7 ms·

FB employee here. Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. Things happen, people are striving to be better, but

FB employee here. Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. Things happen, people are striving to be better, but scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly. At sufficiently large scale, there'll be people who have bad experience with the platform. The teams are always working on improving it, and security of accounts are obviously important, but sometimes things go wrong for some unforeseen circumstances like in this case.

cookiengineer 4y ago
> scale and sometimes incompetence. This would mean that automation is built for trust, not for "don't call us anytime". Everything facebook so far has automated when it comes to customers is actively helping scammers taking over accounts more easily, rather than helping actual real people that are who they say they are. But, facebook's incentive is ad business, that's why things like this will never get prioritized.
- tehlike 4y ago
  There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people.
  - alpha_squared 4y ago
    > There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people. Not to be terribly facetious, but ads pay the bills. I'm not aware of any significant money-making ventures Meta is involved in outside of ads. In the end, that makes all employees "ads people". All ventures, projects, features, enhancements, and bug fixes are to serve the ads machine. Unless, of course, there is legitimately a new market opportunity that will create revenue without ads. Even the Oculus arm of the company is really just a new platform for ads in the end.
    - tehlike 4y ago
      alpha_squared: that's a little too much extrapolation. people outside of ads don't really care much about ads, to the point i find kind of annoying (i am in ads). non ads teams in general have non-ads metrics they care about more. obviously revenue is being kept in mind, but it's more of a guardrail and not the goal (for non ads teams).
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    It doesn't help sell ads if there's nobody to sell ads to. But the "monetizable eyeballs" are interchangeable, 100% so.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kube-system 4y ago
    A lot of businesses have significant overhead staff. Cost centers are notorious for having skeleton crews, regardless of their relative size.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corporations. At sufficiently large scale there will be employees that just don't care about their users. It doesn't mean every individual at Facebook is like this, but Facebook as a corporation, and a certain percentage of employees, do not care about the users. That's not to cast judgment on you or your team, I believe there are people who genuinely try to help at all corps :) Unfortunately, like you said, the reality is that as the scale of a product increases the quality will decrease on both sides of the transaction for some people.
- tehlike 4y ago
  Of course, there will always be someone who won't care about their users, it's inevitable. But knowing how sausage is made, there are different trade offs when it comes to authentication... I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs. I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843
  - TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
    There seems to be a loose consensus (which I agree with) that takes a bit of a dim view toward patronizing a company (any company) where the scale is such that there’s no effective relationship between the company and non-paying users. I think that’s probably a better way to capture and elucidate the sentiment than “scale goes up, quality goes down.” There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably. It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.
scaramanga 4y ago
No, you should definitely assume they don't care. As soon as they can no longer extract profit from you, the economic incentive for them to care simply vanishes. To believe otherwise would be completely foolish. If you want to put a positive spin on things, you can assume that their intention is to not let spammers overrun the platform, or kick off legitimate users, as a matter of protecting their brand integrity. The costs of being 100% effective at this are prohibitive due to diminishing returns in any such enterprise. Within the organisation there are probably a great many people who would love to help an embattled user, trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare of having to deal with the corporation. It's just a matter of jumping up and down and screaming loudly enough. You can chose to see that as a positive example of the kindness of humans, even humans who work in gigantic corporations, or you can chose to see it as an example of offloading costs on to the consumer to protect profits. Tomato/tomato.
tintor 4y ago
FB doesn't care.
GoatOfAplomb 4y ago
"Assume scale and sometimes incompetence" means basically the same thing to me as "they don't care about you." In either case, it's "we're okay with not making things right for a number of people who have done nothing wrong."
- tehlike 4y ago
  0.1% * 1B users = 1M users. 0.01% * 1B users = 100K users. I don't know if anyone ever designed a fool proof system with 0 bad cases, but feel free to prove me wrong.
  - TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
    I tried once. No one could route a connection through the epoxy in the Ethernet ports :-(
  - Teever 4y ago
    > feel free to prove me wrong. Yeah my money is definitely on 'they don't care'
  - scaramanga 4y ago
    But I do know people who have designed systems to make it more difficult for those 0.01% of people to contact a human or get anything done about it because that increases their profits. Okay, maybe you're fine that some amount of people are just collateral and the system is not going to be adjusted to minimize that because there are other priorities (eg. meta's share price). But when people need to spread their wings and fly off in to a fantasy world in order to pretend that isn't happening, then it's probably not going to end well for them / be conducive to their mental health in the long run.
  - rtsil 4y ago
    If a company's answer to 100K of its users having insolvable problems is "it's scale, deal with it", maybe that company has no business being so large. And yes, that applies to Google and all the others as well.
anoncow 4y ago
If most people having no recourse to a problem that they face is just a problem of scale to the company, then may be the company doesn't deserve to operate at that scale.
bmitc 4y ago
> assume scale Scale is an excuse used by corporations to get away with whatever they want. Blaming things on scale is exactly equal to calling your customers a mere statistical data point. "I'm sorry, we through your meal out the window, but 98% of the current customers dining in got their meals successfully. Here's a website with no contact info to help recover your meal." If these "scale" corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the ilk actually cared about their puppet customers, then they'd go read the work by Stafford Beer and other complex systems thinkers and learn how to take care of unhandled variety rather than creating it behind the excuse of scale.
sushiburps 4y ago
"...there'll be people who have bad experience, unfortunately". The bad experience is the frustration of a kafkaesque process that dead ends with an ID submission form without the personnel infrastructure to actually support it. It's there to shrink from saying what you just said. You shouldn't need to come to Hacker News to get the real answer.
_moof 4y ago
"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value." Blaming scale is just another way of saying FB won't fund enough user support. And if FB won't fund it, it doesn't care about it.
SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
collects $10k/week paycheck "Scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly" "Things happen"
- tehlike 4y ago
  have any more substantive comments besides ad hominem attacks? it's 10pm, and i reported this problem a few hours ago - i probably either care about the problem, or i am nerding out on HN, or both. Money doesn't define how i think of problems, if it decides yours, power be onto you.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
    It's not ad hominem, it's an observation about senior FANG engineering
    - tehlike 4y ago
      Is it an observation about specific people? I doubt it. Also it's clearly directed at me. Hard to spin it otherwise because it's using things i said either whay you are saying sound more like a stereotype. I doubt you observed enough people in person to make a stereotype worthy conclusion.
  - eCa 4y ago
    You most likely care (otherwise you would have stayed out of this thread). But when the recourse for many users are getting their issue on HN, it’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that Meta on an organizational level doesn’t care. Or rather: It’s value-based customer service. If the monetary value of fixing one user’s issue is less than the lifetime monetary value of keeping them as a user, then fixing it is a net loss and so it shouldn’t be fixed. When a user gets their issue on HN, the calculation changes.
otterley 4y ago
Choosing scale over service was a conscious choice your employer made. They didn’t have to make that choice.
- tehlike 4y ago
  If you get more and more users do you say sorry, we are an exclusive club of 2m[1] we won't let you have a chat/group/event with your other friends who were late to the party. That sounds wrong. [1] rando number, large enough to brag about probably small enough to have easier support problem
  - otterley 4y ago
    Scale is multi-dimensional. It's not just a question of user base; there's also all the different features they have added over time as well that they have chosen to dedicate resources to. Also, support has cost, and putting service as a key feature of your brand often means sacrificing margins.

cookiengineer 4y ago

> scale and sometimes incompetence. This would mean that automation is built for trust, not for "don't call us anytime". Everything facebook so far has automated when it comes to customers is actively helping scammers taking over accounts more easily, rather than helping actual real people that are who they say they are. But, facebook's incentive is ad business, that's why things like this will never get prioritized.

tehlike 4y ago
There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people.
- alpha_squared 4y ago
  > There are FAR more non-ads people than there are ads people. Not to be terribly facetious, but ads pay the bills. I'm not aware of any significant money-making ventures Meta is involved in outside of ads. In the end, that makes all employees "ads people". All ventures, projects, features, enhancements, and bug fixes are to serve the ads machine. Unless, of course, there is legitimately a new market opportunity that will create revenue without ads. Even the Oculus arm of the company is really just a new platform for ads in the end.
  - tehlike 4y ago
    alpha_squared: that's a little too much extrapolation. people outside of ads don't really care much about ads, to the point i find kind of annoying (i am in ads). non ads teams in general have non-ads metrics they care about more. obviously revenue is being kept in mind, but it's more of a guardrail and not the goal (for non ads teams).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- Syonyk 4y ago
  It doesn't help sell ads if there's nobody to sell ads to. But the "monetizable eyeballs" are interchangeable, 100% so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 4y ago
  A lot of businesses have significant overhead staff. Cost centers are notorious for having skeleton crews, regardless of their relative size.

_gabe_ 4y ago

> Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corporations. At sufficiently large scale there will be employees that just don't care about their users. It doesn't mean every individual at Facebook is like this, but Facebook as a corporation, and a certain percentage of employees, do not care about the users. That's not to cast judgment on you or your team, I believe there are people who genuinely try to help at all corps :) Unfortunately, like you said, the reality is that as the scale of a product increases the quality will decrease on both sides of the transaction for some people.

tehlike 4y ago
Of course, there will always be someone who won't care about their users, it's inevitable. But knowing how sausage is made, there are different trade offs when it comes to authentication... I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs. I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391843
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  There seems to be a loose consensus (which I agree with) that takes a bit of a dim view toward patronizing a company (any company) where the scale is such that there’s no effective relationship between the company and non-paying users. I think that’s probably a better way to capture and elucidate the sentiment than “scale goes up, quality goes down.” There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably. It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.

scaramanga 4y ago

No, you should definitely assume they don't care. As soon as they can no longer extract profit from you, the economic incentive for them to care simply vanishes. To believe otherwise would be completely foolish. If you want to put a positive spin on things, you can assume that their intention is to not let spammers overrun the platform, or kick off legitimate users, as a matter of protecting their brand integrity. The costs of being 100% effective at this are prohibitive due to diminishing returns in any such enterprise. Within the organisation there are probably a great many people who would love to help an embattled user, trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare of having to deal with the corporation. It's just a matter of jumping up and down and screaming loudly enough. You can chose to see that as a positive example of the kindness of humans, even humans who work in gigantic corporations, or you can chose to see it as an example of offloading costs on to the consumer to protect profits. Tomato/tomato.

tintor 4y ago

FB doesn't care.

GoatOfAplomb 4y ago

"Assume scale and sometimes incompetence" means basically the same thing to me as "they don't care about you." In either case, it's "we're okay with not making things right for a number of people who have done nothing wrong."

tehlike 4y ago
0.1% * 1B users = 1M users. 0.01% * 1B users = 100K users. I don't know if anyone ever designed a fool proof system with 0 bad cases, but feel free to prove me wrong.
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  I tried once. No one could route a connection through the epoxy in the Ethernet ports :-(
- Teever 4y ago
  > feel free to prove me wrong. Yeah my money is definitely on 'they don't care'
- scaramanga 4y ago
  But I do know people who have designed systems to make it more difficult for those 0.01% of people to contact a human or get anything done about it because that increases their profits. Okay, maybe you're fine that some amount of people are just collateral and the system is not going to be adjusted to minimize that because there are other priorities (eg. meta's share price). But when people need to spread their wings and fly off in to a fantasy world in order to pretend that isn't happening, then it's probably not going to end well for them / be conducive to their mental health in the long run.
- rtsil 4y ago
  If a company's answer to 100K of its users having insolvable problems is "it's scale, deal with it", maybe that company has no business being so large. And yes, that applies to Google and all the others as well.

anoncow 4y ago

If most people having no recourse to a problem that they face is just a problem of scale to the company, then may be the company doesn't deserve to operate at that scale.

bmitc 4y ago

> assume scale Scale is an excuse used by corporations to get away with whatever they want. Blaming things on scale is exactly equal to calling your customers a mere statistical data point. "I'm sorry, we through your meal out the window, but 98% of the current customers dining in got their meals successfully. Here's a website with no contact info to help recover your meal." If these "scale" corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the ilk actually cared about their puppet customers, then they'd go read the work by Stafford Beer and other complex systems thinkers and learn how to take care of unhandled variety rather than creating it behind the excuse of scale.

sushiburps 4y ago

"...there'll be people who have bad experience, unfortunately". The bad experience is the frustration of a kafkaesque process that dead ends with an ID submission form without the personnel infrastructure to actually support it. It's there to shrink from saying what you just said. You shouldn't need to come to Hacker News to get the real answer.

_moof 4y ago

"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value." Blaming scale is just another way of saying FB won't fund enough user support. And if FB won't fund it, it doesn't care about it.

SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago

collects $10k/week paycheck "Scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly" "Things happen"

tehlike 4y ago
have any more substantive comments besides ad hominem attacks? it's 10pm, and i reported this problem a few hours ago - i probably either care about the problem, or i am nerding out on HN, or both. Money doesn't define how i think of problems, if it decides yours, power be onto you.
- SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
  It's not ad hominem, it's an observation about senior FANG engineering
  - tehlike 4y ago
    Is it an observation about specific people? I doubt it. Also it's clearly directed at me. Hard to spin it otherwise because it's using things i said either whay you are saying sound more like a stereotype. I doubt you observed enough people in person to make a stereotype worthy conclusion.
- eCa 4y ago
  You most likely care (otherwise you would have stayed out of this thread). But when the recourse for many users are getting their issue on HN, it’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that Meta on an organizational level doesn’t care. Or rather: It’s value-based customer service. If the monetary value of fixing one user’s issue is less than the lifetime monetary value of keeping them as a user, then fixing it is a net loss and so it shouldn’t be fixed. When a user gets their issue on HN, the calculation changes.

otterley 4y ago

Choosing scale over service was a conscious choice your employer made. They didn’t have to make that choice.

tehlike 4y ago
If you get more and more users do you say sorry, we are an exclusive club of 2m[1] we won't let you have a chat/group/event with your other friends who were late to the party. That sounds wrong. [1] rando number, large enough to brag about probably small enough to have easier support problem
- otterley 4y ago
  Scale is multi-dimensional. It's not just a question of user base; there's also all the different features they have added over time as well that they have chosen to dedicate resources to. Also, support has cost, and putting service as a key feature of your brand often means sacrificing margins.