Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.
The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.
having worked in Facebook games in 2012, I think some today forget how much worse for privacy Facebook used to be than it is today
I think your parent's point is that all of this information has been out there even in the news.
As he said:
>they were very clear about what they were doing
I think you hit the nail on the head. I doubt it has to do with moral qualms as employees. More to do with your friends and family giving you crap for working at a company that's getting bad press.
> Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading.
You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.
And I doubt it's a mass exodus either.
If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices.
They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded.
And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.
While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.
What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)
I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).
—- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test
-- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer
Japan came later.
Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.
But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity.
And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi.
That the bomb was a good decision or not is a hard debate that I still think about sometime.
But there was not that much debate reported from the people building it.
It brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
I'm sure those scientists thought about it and discussed it among themselves, but they were in a super top secret lab in the middle of nowhere. Not much opportunity to leave an historical record of what they thought (letters highly censored, etc).
Yes, however the point is moot if your adversary hits you with it before you are finished.
Pacifists get shot first.
Now given the cold war event, I can't say for sure if the bomb was a good or a bad thing.
But's saying "we had no choice" is a really dangerous way of putting things.
In fact Feynman's IQ was merely "above average" according to Feynman himself, who got a look at his score after taking the test in school.
But if you're using "IQ" as a proxy for actual, you know, intelligence then yeah, I agree :-)
Barring a couple of teams that work on interesting projects, Facebook has little other than money and reputation to throw at people. The former isn't that hard to find in our field, though, and the latter is kindda fickly. Facebook may well keep its talent pool constant, but largely by having people for whom the latter (or, more generally, what they work on and what impact it has) is important replaced by people for whom it is not.
Fortunately (for most of us, at least), the kind of talent that money, disregard for ethics and public doublespeak attracts is pretty self-destructive in the long run.
And they got the best projects and the most money.
Yet when I said to my relatives, 5 years ago, that I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity.
I don't pretend to have the moral high ground here, as i made enought bad things in my life, but this kind of pondering work opportunities doesn't happen enough imo.
I think what they don't have is their CEO testifying in front of the Congress after building a platform whose hunger for money made it an exceptional weapon against society. Smart, young people start avoiding companies only after public perception turns against them. Facebook is closer to that than Amazon or even Google.
You were prematurely anti-facist.
(It's an old phrase: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/premature_antifascist )
Do you think "very positive personalities" were a plus in this case? Obviously you don't want homicidal sociopaths on the team, but someone whose first thought was "What's the worst possible thing that could happen here?" might have come in handy.
And saying having the bomb is the only way to counter the enemy building one is excluding the search of any other possible solution.
Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume. (He scored 125 on his test at school).
See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein...
There is no friggin way I'm remotely as intelligent as Feynman was so there goes any faith in IQ tests being meaningful. Most of the people who have worked for me are demonstrably smarter than me and none of them are close to Feynman. Smart people but not at his level IMO.
RIP IQ tests :)
You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without careful definition) can't be reduced to a single number.
If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?
It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.
Tests are not perfect, he could have had a bad day
Maybe he didn’t care
Maybe he misremembers taking an actual IQ test etc
There have been plenty of other highly intelligent people who acted ethically, often at great danger to themselves, rejecting many financial and social incentives to act unethically.
I usually try to keep that in mind now. In the back of my mind I'm saying "they knew, someone told them" and lo and behold, if I go looking for said detractors I can usually find them in spades.
I'm not defending or excusing anyone. Just pointing out that its unlikely these employees were unaware.
But it just doesn't seem likely.
Feynman was only speaking for himself there. It's been 25 years since I read that book but I thought he described some of the efforts by Einstein, et al. to prevent the bomb from being used.
Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals, the next mass percution can be more specific than race. Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV.
As the world becomes more aware of the dangers of algorithms and AI, Facebook engineers are rethinking their career path.
It's clear to me that Zuckerberg was entirely too willing to abuse his power from the start, he doesn't seem to have good intentions at all.
It's also worth noting that a certain American tech company was responsible for this.
Employees rarely flip until the organization stops making them money, then they flip en masse. As long as Facebook's stock remains stagnant, the insider leaks will likely continue.
Might this be the last straw for some that were already close to leaving? Sure. But it's not the only reason, just the one that's simple to explain and/or easy to spot.
That said, I have to wonder how often unintended consequences are discussed at FB, or at any of the other (tech) powerhouses. I mean, targeting ads based on personal info hardly sounds like a big moral / ethical problem, until someone finds a loop hole and attempts to exploit it (in what should have been foreseeable ways?).
Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say.
These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all of this and say "is this right?". To quote David Mitchell: "Are we the baddies?".
That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'?
I've understood that Facebook is essentially evil for a decade. People who work there who are jumping ship now either look like they aren't paying attention but are moralizing the company's action or are abandoning a sinking ship, neither are really positive traits in a potential employee.
But a repeated theme of the conversations was me trying to get inside their heads: I said: "Your job is to figure out when I'm going to be making a decision, purchase or whatever else, and make sure that your advertisers' message is in front of my eyes just as it's occurring to me to make a choice".
With creepy consistency, the replies were rejections of this idea. "No, we're connecting the world!".
My conclusion was an echo of the Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I hope that the quitting phenomenon is real, and that it represents the creme de la creme, with many other options, leaving because they can no longer avoid understanding. If this is happening, then FB's decline will just accelerate.
"Connecting the world!" is indeed the job of almost all employees at Facebook. You can have a large majority of the company focus on this one goal, and also know that the byproduct of that goal allows you to expand another part of a bigger goal: to make more money on ads.
A company in a capitalist economy must make money, of course. No one is arguing that and no one is saying that Facebook doesn't want - indeed must - make money.
It's like asking an Uber driver what is job is: "to transport people!". Of course, that much is obvious. If you ask someone in the "growth" department (or whatever) what their job is - the description will necessarily be much different.
Given that FB is now a public company, it needs to prove to shareholders, beyond anything else, that it's growing its revenues and profits. Turn FB into a company that puts its users first instead of its profits, and its stock price would probably be 1/3 of what it is today.
Perhaps it was not prioritized because a certain amount of scale, in terms of active members, is required to be very successful (to the extent of getting to "rule the world" kind of level)? Many companies start with fewer user hostile items until they reach a massive scale so as to protect their turf from competitors who may use that against them as well as to keep people coming back to the platform often and for long durations.
The best case scenario here is many people simply didn't ever consider the actual ethics of the business that was paying them until everyone else started talking about it.
Not thinking about it until someone makes you doesn't make you a terrible person of course, but I won't be throwing any admiration your way.
I find trying to transfer into another product hilarious: it seems to me that they just don't want to have the stigma of working for "Facebook, the product", without really solving the issues working for "Facebook, the company".
Yes, that's my point. These people, in my head, are trying to minimize the damage done to their reputation, but without actually realizing that moving around inside Facebook doesn't really help. I seriously doubt that how Facebook, the product, is run is significantly different than how Instagram or WhatsApp is run. Anyone who just jumps around isn't trying to really address the root issue.
It says more about the individuals than it does about the company.
Install Facebook and Instagram on iOS. Launch FB and note how long it takes to start, now launch Instagram and do the same. Instagram starts up nearly instantly.
Now, force quit both apps and remove Facebook. Start Instagram and all of the sudden it takes much longer to start. I don't know why this is but it certainly shows a deep connection between the apps in a way that users are probably not expecting.
Silicon Valley is turning on Facebook. Employees are realizing this and do not want a tarnished resume. If you actually believe this is for ethical reasons then you're not equipped for the world.
I think that's too strong of a word. It doesn't take a "sociopath" for a company to get to a bad place; merely the efforts of many engineers each doing something slightly immoral. Hopefully there are less of these now that they see what can happen to a company where such engineers work.
You may lose a small amount of jobs that would come your way, but you'd still likely have dozens of offers to choose from from companies that don't view you as 'tainted'.
Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.
It doesn't, but it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society. Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?
> Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.
I'll have to disagree with you there. Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done. And these ethical standards are hardly "after-the-fact": the idea of a right to privacy has been around for a long time.
The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.
>Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done.
Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then. You're arguing correctly on a moral ground, but you don't have good industry ethics without good legal precedents.
Otherwise the best chance you've got is to get media attention and now you're fighting the company's PR.
When you can point to "Defendant can no longer work in software development because of an ethical failure" cases, you will have a much stronger argument to get engineers to follow ethical guidelines (we're assuming those have been written down on something other than a Github-feelgood repo for that case).
I think Engineers who carry water for unethical companies probably get paid more. Your next employer would much rather hire you if you kept your head down during the PR Nightmare than if you made noise and created a problem for management.
Sure, but then you're diminishing the value of what you did. If someone asks you want you did at Facebook, it would be odd if you said "I'd rather not say", as would it if you had five years of blank in your resume.
> Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then.
I do agree that this is an issue that should be addressed.
I guess if you only worked on creepy and unsavory things, you'd be in a tough spot. Assuming you can't weasel-word your way out of the creepiness and make it more palatable.
If someone ultimately thinks that, you're back to "move on to the next company". And the consequences are paid then and there. But again, you can lean on the market's health to make those consequences really small.
You're assuming all employers (a) believe in and (b) care about Cambridge Analytica. That likely isn't the case.
It requires quite a leap to begin with, to believe that CA could actually "influence elections". But this is just the latest iteration of a very, very biased political viewpoint emanating from Dems-in-Denial. Back in Obama's time it was "elections can be bought with campaign spending", then it became "elections can be controlled with Twitter spam" and now it's "elections can be controlled through some vaguely specified process involving years-old data from Facebook profiles". The mechanism keeps changing but the underlying belief that voters who don't vote left-wing are just marionnettes on string remains.
If you don't believe that, and believe / know that voters make up their own minds consciously, based on the information they have, then this entire Facebook story would make no impact on your hiring decisions because the idea that Facebook is some sort of sordid unethical power broker seems ridiculous to begin with.
The vast majority of people do not consider advertising unethical. Nor do they consider social networks to be unethical.
I always struggle to figure out what classical rules of ethics Facebook (or Google) are supposed to have violated, but nobody can ever give me one. Instead there's a lot of begging the question.
If the algorithm is truly novel then yes, absolutely.
"I wrote software that took advantage of addictive behavior in new ways" "My new flagging mechanism, tailored to prevent users from leaving the platform, led to someone committing suicide after being unable to block an abuser" "My relevancy algorithm, based on what had the most engagement, led to a genocide"
I've made these purposefully extreme, but these are all based on reality. Making something "novel" isn't always a good thing.
I wouldn't put any of those on my resume, because they're ridiculous and don't represent the way people report their achievements. However, I would put the technology I developed on my resume that enabled any one of those things.
Personally, I'd be proud to have had significant involvement in the development of Facebook's data analysis and ingestion platform. I would not be proud of the Cambridge Analytica mistake in of itself, but that's because I don't conflate the underlying technology with a particularly grievous mistake that was happened because of the technology's existence.
Moreover, I contest your use of examples which are cartoonishly evil. I disagree with the fundamental premise that the technology is innately bad, or that your examples even remotely constitute an accurate portrayal of the internal culture at Facebook. I believe there are clear failures in Facebook's data analysis processes, but it's intellectually lazy and dishonest to misrepresent those failures using the obviously biased language in your examples. It's also unfair to mischaracterize the majority of people who work there as lacking in ethics.
All occupations have the same ethical concerns, they're just a function of how much money can be made.
You are correct that it doesn't. But our field also carries a lot less prestige, with most of it tied to the employer as opposed to our profession and skillsets.
This board often laments this fact.
I think adopting an Eichmann defense here is a big mistake and hurts our profession as a whole. We'd be indirectly surrendering a huge amount of autonomy. How can we have ownership over the positive outcome of what we create without also be willing to accept some of the responsibility for negative outcomes? When we wash our hands of these externaliities, to an outsider, it just looks like developers are nothing more than cogs in a machine, following orders. It just moves the glory up the food chain.
I wouldn't hold experience at Uber or FB against any applicant.
I'd expect people working there to know the deal a bit better, but even so they might not be directly involved with anything unethical, and even if they knew about unethical things, they might not have had an opportunity to switch jobs.
But I wouldn't hold working at Facebook against anyone, unless they knew and worked directly on monetizing PII and didn't see problems with it. That's for other reasons -- there are certain things you can't engineer without having a really good idea how, where, and why it'll be used. I don't want an engineer that is blindly solving technical problems.
If this isn't irrational behavior, what would it take for you to be acting irrationally?
Cough cough https://god-knows-what.com/2018/03/27/why-almost-everything-...
A quote from the article you linked:
> Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on. Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers.
Are there other companies you'd indiscriminately never hire from? What about Google? How is their data mining materially different, in your view? What about a subcontractor for Facebook? Would you hire engineers from a startup which advertised on Facebook? If so, why are they not complicit?
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/effect-social-media-dem...
https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t...
> More importantly, just how "indirectly" do one of those 20,000 employees need to be tied to the work you dislike before you'd acknowledge that rebuffing them is silly?
It's not their work that is important, but rather their understanding of Facebook's impact. I think it would be kind to give conscientious quitters and H-1B employees extra points as their situation varies.
> Are there other companies you'd indiscriminately never hire from? I never advocated for such a draconian policy. I was stating that having this information could help with culture fit in an ideal hiring situation (in either direction, depending on your business). Maybe these people are hired less or more in highly sensitive, privacy-related roles based on the company's prerogatives.
> What about Google? How is their data mining materially different, in your view?
Google's mission is to "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Their first value is to "focus on the user". Facebook's mission is to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Their first value is to "be bold".
Facebook's stated mission is to be in the business of social information. Google's stated mission is to be in the business of information more generally. Materially, this general mission leads Google to lean less on people's personal information to achieve their mission.
> What about a subcontractor for Facebook?
Direct contractors are typically employees in all but name, but if they were working for a company hired by Facebook I would think it only reasonable to take that into consideration as their will may not have been aligned with the business decision.
> Would you hire engineers from a startup which advertised on Facebook? If so, why are they not complicit?
Again, to be clear, I would hire engineers directly from Facebook so certainly I would hire their partners employees. It is one of many data points to consider when hiring. They may be complicit in Facebook's misdeeds, but still can have value to a business.
edit: grammar
I think that would be enough to get you blacklisted in certain California crowds.
It doesn't help FB that Trump is associated with them and that he's in hot water already.
[1] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
So the normal rules of ethics that would lead to conclusions about immoral behaviour don't apply here. Privacy isn't something that should be forced on someone. It's their life, their decisions, their information. They can do what they want with it. In reality virtually no users care about privacy and will happily upload their lives or even broadcast it to the whole world given the slightest chance.
As such, it's hard to conclude what exactly Facebook employees are supposed to have done wrong here.
That leaves "OMG YOU GOT TRUMP ELECTED", which isn't going to convince the roughly 50% of Americans who voted for him. After all, they won't believe that Trump voters were mindlessly reprogrammed into voting for Trump against their will by social media. And a lot of Clinton voters won't believe that either.
I expect a whole lot of virtue signalling from the same Silicon Valley types who foam at the mouth if someone says there aren't many women coders because on average they choose to be teachers instead. And not much else.
The modern understanding of consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time. Sometimes even retrospectively
Depends on what you’re doing. I wouldn’t want a former Facebook employee near anything remotely customer data related, or anything with political or PR sensitivity.
I can understand it if you're in a situation where the bottom can kind of dictate the company direction in a "hey, with this data, we could make the company a killing, our shareholders happy, etc." sort of way. Perhaps avoid the upper level employees, but engineering talent is probably safe.
The people working on the political and PR areas at Facebook are badass. They come from places like the Obama administration. They now have a front-row seat in the negotiations for how governments around the world are negotiating with Facebook.
After the dust settles, these people will start charging $1k/hour to consult on "political or PR" sensitive business areas.
I frequently see people try this when their employers start burning in political and criminal crosshairs. It’s a tough and treacherous strategy. It is likely just an easier thing to tell oneself than “I need this job for the pay cheque, the next 10 years be damned.”
Unless you leverage the crisis into deep relationships with regulators and politicos who remain relevant afterwards, you walk away weaker. Low-touch Facebook PR folks saw their best days when they worked in the last administration.
They are equal opportunity data vacuums!
Of course, they accept the data of all kinds of people.
They are very diverse in they data collection efforts.
They can still, and certainly will, virtue signal!
At $JOB-1, my boss (only good boss in the whole company, TBH) got fired soon after I left. As a knee-jerk reaction by upper mgmt. (poorly run company.) His replacement knows 1/10 of what he knows, and hails from Uber.
depends who's evaluating it and what their values are. If their values are aligned with Uber's values, then no. If their values are opposed to Uber's values, then yes. I'm squarely of the latter. Uber would be a major negative to me. But everyone is different. Some people might view it positively.
I think Uber is a bad thing. If you work for Uber, you have helped create a bad thing. At that point, I do not trust your judgement, and I do not want to work with people whose judgement I do not trust.
Should we bar military veterans from these development jobs because the Military Industrial Complex has a toxic culture of killing millions around the world for profit?
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Now the pendulum swings hard opposite, and foolish as the kids where, they wanted the prestige 3 months ago and should suffer that choice today?
Even though I'd never work for Facebook, I can acknowledge the people who work there are working on some tough problems.
I'll be fully convinced when every Facebook product is removed from every website, including React.
If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of course, not everyone that works for or wants to work for Facebook is unethical).
Could Facebook exist without selling as much personal data to advertisers as possible? It doesn't look like it currently, but it is at least hypothetical possible.
Some things exist in a gray area (for now) so while some people might argue that its righteous or necessary to do something, there's no problem with an opposition to such an ideal shoving it back.
You just reduced the linked comment - a nuanced, neutrally presented argument that there are significant practical and philosophical difficulties inherent to refusing to develop technology for military application - to "lots of words", followed by what is effectively a rhetorical sneer.
You don't have to agree with every comment asserting an opposing view, but at least give them a modicum of respect if they put in as much intellectual effort as that one. Why even bother commenting if you're just going to issue a middle-brow dismissal without a substantive critique?
Engineer used to (hundreds of years ago) literally mean someone who worked on designing weapons of war and/or defensive structures. How times have changed, hah.
On the other hand, your argument is weak because 1) you attack a strawman (the commenter did not indicate by their choice of example that it is the most recent), and 2) you did not substantiate why developing military technology then would be different to developing military technology now, in such a way that precludes beneficial use.
The popular rationalizations are "it will help save lives of armed services" or "prevent the big terrorist attack". Ther are dozens of reasons people make up to convince themselves and others that it's ok.
Judgement as to whether their reasons hold up to the light of day are left as an exercise to reader.
So you have read Aquinas and have a reasoned argument against the concept of Jus ad bellum - please I am sure hn readers would like to see your argument.
The "just war" argument can be taken to places it's not fit for, is all I'm saying. I'm not denying that it has it's place and time.
It is simply too powerful/useful to be assumed to be legit all the time.
It's not clear to me which one will cause more human death. Civillian aircraft is a significant cause of anthropgenic climate change.
I’m saying that deterrence and defense are different words with different meanings, and you used the word, “defend” somput down the goal posts.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
You're exposed to psychological experiments on every large website you use, although typically the psychometrics are more limited to things like "did you click the button that gives us money?" instead of questions like "how does the emotional content of the news feed affect our users well being?"
Also the fact that they made this research public is, in my eyes, a sign of good faith (in this specific case), and an indication that at least some people in the company take the power they have over their users' health seriously.
I have lots of other reservations about working for Facebook, that was just the one I specifically cited to the recruiter.
It showed a surprising lack of awareness and care for the users of their platform. Regardless of the intention it was grossly irresponsible to do the experiment in that way. The kind of data that Facebook had and was manipulating is completely more personal and completely different than getting people to click a buy button, a distinction lost on them. We’re talking about people’s relationships with their family, their old friends, and we’re talking about cries for help or compassion that were suppressed to see how it would affect users mood, not just engagement.
I'd say at the time several years ago it had more to do with "I don't want to have to re-activate my closed FB just to join the company", never mind having to drink the koolaid.
This was several years ago, before any specific scandal I can think of. I have constantly questioned whether I made the right move ... it was a lot of money. Now, finally, I have my answer.
That said, of course my story is anecdotal and for the most part, I guarantee you that the great majority of folks would jump for a job at FB. At the time I was going through the process, the work environment was very much kool-aid, with kool-aid posters everywhere, "work hard" posters and such. It went past my sad filter straight to laughable. I was on campus a few months ago and that kind of thing is gone or mostly gone. I hear it's a pretty good working environment these days, actually.
The article cites one designer who left (out of ~25,000+ total Facebook employees).
Of course, it's unclear from this article whether negative sentiments have increased substantially this year compared to previous years.
And to clarify, I'm not saying that I am innocent or that I have taken some sort of ethical high-road. I gladly spent many years cashing out my pre-IPO stock grants while turning a blind eye to numerous immoral business practices. But soon after going public, there wasn't much benefit working at Facebook compared to any other large silicon valley tech companies. Without the financial motivation, the ethical concerns made it hard to be excited about remaining.
https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-st...
I think this (parody) video does a better job of capturing employee sentiment than any Business Insider article.
There are so many things that go into that decision, how "important" is it to be employed, how "bad" is the business behavior, how "costly" to a reputation is it to leave or to stay. It is the kind of question that puts a persons character and self image on trial, and in my experience few people emerge on the other side unchanged.
Faulkner said, "... the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. This was one of my High School English teacher's favorite quotes. But in the late 90's I met people who were being ripped apart by working at a dot.com company, knowing it was all smoke and mirrors, but staying to that they could vest their stock and sell it before the rest of the world figured it out. Being in a position where your personal wealth will benefit because you are participating in, although not directly responsible for, a fraud that is being perpetuated on the investors. How tainted is that silver?
A couple of years ago I was having lunch with an ex-Googler who was coming to grips with their loss of innocence. They had worked in AdWords and were part of a group that was increasing the average 'spend' of an AdWords customer with targeted messaging that was designed to appeal to their use of the system. This person had recognized that the goal of the program was to essentially "trick" the customer into spending more money when all the statistics said that doing so would not give them a commensurate growth in business or traffic. And as bad as they felt about participating, they continued to do so as the program manager stressed that nobody was "forcing" them to spend more money, just offering them a way to think about where they would "want" to spend more. This person was dealing with the realization that a younger version of themselves would be disgusted with the older version of themselves for "giving in."
It seems that people will talk about honor, character, and integrity in the abstract with one set of views and then find their real character (or lack thereof) when confronted with a test of their values.
Business Insider derivative: "Facebook employees are quitting".
This article is just shitty clickbait.
You built this behemoth, we told you so, you insisted because it was too hard to resist, deal with it.
For the record, the situations in which some people find themselves are complex and not everyone has the freedom a high salary or stocks or other perks grant some of us.
Nevertheless, for those of us who choose to make the world, our world, a nastier, less friendly, more neurotic place, I have zero sympathy. Reap what you sow, in my case it's disdain.
I apologize for the hard tone but I'm not exactly known for accepting "sorry not sorry" kind of apologies.
We don't know if this is a cluster of concerned people, or a broad trend across the company. Given the vagueness, it's probably the former, because exaggerating the number lends to a more interesting narrative. Not much to see here, just a few people leaving FB.
Better yet, become a whistleblower and leak to the press.
- Depending on the actual contents of the leak, people might panic; this is basically never useful.
- Depending on the outlet, the contents may get distorted before being published in order to fit some narrative -- potentially causing a panic. See above.
- You or the original leaker may be traced back using even editorialized data, or without the corporation seeing the data. This would land you and/or the original leaker in a lot of legal hot water.
- A side-effect of that is that you'd become unemployable in many cases, and you might find yourself running from the law in other cases.
So, yeah -- quitting facebook probably isn't a bad idea as a user. Refusing work as a contractor or an employee may be difficult, but because absolute morality doesn't exist, it's really up to the person in that position to make the call about quitting.
So if they are doing something illegal, and therefore one is protected from prosecution, they should absolutely "leak" it to the authorities.
Doesnt matter if you are unemployable if you recieve millions in a whistle blowing reward from the government.
And yes, the US offers rewards as well. Specifically, it is something like 10% of the monetary judgment against the company, in many cases.
My guess is that employees of Facebook mostly stay for the money, with a second reason being for some kind of exposure on working on things on "planet scale". I find it difficult to understand anyone being fine with Facebook's ethics all these years and then changing their minds now. It is quite weird.
Facebook is a soulless company. If you're a Facebook employee and haven't understood that yet, I cannot even sympathize with you (while being frustrated and worried about the implications for billions of humans).
The real issue in my mind is that the platform can be used by bad actors to spread misinformation. It's as if during WWII the Nazi's had the ability to publish editorials in leading newspapers throughout the US.
While this is a feature/bug of the internet in general, the vast scale of Facebook and its near ubiquitous use amongst the general voting public in the US and other democratic nations make it the most potent vector through which a bad actor like Russia could spread propaganda and misinformation.
I'm not sure the recent move to label political advertisements as such will do much to safeguard us from misinformation.
Maybe over concerns that their department is in limbo due to the general public's concern, but I can't imagine they have been working on their projects and only now found ethical issues with them.
Also, it’s not something new. Facebook data has been used and abused in other past elections.
Sorry for the following link. Sure, it is not the same, but this is the great debate of "following orders": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
I'd also like references about the ethical debate about the Manhattan Project where the greatest minds of humanity gathered to develop WMD.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/business/computer-science...
These are the Stanford profs mentioned in the article:
Facebook isn't a billion dollar business like it is today because they take steps in protecting your data and ensuring transparency and not selling out to advertisers. Transferring to Instagram or Whatsapp isn't going to absolve you of ethical issues if the leadership is the same. It'll be a matter of time before FB finds a way to monetize all the messages you send via Whatsapp
I saw the same things at school, studying for forensic IT. Whole classes of people who think they learned to be an ethical person. The thing is, sure they makke ethical decisions at times. But in a pinch they might not consider ethics as much. Like when they really need a job. I myself don't consider myself to be the most ethical, but my morals are strong... don't do evil!
Knowing what is evil and not evil, is a big part of doing the right thing, can't expect the whole workforce to know where the line is or that there is a line.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-facebooks-employees-crisis-... has actual sources, and comes to the opposite conclusion.
The compensation will tell the real story apart from all the publicity and attempts at spin.
Price is a very thin signal, and deriving inferrences from it fraught.
that alone is a sign of a deeply unethical company
What are they referring to here? That the code base has gotten unwieldy and has become hard to change?
At this point I feel like HN has turned into a FB news dump since it makes the people who "quit facebook and never looked back" feel good. Where are the quality submissions?
Zuckerberg is testifying to congress right now. That's the news. You're not mad at HN, you're mad at the present.