>What makes you more qualified to judge whether the public perception was accurate as compared to someone who actually worked there - an "FB vet" in your own words?
For starters, most of us here don't benefit financially from putting a positive spin on disasters at Facebook. As the Upton Sinclair saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I've not talked to Facebook employees personally but I've witnessed the same degree of delusion at other large tech companies. Some are straight-up like a cult with employees willing to defend just about anything their company does regardless of how hazardous it was. Which is even more baffling if one takes into consideration that these are usually salaried employees working there only for a few years with no personal stake whatsoever.
The point isn't even to discuss some sort of internal nuance about the technical details of CA. If you are a company as large as Facebook and you allow user data to be abused to this degree, even if there is some nuance to it, when facing the public you apologize, tuck your tail between your legs, admit that you screwed up, and fix your problems, and you turn the arrogance and the world saving rhetoric down a notch.
> I've not talked to Facebook employees personally but I've witnessed the same degree of delusion at other large tech companies. Some are straight-up like a cult with employees willing to defend just about anything their company does regardless of how hazardous it was. Which is even more baffling if one takes into consideration that these are usually salaried employees working there only for a few years with no personal stake whatsoever.
Well I think I can solve this puzzle. It's possible some people disagree with you about how "hazardous" their company is.
They're not "cult-like" or "delusional". They're not willing to "defend just about anything" despite the fact that they are only there a few years.
They just don't agree with you on the amount of hazard their companies are doing.
Note: This is regardless of whether you are in fact right or wrong. But it kind of bugs me that someone not having the same views is branded in such a way, as if somehow clearly you know the truth, so anyone who isn't automatically on your side must be delusional/evil in some way.
> But it kind of bugs me that someone not having the same views is branded in such a way, as if somehow clearly you know the truth, so anyone who isn't automatically on your side must be delusional/evil in some way.
That's not what I believe at all. I've had plenty of discussions in my life with people from all kinds of sectors and the tech industry, in particular, FAANG employees in my experience stand out in this way. If you talk to someone from the Big 4 like PWC I never exactly got the impression that they're overly attached to their companies point of view.
Tech companies have very cleverly fostered some sort of ideological atmosphere among their employees that makes them defensive about their wrongdoings, and they have long pushed the idea that they're not just vehicles to create profit for shareholders but on world-saving missions.
As another example, remember when Uber essentially spammed mayor DeBlasio's office through their app in an attempt to undermine regulation and to effectively get ahead of the law through a harassment campaign? At that time I talked to Uber employees and a good chunk defended it.
Can you imagine any ordinary industry acting like this?
> Can you imagine any ordinary industry acting like this?
You mean proactively explaining to their workforce the reasoning behind actions likely to gain widespread attention in the press?
Yes; that's called treating your employees with respect. Everyone generally expects employees to have some level of insider knowledge, and it's polite to give your workers enough of a heads-up to not be blindsided by questions from friends and family.
The difference with Facebook and some other tech companies is that there's enough trust that employees are generally better informed about the strategic and competitive landscape the company is operating in, and that context can explain actions that may look nonsensical from the outside.
More industries should work like this, not less -- It's treating workers as people that can think for themselves instead of simply cogs in the machine.
I was working at Facebook when the CA story broke, but not when the events happened. I was in a department far removed from any of the involved parties. I haven't worked for them for several years now, and I currently own no FB stock outside of broad-based index funds¹.
As I recall, the sense of unfairness that was going around was rooted mostly in it feeling like old news. CA was the ghost of a bad policy that had already been rescinded, and there was very little awareness of that in the media coverage. Instead, there were loud calls for Facebook to do something, but every reasonable thing had already been done years before.
When I worked there, nobody believed that the policy which birthed CA was a good idea, which is why it was long gone. Also, everything had played out already in the public eye (in the tech press) -- anyone who had been paying attention should have known about most of these things already.
¹ It seems silly to make all these disclaimers, but they seem necessary with the mood here.
I remember all the puff pieces when Obama's campaign did something similar in 2012, where his app would drink down all the data it could from the social graph. When CA broke, I was asking people why they thought this was news and why I only used Facebook to shitpost on company pages, it wasn't exactly a well kept secret that you could do that.
There may have been effort to stop it from happening again, but from the outside it seems there has been zero effort to mitigate the harm already done, I don't think Facebook contacted anyone to tell them their very personal data had been downloaded by a third party because one of their Facebook friend participated in some poll, and that they would now be targeted by very personalized political propaganda .
> For starters, most of us here don't benefit financially from putting a positive spin on disasters at Facebook. As the Upton Sinclair saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Ugh, this quote. If someone is working at a SWE at Facebook, their career options are probably pretty good. They can get a salary most anywhere.
Too often people use this quote as an intellectual shortcut to ‘I’m right, you’re wrong because your job blinds you to your bias’. Sometimes, they do just know more than you about it.
I’d suggest you take your own advice and dial up the humility a notch and quit branding people who disagree with you as ‘delusional’ or ‘cult like’
I think it's fair to say most people working at FANGs are probably earning significantly more than they would almost anywhere else. It's not just getting "a salary", it's getting a very large one that wouldn't be available if they decided it was morally wrong.
As a FB employee, I hear this sometimes - I can't take your point of view as you work at FB, instead of debating the fact straight up. It's just an Ad Hominen attack in a different form.
For starters, most of us here don't benefit financially from putting a positive spin on disasters at Facebook. As the Upton Sinclair saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I've not talked to Facebook employees personally but I've witnessed the same degree of delusion at other large tech companies. Some are straight-up like a cult with employees willing to defend just about anything their company does regardless of how hazardous it was. Which is even more baffling if one takes into consideration that these are usually salaried employees working there only for a few years with no personal stake whatsoever.
The point isn't even to discuss some sort of internal nuance about the technical details of CA. If you are a company as large as Facebook and you allow user data to be abused to this degree, even if there is some nuance to it, when facing the public you apologize, tuck your tail between your legs, admit that you screwed up, and fix your problems, and you turn the arrogance and the world saving rhetoric down a notch.