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Seems reasonable that at a company of 60k, with hundreds who specialize in PR, you do not want a random engineer making the choice himself to be the first to ta
by handmodel 5y ago
Seems reasonable that at a company of 60k, with hundreds who specialize in PR, you do not want a random engineer making the choice himself to be the first to talk to the press by giving a PR conference on a random forum.
- ric2b 5y agoFacebook is well known for having really good PR, if they go after this guy for sharing such basic info that's yet another example of their great PR teams.
- OskarS 5y agoHonestly, from a PR perspective, I’m not sure it’s so bad. Giving honest updates showing Facebook hard at work is certainly better PR for our kind of crowd than whatever actual Facebook PR is doing.
- confiq 5y agoI agree, but try to explain that to PR people...
- ballenf 5y agoIt's terrible PR for the FB PR team's performance.
- ALittleLight 5y agoThat one guy's comments seen fine from a PR perspective apart from it not being his role to communicate for the company. I still think he should be fired for this kind of communication though. One reason is, imagine Facebook didn't punish breaches of this type. Every other employee is going to be thinking "Cool, I could be in a Wired article" or whatever. All they have to do is give sensitive company information to reporters. Either you take corporate confidentiality seriously or you don't. Posting details of a crisis in progress on your Reddit account is not taking corporate confidentiality seriously. If the Facebook corporation lightly punishes, scolds, or ignores this person then the corporation isn't taking confidentiality seriously either.
- mike_d 5y agoYou falsely assume Hacker News is even remotely what Facebook PR gives a shit about.
- staticassertion 5y agoReporters are going to opportunistically start writing about those comments vs having to wait for a controlled message from a communications team. So the reddit posts might not be "so bad", but they're also early and preempting any narrative they may want to control.
- orangepanda 5y agoThat was their best PR in years
- Animats 5y agoCompare Facebook's official tweet: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." That's the PR team, clueless.
- tornato7 5y agoTo be fair, Facebook has never been open and honest about anything.
- tornato7 5y agoFacebook has never been open and honest about anything, no reason to think they would start now.
- HelloNurse 5y agoI don't think Facebook could actually say anything more accurate or more honest. "Everything is dead, we are unable to recover, and we are violently ashamed" would be a more fun statement, but not a more useful one. There will be plenty of time to blame someone, share technical lessons, fire a few departments, attempt to convince the public it won't happen again, and so on.
- handmodel 5y agoI agree completely. The target audience Facebook is concerned about is not techies wanting to know the technical issues. Its the huge advertising firms, governments, power users, etc. who have concerns about the platform or have millions of dollars tied up in it. A bland statement is probably the best here - and even if the one engineer gave accurate useful info I don't see how you'd want to encourage an org in which thousands of people feel the need to post about whats going on internally during every crisis.
- no_time 5y agoThese few sentences were a better and more meaningful read than what hundreds of PR people could ever come up with