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Comment by nemild | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a more complex picture. I did my own deep dive after years of reflecting on this:

Inside the Bubble at Facebook

"Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume the best of their coworkers that they've developed friendships with from working in the trenches, without inquiring into the larger effects they're having."

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html

Would love feedback.

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Sounds like nuclear weapons research in Tennessee during World War 2: only inform employees enough so that they can carry on the work without jeopardizing the mission (building nukes vs building a platform which owns people's information).

Telling people "just enough" was more of a security thing than a psychology thing.

X vs the Manhattan project isn't really a good test for the ethic of working on X.

You don't need to work hard to motivate people to start creating the atomic bomb when the Nazis are doing the same thing and a good chunk of your team fled the Nazis.

You don't need to work hard to motivate people to keep working on an atomic bomb when the alternative is a few million people being killed in the invasion of a bunch of islands that the inhabitants have pledged to defend to the death and thus far made good on their promise.

The Manhattan project is much less morally ambiguous than recent tech scandals (the words "recent" and "scandal" relative to the general population, people who follow tech have seen this stuff coming a mile away) because the cost of inaction in 1945 was so much higher than today. It's not like anyone was working hard to make Facebook IPO happen because they thought it would slightly reduce the chances of their relatives dying half way around the world.

Bookmarked for future reference. It's super important to remember that every company's behaviors reflect their incentive structure, not their mission statement.

I really like the succinctness of that. I wrote a lot of words, to say the same.

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