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As someone who quit FB with a great deal of unvested stock, I've got more skin in the game than most as to the complex question of FB's culture, management, and

As someone who quit FB with a great deal of unvested stock, I've got more skin in the game than most as to the complex question of FB's culture, management, and impact in the world. I paid a lot of fucking money for a very nuanced answer to a very complex question about whether or not I felt I wanted to be there at that time. So, from a position of vastly superior knowledge to the typical HN peanut gallery, I agree there are unfortunate things about FB, or at least were in 2018 when I left. But as one person who gets out of line on HN sometimes to another: this is a negative value comment IMHO and I'd encourage you to strive for a more substantial critique.

chottocharaii 4y ago
Oh come off your high horse. The comment reflects the sentiment of many a commenter. Your choice to forgo your stock is neither here nor there. I hope your salary was enough to live comfortably after finishing
- benreesman 4y ago
  I'm still working 20-something hours at pushing 40 precisely because that stock had been the retirement plan. I don't regret it, it was the wrong place to be at the time for me after thinking deeply on it. And people with more knowledge throwing up a caution flag when people with less knowledge go all 1-bit is a pretty core value on the site. It's not a high horse, I get out of line on here more often than I'd like, but I also appreciate it when people tell me to cool it.
  - pejrich 4y ago
    Well then, let us all break out our extra small violins, and play a somber tune, for the person in their late 30s who still has to work 20 hours a week.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      A violin small enough to be played for me is shorter than h bar: no Silicon Valley engineer deserves anyones sympathy in a world where people are getting evicted from their homes via mortar fire. We all have it way too fucking good. It’s more like 80-100 hours a week, which would put a strain on anybody: but I made my decisions and I’m living with them. I didn’t bring up the details in some lane bud for pity: I brought them up to establish my credentials on knowing my ass from my elbow on what happens at FB, which I do and most on HN don’t.
sverhagen 4y ago
You seem to be suggesting that we're not entitled to opine about Facebook since we don't know the detailed internals or can't grasp the complexity, but I think that OP captures a broadly carried sentiment that Facebook's impact on society, on balance, is negative. And one internal I'll comment on, regardless of not being an insider: the downsizing through performance reviews feels very dishonest.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I proposed that the GP should strive for a more substantial critique, not that they should say nothing.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  It’s just less interesting. If I want to see random people navel gaze about Facebook’s general impact on society there are lots and lots of places for that. HN is one of the few where I’m likely to hear from people that spent a decade there. Also interesting would be someone that studied the impact deeply from the outside. But a thread started with a slightly wordier version of “F Facebook” is just not likely to be very good.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    I appreciate your thoughtful stance on this. In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it. Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with. But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist. The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system. FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test. So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

chottocharaii 4y ago

Oh come off your high horse. The comment reflects the sentiment of many a commenter. Your choice to forgo your stock is neither here nor there. I hope your salary was enough to live comfortably after finishing

benreesman 4y ago
I'm still working 20-something hours at pushing 40 precisely because that stock had been the retirement plan. I don't regret it, it was the wrong place to be at the time for me after thinking deeply on it. And people with more knowledge throwing up a caution flag when people with less knowledge go all 1-bit is a pretty core value on the site. It's not a high horse, I get out of line on here more often than I'd like, but I also appreciate it when people tell me to cool it.
- pejrich 4y ago
  Well then, let us all break out our extra small violins, and play a somber tune, for the person in their late 30s who still has to work 20 hours a week.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    A violin small enough to be played for me is shorter than h bar: no Silicon Valley engineer deserves anyones sympathy in a world where people are getting evicted from their homes via mortar fire. We all have it way too fucking good. It’s more like 80-100 hours a week, which would put a strain on anybody: but I made my decisions and I’m living with them. I didn’t bring up the details in some lane bud for pity: I brought them up to establish my credentials on knowing my ass from my elbow on what happens at FB, which I do and most on HN don’t.

sverhagen 4y ago

You seem to be suggesting that we're not entitled to opine about Facebook since we don't know the detailed internals or can't grasp the complexity, but I think that OP captures a broadly carried sentiment that Facebook's impact on society, on balance, is negative. And one internal I'll comment on, regardless of not being an insider: the downsizing through performance reviews feels very dishonest.

benreesman 4y ago
I proposed that the GP should strive for a more substantial critique, not that they should say nothing.
bradleyjg 4y ago
It’s just less interesting. If I want to see random people navel gaze about Facebook’s general impact on society there are lots and lots of places for that. HN is one of the few where I’m likely to hear from people that spent a decade there. Also interesting would be someone that studied the impact deeply from the outside. But a thread started with a slightly wordier version of “F Facebook” is just not likely to be very good.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I appreciate your thoughtful stance on this. In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it. Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with. But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist. The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system. FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test. So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]