7 ms·

On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired. On the other: $150 I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selli

• TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Yeah, as someone who works for one of these companies, no fucking way would it be worth the risk to me.
  • dylan604 2y ago
    Here's my question not to you specifically but the royal you of any bigTech employees reading this forum or similar: why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this issue. They clearly do not feel the negative comments on some techy nerdcentric boards or twitter followers amounts to enough to cause a negative impact on the bottom line. So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech.
    • TulliusCicero 2y ago
      > why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. This definitely happens for all kinds of problems at big tech companies. But you might be absolutely shocked to learn that many times, random engineers complaining about something doesn't result in management taking immediate action to fix the issue. > Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. Stuff like this does get brought up by employees, especially Google has a lot of internal memes criticizing various aspects of Google's culture or policies. But executives mostly just deflect or ignore it, probably because they don't see the money in fixing it. > So instead, people with respect lose respect for those "yous" that work at bigTech. I guess the more ignorant ones do? I figured it was common knowledge that when something is broken policy-wise at companies, and they're clearly avoiding fixing it, it's rarely the non-management employees that are the problem. Almost always, it's a strategic decision by management to not address the issue (or sometimes they do address it, but poorly).
      • dylan604 2y ago
        > I guess the more ignorant ones do? the toxicity that this whole type of signaling represents from a company just means the give 0 shits about users. therefore, that means that its employees are placated by paychecks to also be happy to receive the negative aspects and laugh it off on their way to the bank to cash their large paychecks. this is the loss of respect others have towards the "yous"
        • TulliusCicero 2y ago
          If you 'lose respect' for individual employees because the megacorporation they work for has bad customer service or UX design or what have you, not sure what to say. Most companies seem to suck in some way or another, reflecting that onto the individual workers just seems silly to me. They're not "laughing it off" because they're paid well; if they were paid badly instead, what would change? Do people with low wages who work for corporations do something differently here?
          • dylan604 2y ago
            For me, myself, and I, we have changed jobs when it became obvious that management wasn't going to change. I had made my very public comments at all-hands meetings as well as other attempts with coworkers to attempt internal changes. When it was obvious we were on the wrong side of the internal motes, it was time to leave. I've even taken pay cuts to not continue to be involved in the insanity. So, yes, I've walked the walk after talking the talk. I did not want to be associated with that company.
            • deleted 2y ago
              [deleted]
            • TulliusCicero 2y ago
              I think tech companies could probably do better with customer support, but I also recognize that it's an extremely difficult problem to handle realistically at scale, especially when most individual users pay little to nothing directly for many services. A higher-touch CS model would do better, sure, but that's expensive. It's different imo when you're a store or similar business where your customers are constantly actually giving you money.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • jsnell 2y ago
      So, the people complaining at an all hands are likely to be completely ignorant about the facts on the ground. They're not working on these systems or processes. They're just gullible enough to believe what they read on the internet, and take action on it. The team responsible for the account suspensions / content takedowns / etc on the other hand will have the numbers to show that they're doing a good job, and the expertise to predict what the implications of doing the policy changes asked by the complainers would be. Not just how much it'd cost directly, but the second order effects on abuse from making different tradeoffs. So let's say that you want to give high-touch customer support to billions of free accounts? Not only is it going to be fabulously expensive, but it's going to be abusable as hell. The abusers will quickly learn just what kind of sob story will have the best chance of fooling the humans, and get their accounts falsely unbanned or even use it to hijack the accounts of others. The only way to avoid this is to make sure the customer service reps have no agency. But then you're paying tens or hundreds of millions / year just to have humans execute a script. And these predictions will be a lot more credible than those from random employees parrotting social media posts and making vague claims about potential brand damage or loss of trust. Ignoring the complaints is going to be a pretty easy choice for an exec.
      • pompino 2y ago
        Raising complaints internally always has value in any organization. At a minimum, it highlights the fact that people outside the organization think your colleagues are doing a shit job. The patronizing "Oh you silly plebs, we know what we're doing" line is unlikely to get any traction in a developer community where second-guessing and challenging established designs, decisions from SMEs with decades of experience is common.
        • jsnell 2y ago
          I'm not saying there's no value in raising complaints internally. I'm saying that the proposed method of having somebody uninformed do it in an all hands meeting based on internet anecdotes has no value. It has no chance of affecting change.
        • grayhatter 2y ago
    • bagels 2y ago
      Raise what as a serious problem? People taking bribes to get people unbanned? People getting banned?
      • dylan604 2y ago
        Companies make decisions that ultimately affect their users in a negative manner including when the company's decision is a mistake. Not having a real method of correcting the mistake is a huge sign to me that says company is not someone that I want to do business with at all. I understand mistakes happen, but claiming absolute immunity and acting like no mistake was made is the absolute worst customer service position to take.
        • bagels 2y ago
          Meta has 6 billion or so customers. Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time. There are processes to correct problems there. It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced.
          • johnnyanmac 2y ago
            >Not every decision can be positive for every customer every time. sometimes would be a good first step. > It requires someone to champion it, and to make a good enough case that others will join and for stakeholders to be convinced. well we're screwed then. of course shareholders don't understand the need for moderation, nor keeping a satisfied userbase.
            • bagels 2y ago
              Stakeholders. I'm talking about the different teams in Meta that would have to approve your diffs.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
      Because when you're dealing with a billion users, a one-in-a-million mistake still screws a thousand users, and everyone realizes that getting the rate of mistakes anywhere near that low is impossible. At the same time, you're dealing with actual bad actors that genuinely need to be banned, and there is a lot of this abuse. Mistakes will happen. You can't stop banning users. The bad actors will file appeals (in some cases including public escalations - see the various cases where someone complained about being unfairly banned from a game for cheating, and after a bit of a shitstorm, the company posted the evidence of him cheating). The appeal processes often work, sometimes don't - the public shitstorms are often cases where multiple things went wrong. There is no easy solution, and at the scale these companies operate it's obvious to everyone involved that "just having a highly skilled human review every case" is completely impractical (not just "too expensive for the company to want to pay for it"). Because for each genuine user affected you have many abusers. The pay-for-support proposals have several issues (PR impact from "screwing customers then extorting them to pay", stolen credit cards, engineering required to make it happen). Abuse teams are (understandably) rather tight-lipped, and also tend to insist that telling the user what they did wrong would enable abusers to dodge the protections - this is something I don't understand (the abuser presumably knows what they did, while a user wrongfully accused does not), but it seems to be consistently said by abuse teams from many different companies. All this combined makes it very hard to push for improvement, because there is no clear path towards a solution. You can ask a question at an all-hand generally raising the problem, but you'll get the usual "our abuse teams are working very hard on this, it's a hard problem" non-answer. At the same time, yes, genuine users are absolutely getting screwed, and for the individual affected user, the consequences can be pretty severe.
      • jsnell 2y ago
        (This reply is probably too late, I missed it while scanning this thread in the morning.) > Abuse teams are (understandably) rather tight-lipped, and also tend to insist that telling the user what they did wrong would enable abusers to dodge the protections - this is something I don't understand (the abuser presumably knows what they did, while a user wrongfully accused does not), but it seems to be consistently said by abuse teams from many different companies. The abuser will have done a lot of things. They don't know which one(s) got them caught. The more information they're revealed, the faster they can iterate to avoid getting caught next time. But also, the real user doesn't actually benefit that much from knowing what got them banned. What are they going to do? Go back in time and not do it? Now, a thing the user will greatly benefit from is knowing exactly what (if anything) they need to do to get their account back. That's where the focus on informing users should be. But since the abusers will also be told the same information, this needs to be something that legitimate users will find easy, but abusers or account hijackers will find hard to do at scale. So it can't just be "write a sob story about how you need the account back because it has photos of your dead grandmother". The abusers will be more competent at that than real users. Typically it has to be spending a limited resource, or at least proving you have access to some limited resource and rate-limiting recovery actions by that resource. Some examples: non-VOIP phone numbers, proof of real world identity, social vouching by accounts in good standing.
    • patrakov 2y ago
      > to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. One of my previous managers told me that they kept me exactly because "I am not a sheep," i.e. because it required non-zero effort to convince me to do anything, and I always tried to poke holes in any proposals. So, in a healthy organization, this would not be a risk.
• blast 2y ago
  yes and it seems unscrupulous to take kickback money for this. on the other hand, as someone who has one of these problems, I'd be only too happy to pay an insider to fix it. It's not just the technical problem (account suspension etc.), it's the injustice of the thing in the first place, and then the rage of being put in an endless hell loop.
  • diputsmonro 2y ago
    I mean, that's the nature of bribery, isn't it? Of course you want to pay someone to get special treatment, who doesn't?
    • zarathustreal 2y ago
      I think there’s a conceptual difference between a payment made for bare minimum service and a payment made for special treatment. Granted, for most web services these days they seem to be the same in reality
    • loeg 2y ago
      It's the nature of payment for services more broadly. Someone with money and lacking a service happily crosses trade with someone offering a service and desiring money.
• aramova 2y ago
  See, what you need to do is get a job on that team, and sell the ability to have the team overlook the persons case... call it plsfixmyfix.com
  • dessimus 2y ago
    Then, the manager of that team has their startup: plsfixmyfixer.com
• billjings 2y ago
  > I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help: When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day. A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help a real personal friend with an account issue, and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation. Months later, he was investigating data for a project, which triggered an audit. They walked him out the door the next day after finding it. So: yeah. This is not a very good business idea.
  • tdeck 2y ago
    > and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation Sounds like they need better controls, there shouldn't be ways to inadvertently access personal data and violate someone's privacy. Particularly not at such a mature company.
    • loeg 2y ago
      The controls have gotten better / more explicit over time. They flash you up a pretty explicit clickthrough wall now. And there's pretty explicit training that you hand off issues for friends/family to a 3rd party engineer to handle rather than accessing user/friend data yourself.
      • tdeck 2y ago
        When I worked at Google it was literally impossible to access personal data like this in most roles, even for my own account. So it seems like meta leaves something to be desired if it's a click through and a policy.
        • loeg 2y ago
          Maybe? I don't think engineers are likely to "inadvertently" access data inappropriately with either policy.
• jannyfer 2y ago
  Plot twist: this is a honeypot marketplace designed to catch employees selling access like this.
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    If the site's smart, they'd simply verify by challenge/correlation. Spin up a random account, get it banned, then ask an anonymous "employee" to get it unbanned. If it is? Verification by result.
  • patrakov 2y ago
    To add: this honeypot requires the employee to sign up using their corporate account. Corporate accounts are probably monitored internally.
  • fasa99 2y ago
    Plot twist 2: it's also a marketplace for big tech compliance departments, $10,000 to reveal the insider
• NegativeLatency 2y ago
  400k for one offer right now