkits and all the poor programmers shepherded by non technical management work on the ever suspect contact scrapers at another campus or something?
  - beagle3 6y ago
    More likely it is compartmentalized in such a way that every single person has plausible deniability sufficient to believe that what they are doing is good “I help people find each other!” As Upton Sinclair noted, it is hard to make a person understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Doubly so when the salary is FAANG high.
    - izacus 6y ago
      Do you think this also holds true for americans who develop weapons to kill people? American drone pilots dropping bombs on cities? Palantir employees, bank employees, lobbyists, people working on DRM and censorship systems, politically partisan reporters, etc. etc. etc. etc. I find this hand wringing around Facebook employees very wierd when it's so trivially obvious to find people that outright build systems for murdering other people and are even proud of it. If those people exist in hundreds of thousands, why is existence of people that build a webpage that sells advertisements and shows messages from people this wierd? In what way is it worse working for Facebook than working for a news outlet to write fake news that outright attacks LGBT communities? And why can everyone understand existence of those reporters and then wonder why people still work at FB?
      - ForHackernews 6y ago
        I suspect weapons-manufacturers and soldiers are less self-deluded, to be honest. They believe there are bad people in the world who need to be killed to keep America safe. They also believe in the principle of civilian control of the military, and it's not the military's job to second-guess the elected leadership of the country. Who specifically gets killed is above their pay-grade. Contrast this with many FAANG employees who may believe they personally are "making a difference" and continually second-guessing and sniping at their (unelected) corporate leadership because they need to feel that they're On The Right Side of History.
        FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        You are contradicting yourself a bit in your second paragraph. Employees who want to be on the right side of history have stopped Google from doing projects related to weapons and Chinese censorship, which is literally making a difference.
matkoniecz 6y ago
There are some very smart people who either consider privacy as unimportant or dead anyway. There are some people working in Facebook who consider it as evil but considering salary as sufficient reason to work there. There are some deluding themself that they can make FB less evil. I think that some smart people make mistake of assuming that other smart people have the same priorities and ethics as them. It is not true. Some of smartest people do far more evil things than things ever done by Facebook. See FSB, KGB, NSA, Mossad, finance companies, chemical companies, lawyers, military sector, military for many examples people doing clearly evil things despite being smart. To clarify, there are people in mentioned places also doing non evil things or doing evil things and being dumb. Not everyone in chemical company is covering up Bhopal disaster and similar or setting up the next one.
pyjug 6y ago
>On the one hand I picture a classic clueless business people They aren't clueless at all. Privacy isn't a priority for their business, in fact it would actively harm revenue.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  I worked at Facebook from 2009-2012 and again briefly in 2016. "Answers" like this are why you will not read real answers.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
    Then what is a real answer in this case?
    - bertil 6y ago
      The problem isn’t simple. To take one example: Banning racists requires that you have a clear, well-understood but also nuanced view about what is incitement, dog-whistle, free speech, etc. Having large teams enforce those require that everyone in those teams understand those rules and apply them fairly. In those divided times, I challenge you to find anyone able to articulate the agenda both the American Left and the American Right coherently. So you can have multiple people review, but will you get a decision without a process that most people will find deeply wrong? In addition, they have to be international which opens even bigger cans of worms. Casey Newton has great reporting on the centres that handle those; I strongly recommend you read those — with the provision that you realise Facebook doesn’t manage those centres, they are contractors, so Facebook also has to make complicated decisions about how to insure those centres are not abusing their staff, performance is properly rewarded, etc. without overstepping. You can imagine, say, gender relations among a group of people who speak certain languages ::cough::indi ::cough::. Now find me Burmese-speaking people who think that the rules about human-rights also apply to Rohingya. Or how to realise that your team dealing with gender-related issues is managed by TERFs? How do you manage for all of those if you’ve never heard of Abkhazia, how language and castes interlace in India, the religious dimension of the conflict in Somaliland, common forms of gaslighting about ethnic relations in China? The goal is not for you to know it all, but how do you set-up processes to not be blind to the fact that the prejudice is already in your (contractor’s) house? Also, on occasion, those rules have to be legally enforceable. Say you have a friend who lives in Turkey, or in Germany, it is legal for you to comment on their post saying that Ataturk was a little bitch, or that Hitler was a great man? Well, it might not legal for them to read it… So do you hide? Do you add a message to say that you hid something? What is simple is that engaging with shoot-from-the-hip, Facebook-is-bad comments will never end up in a better place.
matkoniecz 6y ago
> classic clueless business people Why you think that FB is managed by clueless business people? They are clearly not clueless, just with completely different priorities mismatching mine and with completely different opinion about ethics (AKA "they are evil").
brnt 6y ago
Money buys you everything, including highly skilled and capable engineering teams. Lackeys are lackeys, they will do what you ask as long as the crumbs are big enough. The hand that feeds and all that. It is obvious how Facebook benefits from obtaining this info, thus the onus is on them to prove otherwise. They haven't, so they didn't.
romanhn 6y ago
I'll bite. Worked at FB for a couple of years, until very recently. The HN groupthink on the company is quite strong, reaching conspiracy theory levels in some cases. Thing is, 95% of users (which is like, half the world) either do not know or care about the latest controversy. Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. Social media holds a mirror up to society, and we don't like what we see there. It's not our fault, it's Facebook's! So screams the press that is losing subscribers to new forms of media. Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). From my perspective, Facebook (and WhatsApp, and Oculus) have added a lot more to my life than they have taken away. My family and friends are all on Facebook, so clearly they feel similarly. Internally, there are indeed plenty of smart, empowered people that also haven't bought into the doom and gloom of what, ultimately, is a loud minority. I fully recognize that my priorities might be different from those of others. Or perhaps they are impacted by the negatives differently. All opinions have their place, and I don't mean to speak for all employees either, just sharing my own point of view.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
  > Social media holds a mirror up to society This would only really be the case without algorithmic influence on discoverability and what people get shown on Facebook. "Engagement" being one of the keyword here, which very much morphs this "reflection". Facebook might technically be a mirror, but if it is, it is one of those curved distorting ones you used to see at carnivals and fairs.
  - throwawei369 6y ago
    Not in support of the above poster's views btw, but I think he gave the analogy in a broader sense. Your take on this mirror analogy is from a micro-level. I still think looking at FB from a birds-eye view, the society mirror assessment is fairly accurate.
  - romanhn 6y ago
usrusr 6y ago
An interesting observation, the low effort (and zero knowledge) answer (answerism?) is that it's easy, low-friction and rewarding to show off technological excellence in things like React etc, but executing "ethical excellence" or whatever you'd call it would be the exact opposite. In the end, like so often, it's just the old salary-induced difficulty of understanding.
bertil 6y ago
The vast majority of the coverage of Facebook has large factual issues that most employees would know about. Seeing their work, or the work of people they admire, misrepresented just makes employees distrust the media. It’s easy to have Gell-Mann amnesia when you notice something wrong every year at most. It’s harder when it’s every day.
bertil 6y ago
I’ve been one of the very first critic of the company (suggesting they’d become a monopoly and current laws wouldn‘t be fitting, submitting a PhD about that in late 2004). I’ve worked at Facebook (twice) working on controversial projects and debated about the company a lot in the last 17 years. 1. Most of the reporting is just factually wrong. For instance, Facebook didn‘t sell data to Cambridge Analytica; your bank did sell, with your name, for profit. Facebook didn’t know about the Rohingya genocide: they had a Nobel prize laureate telling them the messages where harmless. It doesn’t matter that Facebook did all was legally possible once they realised what was happening then, there is such a stain on the brand that opponents are actively protecting the people who are still doing harm to this day just because it let them feel good about criticising the company. It’s horrifying. And when employees see that, they are rightfully happy that the company is powerful enough to ignore the critics and do what they can to, say, prevent marketers from using the data that your bank sold them. Or not throw the only hope that Myanmar has of ever being a democracy to the critics because she lied to them. 2. There’s a lot of bad decisions happening. I’ve personally seen several issues that are far worse than what has been reported. Seriously. Which is stunning — but journalists are so latched on their stories (and so hurt to be called out on their lies) that they refuse to hear far more problematic and nuanced issues. I’m not making this up. 3. Most of the real issues are hard, and far outside of Facebook’s control, in spite of them trying really hard and often publicly. Take how bonkers is the American Right right now (sorry to all the readers of HN who think that QAnon is a reasonable group, or that Trump hasn’t raped underaged victims of human trafficking, or never paid for an abortion after raw-dogging pornstars for 40 years). Sure, it looks like banning the racists assholes would be a healthy decision, but it’s not necessarily democratic. And talking about that requires far more nuance that most analysts have granted the company. Internally, the people in charge are far more deliberate than that. “1200 employees have signed a petition!” So… 0.6% of the company? Sure that committee is still horrifyingly American-centric; they have a diversity that would make a Yale-Harvard rowing derby blush; they are full of political appointees with problematic friends, but at least, unlike journalists, they get basics like: Censorship is bad. More importantly, there’s a really good team of researchers that try every thing that is suggested publicly and more. “What about if we told Flat-Earthers and Anti-Vaxxers that they are wrong, and kick them out?” well, there’s published science from Facebook about that. That science informs a lot of the key decisions. What happens when you link to those results in a debate outside the company? “Oh, it’s from Facebook, it must be biased…” Huh… no, it’s peer-reviewed and it has strikingly critical takes; it has detailed experimental protocols. You are welcome to engage with the authors. But most people outside of the company choose not to. 4. The alternative is far worst. Imagine you can help the company gain market share among teenagers. Every minute they spend on Facebook, they are not listening to Chinese propaganda on TikTok, or getting asked for nudes by creepy 45-years-olds on SnapChat. So, are the teams at Facebook working on detecting State-actors or groomers under-funded? Sure, but those teams _exist_; you can help them. Those teams don’t exist at alternative. So you are not necessarily defending the company with insufficient effort in key direction because of “the pay check” or “profit” but because, as insufficient as they may be, those efforts are there. 5. The vast majority of what Facebook is doing is neither controversial nor hard. It’s helping small businesses grow and survive the pandemic; helping families share a video feed for an anniversary; helping VR not trigger headaches after 20 minutes. Those are clear ethical goods (as well as profitable, which isn’t bad) and leaving the company means that those projects get delayed. 6. Employees feel heard on those questions. But the thing is: most of the time, the problem isn’t we need someone whose work and focus is unrelated to barge him and play the reply-guy. That’s occasionally helpful, but rarely. Recent examples: last year, employees from Hong-Kong have reached out to explain how the CCP was trying to detect and hurt them. Facebook has systems to protect dissidents. Knowing about them and spreading awareness locally; translating them to Cantonese was presumably helpful. But the policy team rarely needs petitions to be told that the NYTimes has published a scathing OpEd, or that racism is bad. Employees overall trust the management to do well enough; they share the same view of the world. They read the same opinion that are shared publicly (maybe more often) and agree with it. That’s probably the most striking difference: the same text (say, about how Apple’s changes to iOS will decimate small businesses) is taken at face value internally because the assumptions behind it are well documented and understood. So it’s incredibly confusing when the exact same document is immediately shot down externally, for being wrong (it’s not) or self-interested (sure but still true and important). So employees disengage. Because it’s too frustrating, too hard and it generally leads to bad things. Not because of the confusion of being a bad guy (it’s far more confusing internally because all the remaining problems are hard) or because of a pay check (you get offers for more money every day in your LinkedIn inbox, let alone from writing a tell-all book).
c22 6y ago
The flaw is that young idealistic techies and would-be business people keep making the mistake of believing you can grow a large multinational corporation that doesn't end up becoming at least slightly evil. The evil is inherent in the scale and structure of these entities and it comes from the bureaucracy of many competing and self-defeating business incentives and the ultimate decision/realization that "making more money" is the only sane holistic goal to globally optimize for. Simply deciding that your company will contribute to open source or have some motto like "don't be evil" is not enough to avert this pitfall.
ummonk 6y ago
It’s got a good bottom-up culture focused on empowering engineers to build stuff like React and ship changes to the social media platform on their own initiative (especially when those changes prove effective in improving key metrics in A/B testing). This same bottom-up culture leads to a lack of oversight on potentially questionable changes, and also means there is sometimes a lack of ownership and investment in fixing issues that haven’t gotten media attention (because no team decides to work in the fix). In recent times there has been quite a bit of investment in improving privacy but it feels a lot like trying to patch over a broken foundation.

nikanj 6y ago

” Number of employees 52,535 (June 30, 2020)” Plenty of space for both groups

travisgriggs 6y ago
So the good and functional engineering teams work on UI toolkits and all the poor programmers shepherded by non technical management work on the ever suspect contact scrapers at another campus or something?
- beagle3 6y ago
  More likely it is compartmentalized in such a way that every single person has plausible deniability sufficient to believe that what they are doing is good “I help people find each other!” As Upton Sinclair noted, it is hard to make a person understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Doubly so when the salary is FAANG high.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Do you think this also holds true for americans who develop weapons to kill people? American drone pilots dropping bombs on cities? Palantir employees, bank employees, lobbyists, people working on DRM and censorship systems, politically partisan reporters, etc. etc. etc. etc. I find this hand wringing around Facebook employees very wierd when it's so trivially obvious to find people that outright build systems for murdering other people and are even proud of it. If those people exist in hundreds of thousands, why is existence of people that build a webpage that sells advertisements and shows messages from people this wierd? In what way is it worse working for Facebook than working for a news outlet to write fake news that outright attacks LGBT communities? And why can everyone understand existence of those reporters and then wonder why people still work at FB?
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      I suspect weapons-manufacturers and soldiers are less self-deluded, to be honest. They believe there are bad people in the world who need to be killed to keep America safe. They also believe in the principle of civilian control of the military, and it's not the military's job to second-guess the elected leadership of the country. Who specifically gets killed is above their pay-grade. Contrast this with many FAANG employees who may believe they personally are "making a difference" and continually second-guessing and sniping at their (unelected) corporate leadership because they need to feel that they're On The Right Side of History.
      - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        You are contradicting yourself a bit in your second paragraph. Employees who want to be on the right side of history have stopped Google from doing projects related to weapons and Chinese censorship, which is literally making a difference.

matkoniecz 6y ago

There are some very smart people who either consider privacy as unimportant or dead anyway. There are some people working in Facebook who consider it as evil but considering salary as sufficient reason to work there. There are some deluding themself that they can make FB less evil. I think that some smart people make mistake of assuming that other smart people have the same priorities and ethics as them. It is not true. Some of smartest people do far more evil things than things ever done by Facebook. See FSB, KGB, NSA, Mossad, finance companies, chemical companies, lawyers, military sector, military for many examples people doing clearly evil things despite being smart. To clarify, there are people in mentioned places also doing non evil things or doing evil things and being dumb. Not everyone in chemical company is covering up Bhopal disaster and similar or setting up the next one.

pyjug 6y ago

>On the one hand I picture a classic clueless business people They aren't clueless at all. Privacy isn't a priority for their business, in fact it would actively harm revenue.

ericbarrett 6y ago
I worked at Facebook from 2009-2012 and again briefly in 2016. "Answers" like this are why you will not read real answers.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
  Then what is a real answer in this case?
  - bertil 6y ago
    The problem isn’t simple. To take one example: Banning racists requires that you have a clear, well-understood but also nuanced view about what is incitement, dog-whistle, free speech, etc. Having large teams enforce those require that everyone in those teams understand those rules and apply them fairly. In those divided times, I challenge you to find anyone able to articulate the agenda both the American Left and the American Right coherently. So you can have multiple people review, but will you get a decision without a process that most people will find deeply wrong? In addition, they have to be international which opens even bigger cans of worms. Casey Newton has great reporting on the centres that handle those; I strongly recommend you read those — with the provision that you realise Facebook doesn’t manage those centres, they are contractors, so Facebook also has to make complicated decisions about how to insure those centres are not abusing their staff, performance is properly rewarded, etc. without overstepping. You can imagine, say, gender relations among a group of people who speak certain languages ::cough::indi ::cough::. Now find me Burmese-speaking people who think that the rules about human-rights also apply to Rohingya. Or how to realise that your team dealing with gender-related issues is managed by TERFs? How do you manage for all of those if you’ve never heard of Abkhazia, how language and castes interlace in India, the religious dimension of the conflict in Somaliland, common forms of gaslighting about ethnic relations in China? The goal is not for you to know it all, but how do you set-up processes to not be blind to the fact that the prejudice is already in your (contractor’s) house? Also, on occasion, those rules have to be legally enforceable. Say you have a friend who lives in Turkey, or in Germany, it is legal for you to comment on their post saying that Ataturk was a little bitch, or that Hitler was a great man? Well, it might not legal for them to read it… So do you hide? Do you add a message to say that you hid something? What is simple is that engaging with shoot-from-the-hip, Facebook-is-bad comments will never end up in a better place.

matkoniecz 6y ago

> classic clueless business people Why you think that FB is managed by clueless business people? They are clearly not clueless, just with completely different priorities mismatching mine and with completely different opinion about ethics (AKA "they are evil").

brnt 6y ago

Money buys you everything, including highly skilled and capable engineering teams. Lackeys are lackeys, they will do what you ask as long as the crumbs are big enough. The hand that feeds and all that. It is obvious how Facebook benefits from obtaining this info, thus the onus is on them to prove otherwise. They haven't, so they didn't.

romanhn 6y ago

I'll bite. Worked at FB for a couple of years, until very recently. The HN groupthink on the company is quite strong, reaching conspiracy theory levels in some cases. Thing is, 95% of users (which is like, half the world) either do not know or care about the latest controversy. Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. Social media holds a mirror up to society, and we don't like what we see there. It's not our fault, it's Facebook's! So screams the press that is losing subscribers to new forms of media. Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). From my perspective, Facebook (and WhatsApp, and Oculus) have added a lot more to my life than they have taken away. My family and friends are all on Facebook, so clearly they feel similarly. Internally, there are indeed plenty of smart, empowered people that also haven't bought into the doom and gloom of what, ultimately, is a loud minority. I fully recognize that my priorities might be different from those of others. Or perhaps they are impacted by the negatives differently. All opinions have their place, and I don't mean to speak for all employees either, just sharing my own point of view.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
> Social media holds a mirror up to society This would only really be the case without algorithmic influence on discoverability and what people get shown on Facebook. "Engagement" being one of the keyword here, which very much morphs this "reflection". Facebook might technically be a mirror, but if it is, it is one of those curved distorting ones you used to see at carnivals and fairs.
- throwawei369 6y ago
  Not in support of the above poster's views btw, but I think he gave the analogy in a broader sense. Your take on this mirror analogy is from a micro-level. I still think looking at FB from a birds-eye view, the society mirror assessment is fairly accurate.
- romanhn 6y ago

usrusr 6y ago

An interesting observation, the low effort (and zero knowledge) answer (answerism?) is that it's easy, low-friction and rewarding to show off technological excellence in things like React etc, but executing "ethical excellence" or whatever you'd call it would be the exact opposite. In the end, like so often, it's just the old salary-induced difficulty of understanding.

bertil 6y ago

The vast majority of the coverage of Facebook has large factual issues that most employees would know about. Seeing their work, or the work of people they admire, misrepresented just makes employees distrust the media. It’s easy to have Gell-Mann amnesia when you notice something wrong every year at most. It’s harder when it’s every day.

bertil 6y ago

I’ve been one of the very first critic of the company (suggesting they’d become a monopoly and current laws wouldn‘t be fitting, submitting a PhD about that in late 2004). I’ve worked at Facebook (twice) working on controversial projects and debated about the company a lot in the last 17 years. 1. Most of the reporting is just factually wrong. For instance, Facebook didn‘t sell data to Cambridge Analytica; your bank did sell, with your name, for profit. Facebook didn’t know about the Rohingya genocide: they had a Nobel prize laureate telling them the messages where harmless. It doesn’t matter that Facebook did all was legally possible once they realised what was happening then, there is such a stain on the brand that opponents are actively protecting the people who are still doing harm to this day just because it let them feel good about criticising the company. It’s horrifying. And when employees see that, they are rightfully happy that the company is powerful enough to ignore the critics and do what they can to, say, prevent marketers from using the data that your bank sold them. Or not throw the only hope that Myanmar has of ever being a democracy to the critics because she lied to them. 2. There’s a lot of bad decisions happening. I’ve personally seen several issues that are far worse than what has been reported. Seriously. Which is stunning — but journalists are so latched on their stories (and so hurt to be called out on their lies) that they refuse to hear far more problematic and nuanced issues. I’m not making this up. 3. Most of the real issues are hard, and far outside of Facebook’s control, in spite of them trying really hard and often publicly. Take how bonkers is the American Right right now (sorry to all the readers of HN who think that QAnon is a reasonable group, or that Trump hasn’t raped underaged victims of human trafficking, or never paid for an abortion after raw-dogging pornstars for 40 years). Sure, it looks like banning the racists assholes would be a healthy decision, but it’s not necessarily democratic. And talking about that requires far more nuance that most analysts have granted the company. Internally, the people in charge are far more deliberate than that. “1200 employees have signed a petition!” So… 0.6% of the company? Sure that committee is still horrifyingly American-centric; they have a diversity that would make a Yale-Harvard rowing derby blush; they are full of political appointees with problematic friends, but at least, unlike journalists, they get basics like: Censorship is bad. More importantly, there’s a really good team of researchers that try every thing that is suggested publicly and more. “What about if we told Flat-Earthers and Anti-Vaxxers that they are wrong, and kick them out?” well, there’s published science from Facebook about that. That science informs a lot of the key decisions. What happens when you link to those results in a debate outside the company? “Oh, it’s from Facebook, it must be biased…” Huh… no, it’s peer-reviewed and it has strikingly critical takes; it has detailed experimental protocols. You are welcome to engage with the authors. But most people outside of the company choose not to. 4. The alternative is far worst. Imagine you can help the company gain market share among teenagers. Every minute they spend on Facebook, they are not listening to Chinese propaganda on TikTok, or getting asked for nudes by creepy 45-years-olds on SnapChat. So, are the teams at Facebook working on detecting State-actors or groomers under-funded? Sure, but those teams _exist_; you can help them. Those teams don’t exist at alternative. So you are not necessarily defending the company with insufficient effort in key direction because of “the pay check” or “profit” but because, as insufficient as they may be, those efforts are there. 5. The vast majority of what Facebook is doing is neither controversial nor hard. It’s helping small businesses grow and survive the pandemic; helping families share a video feed for an anniversary; helping VR not trigger headaches after 20 minutes. Those are clear ethical goods (as well as profitable, which isn’t bad) and leaving the company means that those projects get delayed. 6. Employees feel heard on those questions. But the thing is: most of the time, the problem isn’t we need someone whose work and focus is unrelated to barge him and play the reply-guy. That’s occasionally helpful, but rarely. Recent examples: last year, employees from Hong-Kong have reached out to explain how the CCP was trying to detect and hurt them. Facebook has systems to protect dissidents. Knowing about them and spreading awareness locally; translating them to Cantonese was presumably helpful. But the policy team rarely needs petitions to be told that the NYTimes has published a scathing OpEd, or that racism is bad. Employees overall trust the management to do well enough; they share the same view of the world. They read the same opinion that are shared publicly (maybe more often) and agree with it. That’s probably the most striking difference: the same text (say, about how Apple’s changes to iOS will decimate small businesses) is taken at face value internally because the assumptions behind it are well documented and understood. So it’s incredibly confusing when the exact same document is immediately shot down externally, for being wrong (it’s not) or self-interested (sure but still true and important). So employees disengage. Because it’s too frustrating, too hard and it generally leads to bad things. Not because of the confusion of being a bad guy (it’s far more confusing internally because all the remaining problems are hard) or because of a pay check (you get offers for more money every day in your LinkedIn inbox, let alone from writing a tell-all book).

c22 6y ago

The flaw is that young idealistic techies and would-be business people keep making the mistake of believing you can grow a large multinational corporation that doesn't end up becoming at least slightly evil. The evil is inherent in the scale and structure of these entities and it comes from the bureaucracy of many competing and self-defeating business incentives and the ultimate decision/realization that "making more money" is the only sane holistic goal to globally optimize for. Simply deciding that your company will contribute to open source or have some motto like "don't be evil" is not enough to avert this pitfall.

ummonk 6y ago

It’s got a good bottom-up culture focused on empowering engineers to build stuff like React and ship changes to the social media platform on their own initiative (especially when those changes prove effective in improving key metrics in A/B testing). This same bottom-up culture leads to a lack of oversight on potentially questionable changes, and also means there is sometimes a lack of ownership and investment in fixing issues that haven’t gotten media attention (because no team decides to work in the fix). In recent times there has been quite a bit of investment in improving privacy but it feels a lot like trying to patch over a broken foundation.