20 ms·
Ah yes, the time honoured tradition of improving your integrity department by removing transparency.
by jwalton 5y ago
Ah yes, the time honoured tradition of improving your integrity department by removing transparency.
- piva00 5y agoGiven that their Chief Integrity Officer is Guy Rosen, someone known for running Onavo which was basically spyware... I question a lot the cognitive dissonance that FB employees might go through to believe there is any kind of integrity taken seriously in that fucking company.
- jaywalk 5y agoTheir work is just so objectively good and correct that allowing insight into what they're doing can only harm the work they're doing.
- cosmojg 5y agoFor those without a sense of humor, this is sarcasm.
- whambampow 5y agoReally? Thanks!
- rvbissell 5y agoI think it transcends sarcasm, circling back to how they actually feel.
- Seb-C 5y agoSome cultures does not have sarcasm, while having a sense of humor. And they probably also have forms of humor that you would not understand. Which does not imply that you don't have a sense of humor.
- dym_sh 5y agolike talking loud (translates to ALL-CAPS) is considered humorous the louder – the funnier
- Mtinie 5y agoYour statement reminded me of something I read during my undergraduate courses. An excerpt of Abraham Lincoln’s seminal work of popular wisdom, “Boom! Goes the Capitalism”: “Schrödinger's Policy is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger—-after a late Wednesday night of strong ale and copious amounts of poutine—-that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. Schrödinger proposed his "policy" after debates with Albert Einstein over the Copenhagen interpretation, which Schrödinger defended, stating in essence that if a scenario existed where a policy making body within an (ostensibly) benevolent tech company could be so isolated from external interference (decoherence), the state of the group’s work can only be known as a superposition (combination) of possible rest states (eigenstates), because finding out (measuring the state) cannot be done without the observer interfering with the experiment — the measurement system (the observer) is entangled with the experiment. Einstein reportedly suggested that tech companies could never be benevolent, especially when they are expected to maintain an objective view when their finances were concerned. After an unknown number of rounds of distilled spirits derived from wormwood, Schrödinger conceded this was true and instead recast his thought experiment to feature a cat as the primary actor; a creature which he felt had a vastly higher likability.” /hat-tip to the editors of the Schrödinger Wikipedia page
- q1w2 5y agoSometimes transparency encourages bad actors.
- 0des 5y agoIs there an example you have in mind?
- aerosmile 5y agoYep: https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%A9-Censorship/dp/1510767363 https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%... I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective). Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"
- xyzzy21 5y agoHonestly this doesn't happen if you have a good corporate culture to begin with (which Google has not had for quite a while). I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine. So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.
- baq 5y agospecial circumstances. it's a democratic grey area.
- systemvoltage 5y agoAsk Apple how that turned out for them by being completely hermatically sealed from the public. Zero transparency. This is a low quality knee-jerk emotional comment tickling the current FB zeitgeist and HN tends to love those.