6 ms·

For meta/facebook at least it’s long been an open secret that the fastest way to get something done on the platform is to have a connection that works at meta.

romanhn 2y ago
Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhelmed. On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this. I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
- fmajid 2y ago
  Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employee-hotline-for-faster-customer-support.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ... Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything, they won't even tell you what exactly you violated or how to return into their good graces. It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  > Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything. This is strange to me in that you're implying there is actually staff. Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue?
  - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
    >> Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue? That is exactly what happened to my coworker. She bought a Pixel phone from the Google Store and it got lost in shipping. Shipment tracking showed it arriving at the carrier's hub and never leaving for a month. She called customer service and the first tier workers followed a script that was essentially "apologize and ask the customer to check back later". After many missed "it should start moving again by $DATE" promises, she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 2 workers. They said they had the ability to create a replacement order, but there was no available inventory in the phone color she had originally ordered. They also had no answer about how to prevent a possible replacement order from shipping the same way and potentially getting stuck. Finally she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 3 support. The tier 3 worker created a replacement order with an upgraded phone compared to the original order and ensured it would ship from a different warehouse than the original order that got lost. All this took six weeks and many frustrating hours on the phone for her. And this was for an order directly from the Google Store website.
loeg 2y ago
Yeah, but it is intended for organic connections, not adversely selected 3rd parties directly enriching the employee.
jasonfarnon 2y ago
Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules. The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
- jsnell 2y ago
  These companies have on the order of 100k employees. It's the job of maybe 0.01% of them to deal with these issues. For the vast majority, a random account having been suspended going to be in scope of their work. It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".
bagels 2y ago
There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.

romanhn 2y ago

Depends on what "something" is. When I was at FB, they were very clear that you can request account help internally only for your immediate family (and maybe closest friends, I forget) - you are, in essence, vouching for them with your employment as collateral. Helping random strangers or even acquaintances was out of the question. In the early days it was possible, but the team responsible for this stuff got overwhelmed. On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.

ethbr1 2y ago
'Fix it for me and those after me' seems like a positive version of this. I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
fmajid 2y ago
Meta provides employees with a dedicated support line called Oops@ to address requests from friends and family, they are not allowed to deal with the issues directly: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employee-hotline-for-faster-customer-support.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ... Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago

Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything, they won't even tell you what exactly you violated or how to return into their good graces. It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.

JohnMakin 2y ago
> Same thing with Google Ads, often your account will get suspended for no sane reason and you need an insider to reactivate it, or you're starting from scratch. Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.
- immibis 2y ago
  Lawsuit will get that back. Companies are supposed to behave sanely because they know if they don't the court will force them to and it's a lot more trouble. But we don't sue companies any more, so they can do whatever.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    It isn’t really practical to sue a large company with essentially infinite resources that can drag out something for years, and can always turn around and say “you violated TOS” or some other spurious reason that will get them out of it. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.
dylan604 2y ago
> Appealing only sends you through a kafkaesque circle of hell of support staff who are unable to answer any questions or fix anything. This is strange to me in that you're implying there is actually staff. Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue?
- thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
  >> Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue? That is exactly what happened to my coworker. She bought a Pixel phone from the Google Store and it got lost in shipping. Shipment tracking showed it arriving at the carrier's hub and never leaving for a month. She called customer service and the first tier workers followed a script that was essentially "apologize and ask the customer to check back later". After many missed "it should start moving again by $DATE" promises, she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 2 workers. They said they had the ability to create a replacement order, but there was no available inventory in the phone color she had originally ordered. They also had no answer about how to prevent a possible replacement order from shipping the same way and potentially getting stuck. Finally she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 3 support. The tier 3 worker created a replacement order with an upgraded phone compared to the original order and ensured it would ship from a different warehouse than the original order that got lost. All this took six weeks and many frustrating hours on the phone for her. And this was for an order directly from the Google Store website.

loeg 2y ago

Yeah, but it is intended for organic connections, not adversely selected 3rd parties directly enriching the employee.

jasonfarnon 2y ago

Right. If the operators of this service are slick about it, they'll copy the model of a lot of attorneys who sell access to city hall/DA's office/regulatory boards/etc. You don't frame it as getting the employer to do something outside the scope of their job any more than an advocate is telling the city council to grant a permit that shouldn't be granted. They're just "drawing the employee's attention to some important facts", as two friends might over dinner, and the employee can apply the usual rules. The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.

jsnell 2y ago
These companies have on the order of 100k employees. It's the job of maybe 0.01% of them to deal with these issues. For the vast majority, a random account having been suspended going to be in scope of their work. It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".

bagels 2y ago

There's an internal support channel for employees to get things taken care of, it's supposed to be for friends/family you personally know. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules to take money for it. I had to use it to get myself unbanned because I made a spammy looking instagram name, hah.