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FB had an internal help system called "Oops". It was meant for employees to get help for friends they knew in real life. It was discontinued not long ago (EDIT:

FB had an internal help system called "Oops". It was meant for employees to get help for friends they knew in real life. It was discontinued not long ago (EDIT: maybe not according to a child comment). There were just too many requests for help. Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive (Mark, Sheryl) supports it. Even if it affects the bottom line - and there were plenty of examples where large customers could not spend significantly more money with Facebook because of software bugs - they won't do anything about it.

metajack 5y ago
I used oops to help someone I knew several months back. It still exists and worked amazingly well.
- saltedonion 5y ago
  Can you elaborate what this system does? Escalates customer support tickets for employees?
  - toast0 5y ago
    Yeah, from my time working at FB, it's basically a customer support queue that actually gets reviewed. Sometimes, there can be some additional discussion between the person looking at the ticket and the employee who reported it, so that clarifications can be made when needed. From what I saw, it's mostly used for account recovery, but sometimes used for bug reporting. FWIW, Yahoo had a similar escalation path while I was there (that seems to still exist). This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.
- mmahemoff 5y ago
  I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.
  - harles 5y ago
    While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Or just keep employees on track. Imagine a company the size of FB having a barrage of Slack messages over family and friends with suspended accounts, trying to find who manages which DB.
  - worker767424 5y ago
    Better than just not having an agenda, they're going to personally vet the requests like their paycheck depends on it.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.
    - avidiax 5y ago
      Yes, every ticket on Oops that's found to be actionable should result in a postmortem about why the regular security & customer support channels failed. A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
      - fallingknife 5y ago
        A few of those + lots of money / support headcount. Which is why it hasn't happened.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    The hardest part (authenticating the request) is also done.
- jorvi 5y ago
  It makes me incredibly angry that I have a long-standing issue that I can basically get no support or fix for whilst you are cheering a cordoned-off system on as ‘working amazingly well’.
elzbardico 5y ago
This is disturbingly similar to how criminal enterprises operate, without regard for operational expenses, alienating customers. It is like nobody care much about losing easy money.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I haven’t worked for a company that didn’t leave easy money on the table or waste money because of disorganization, except for the government which just wouldn’t spend any money except employee time.
hangonhn 5y ago
That was literally the only way I got help after someone somehow managed to registered one of my email address under a Facebook account I don't control and tried to impersonate me. I don't even know how that was possible since FB does email verification. I tried the normal help system but got nowhere so I reached out to my friends who work at FB. One of them used the internal help system it was resolved within a couple of days. A mutual friend of ours joked that I was really using my "tech privileges" and he was absolutely right. I would have had to deal with a FB account pretending to be me for a while if not for the fact that I live in Silicon Vally and have a lot of friends who work for FB. It really shouldn't have been how that matter was resolved.
- jpollock 5y ago
  Whenever someone's used my email address, I've used password recovery and taken ownership of the account. It's amazing the number of systems which don't verify email before giving out an account. I've taken control of: Disney DropBox Redbox ...
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Apparently Virgin Mobile doesn't verify email addresses nor does it let you reset your password by email. I assume they send you a text or something. So I've been getting billing notifications and other garbage for someone else's account for years.
    - kentonv 5y ago
      My email address is temporal at gmail.com. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag. It also turns out to mean "temporary" in Spanish. Ever since the Spanish-speaking world started using gmail, people have been signing up for stuff with my e-mail address every single day. Any new service I want to register an account with, I first have to hijack the existing account holding my address and delete it or change the email address. But it gets worse! Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them. Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles. Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.) The list goes on and on... Wired even wrote an article about me. https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox-temporal/ https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox... If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES. PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I would be quite curious what would be possible at some companies if things could be considered beyond 3-6 months or if you could even keep the same team for that period. I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.
happynacho 5y ago
Do you know if Twitter has something similar? It would be very helpful.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  YouTube would be nice as well.
notJim 5y ago
> Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  A lot of it seems to also be around review cycles. My company has quarterly goal reviewing. One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.
etempleton 5y ago
It used to be you could get some level of technical support if you were an advertiser, but that is no longer the case. Perhaps if you are spending tens of millions on Facebook Ads per year, but otherwise the only support you get is a revolving door of advertising support specialists that try to convince you to use whatever advertising product is best for Facebook at the moment. I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything. I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must. If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.
Impossible 5y ago
The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.
- samename 5y ago
  Are you saying projects are highly encouraged to be completed within just 6 months?
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Yes.
  - toast0 5y ago
    FB policy says they want to reward results and not effort. But it makes it hard to reward people for making progress on things that can't be done in 6 months. It also makes for shitty service quality around the end of June and December, as people rush to push things to prod. (I've heard this may have changed, but it's hard to notice good service quality). (Former FB employee)
    - eru 5y ago
      It might be an interesting experiment to have each employee start their cycles (review cycle, or quarterly numbers for sales etc) on a random offset.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - rzzzt 5y ago
        (This is what one should do with cron jobs so they don't hammer the server at exactly the same time.)
        5y ago
User23 5y ago
I kind if like the idea of an SDE running an oops as a service side hustle.
throwaway93382 5y ago
Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support. After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask). Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month. But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.
- StreamBright 5y ago
  Sounds like Google and Facebook does not care about their users anymore.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    Honestly, I don't think they've cared about users for a long-long time. And I think their lack of user support will be their downfall. It may take a while but someone will figure out a way to get tractions on their markets and when they do, Google and Facebook are screwed. Amazon, on the other hand have amazing customer support so much so that even if you think the company is terrible on a moral level you probably still suggest it to friends.
- liveoneggs 5y ago
  care to share some of that business manager support? :)

metajack 5y ago

I used oops to help someone I knew several months back. It still exists and worked amazingly well.

saltedonion 5y ago
Can you elaborate what this system does? Escalates customer support tickets for employees?
- toast0 5y ago
  Yeah, from my time working at FB, it's basically a customer support queue that actually gets reviewed. Sometimes, there can be some additional discussion between the person looking at the ticket and the employee who reported it, so that clarifications can be made when needed. From what I saw, it's mostly used for account recovery, but sometimes used for bug reporting. FWIW, Yahoo had a similar escalation path while I was there (that seems to still exist). This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.
mmahemoff 5y ago
I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.
- harles 5y ago
  While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Or just keep employees on track. Imagine a company the size of FB having a barrage of Slack messages over family and friends with suspended accounts, trying to find who manages which DB.
- worker767424 5y ago
  Better than just not having an agenda, they're going to personally vet the requests like their paycheck depends on it.
- p1necone 5y ago
  My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.
  - avidiax 5y ago
    Yes, every ticket on Oops that's found to be actionable should result in a postmortem about why the regular security & customer support channels failed. A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      A few of those + lots of money / support headcount. Which is why it hasn't happened.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  The hardest part (authenticating the request) is also done.
jorvi 5y ago
It makes me incredibly angry that I have a long-standing issue that I can basically get no support or fix for whilst you are cheering a cordoned-off system on as ‘working amazingly well’.

elzbardico 5y ago

This is disturbingly similar to how criminal enterprises operate, without regard for operational expenses, alienating customers. It is like nobody care much about losing easy money.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I haven’t worked for a company that didn’t leave easy money on the table or waste money because of disorganization, except for the government which just wouldn’t spend any money except employee time.

hangonhn 5y ago

That was literally the only way I got help after someone somehow managed to registered one of my email address under a Facebook account I don't control and tried to impersonate me. I don't even know how that was possible since FB does email verification. I tried the normal help system but got nowhere so I reached out to my friends who work at FB. One of them used the internal help system it was resolved within a couple of days. A mutual friend of ours joked that I was really using my "tech privileges" and he was absolutely right. I would have had to deal with a FB account pretending to be me for a while if not for the fact that I live in Silicon Vally and have a lot of friends who work for FB. It really shouldn't have been how that matter was resolved.

jpollock 5y ago
Whenever someone's used my email address, I've used password recovery and taken ownership of the account. It's amazing the number of systems which don't verify email before giving out an account. I've taken control of: Disney DropBox Redbox ...
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Apparently Virgin Mobile doesn't verify email addresses nor does it let you reset your password by email. I assume they send you a text or something. So I've been getting billing notifications and other garbage for someone else's account for years.
  - kentonv 5y ago
    My email address is temporal at gmail.com. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag. It also turns out to mean "temporary" in Spanish. Ever since the Spanish-speaking world started using gmail, people have been signing up for stuff with my e-mail address every single day. Any new service I want to register an account with, I first have to hijack the existing account holding my address and delete it or change the email address. But it gets worse! Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them. Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles. Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.) The list goes on and on... Wired even wrote an article about me. https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox-temporal/ https://www.wired.com/story/misplaced-emails-took-over-inbox... If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES. PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I would be quite curious what would be possible at some companies if things could be considered beyond 3-6 months or if you could even keep the same team for that period. I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.

happynacho 5y ago

Do you know if Twitter has something similar? It would be very helpful.

TheFreim 5y ago
YouTube would be nice as well.

notJim 5y ago

> Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.

MattGaiser 5y ago
A lot of it seems to also be around review cycles. My company has quarterly goal reviewing. One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.

etempleton 5y ago

It used to be you could get some level of technical support if you were an advertiser, but that is no longer the case. Perhaps if you are spending tens of millions on Facebook Ads per year, but otherwise the only support you get is a revolving door of advertising support specialists that try to convince you to use whatever advertising product is best for Facebook at the moment. I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything. I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must. If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.

Impossible 5y ago

The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.

samename 5y ago
Are you saying projects are highly encouraged to be completed within just 6 months?
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Yes.
- toast0 5y ago
  FB policy says they want to reward results and not effort. But it makes it hard to reward people for making progress on things that can't be done in 6 months. It also makes for shitty service quality around the end of June and December, as people rush to push things to prod. (I've heard this may have changed, but it's hard to notice good service quality). (Former FB employee)
  - eru 5y ago
    It might be an interesting experiment to have each employee start their cycles (review cycle, or quarterly numbers for sales etc) on a random offset.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      (This is what one should do with cron jobs so they don't hammer the server at exactly the same time.)
      - 5y ago

User23 5y ago

I kind if like the idea of an SDE running an oops as a service side hustle.

throwaway93382 5y ago

Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support. After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask). Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month. But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.

StreamBright 5y ago
Sounds like Google and Facebook does not care about their users anymore.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't think they've cared about users for a long-long time. And I think their lack of user support will be their downfall. It may take a while but someone will figure out a way to get tractions on their markets and when they do, Google and Facebook are screwed. Amazon, on the other hand have amazing customer support so much so that even if you think the company is terrible on a moral level you probably still suggest it to friends.
liveoneggs 5y ago
care to share some of that business manager support? :)