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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Do employees at facebook really feel the heat? I'm just picturing management trying to find solutions (or to wait it out) while most other employees must be mostly going on with their work.

In the end, most of the critics seem to miss the point that Facebook grew really fast, and just wasn't ready to police the world. A lot of it focuses on the negative aspects of Facebook conquering the world, but what about the positive aspects? Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?

It might not be clear to people here, who are not heavy users of Facebook and reside mostly in the US. But for me, I have hundreds of friends scattered around the world and Facebook has been the only way to keep in touch with them.I've met so many people through Erasmus groups and Communities on Facebook as well. No, the alternatives are not everywhere in the world.

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most of the critics seem to miss the point that Facebook grew really fast

Growth rate is not an excuse for the evils that have been enabled by Facebook. It is perfectly within Facebook's power to slow its growth to a rate it can actually manage.

And don't play the "shareholder" card. Zuck is the majority shareholder, and can do whatever he wants with the company, including making it not be evil.

Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?

E-mail. The PSTN. Text messages. Actual mail.

WhatsApp, YouTube, and probably several hundred others that I don't know about because I'm not much of an SMS person.

I quit facebook in 2010, so don't take me for any sort of fanboy, but what 'evils' were 'enabled', specifically?

It looks like most of the election stuff was normal humans reposting things of their own volition. Yeah, there were lots of lies in it, some of it was actual fake newspapers being run out of Macedonia or whatever, but are we making facebook a scapegoat just for being the medium? Before 2016, I never heard anyone saying FB had an obligation to fact-check political speech..

Maybe we, as a society, need to figure out how to handle social media rather than expecting a guy like Zuck to do it for us.

Just a little light genocide: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

I didn't know about that, thanks for the link.

Here's my beef, though: People still did that. Facebook isn't your daddy, and Zuckerberg will never be a different person.

Facebook isn't the problem. We are.

If you know how to manipulate 1% of the population — never knowing who, in advance, just that it’s on average 1% — and you sell that power to the highest bidder, I’d totally argue you’re responsible for whatever the winner does with that power.

Especially if you go to great lengths to keep the bidders anonymous, or even merely allow them to make themselves unknown to you because “we can’t scale that”.

But it doesn't sound like Facebook sold anything here?

Obviously in hindsight some posts should have been censored and accounts banned to prevent violence, but I'm honestly not surprised they failed to.. We're expecting some dweebs in the valley to understand Myanmar social dynamics?

> We're expecting some dweebs in the valley to understand Myanmar social dynamics?

If they do business there? Yes! If they cannot hire people who can understand it for them, that is still a problem. If they merely forget, that is still a problem.

> and you sell that power to the highest bidder

You make it sound like FB knew that the accounts that "...posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes" were run by a military operation.

> because "we can't scale that"

And how would you scale that?

I don't think there is any easy solution (or even an "ideal" solution).

Not to mention that FB is on now dealing with actual dam military operations by an authoritarian government. How would you defend yourself against that?

> And how would you scale that?

If I was Facebook, ot if I was a government?

If Facebook: First idea, probably naive, is to require large minimum spending per advertiser so that all can be checked manually.

If government: I’d pass a law requiring all advertisers be checked to some standard, which is what I care about, and let Facebook invent its own solution.

I want to be clear: I don’t care if that bankrupts them, any more than I care about bankrupting surgeons who can’t afford soap.

Both are, if you ask me. WE are just as bad. The demand drives the supply, in fact.

If Facebook was warned since 2013 that they're a conduit for genocide and give exactly zero fucks unless it becomes a PR problem four years later then, well, I would call them a festering, evil karbunkel of a problem.

Facebook is directly responsible for mass murder (not only in Myanmar, but feel free to look up Sri Lanke, The Philippines, Cambodia and probably a few other countries).

The "Well, Facebook is only a medium and those evil folks could have performed their genocide with the help of postcards" excuse really doesn't cut it.

They knew for years and didn't do shit! Let that sink in...

Please look up how Facebook enabled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

Even without Facebook, what's preventing Myanmar's authoritarian government from flooding their own media with propaganda still?

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook

> Do employees at facebook really feel the heat?

Yes. At every social gathering, every online forum, etc. where I mention (or people already know) that I work at Facebook, the most common reaction has gone from "wow cool" to harsh glares. It interferes with all of those relationships. I know a whole lot of people will say "you deserve it you scum I hope you die" but I'm not here to argue deservedness. A question was asked, and I'm answering. Yes, we feel it.

Will you also confirm whether or not the heat that you’re feeling is actually causing tensions? I’m having a hard time grasping if this article is simply sourcing disgruntled employees.

Nope. For one thing I don't think my sense of that is much better than anyone else's (I'm not based in a major office and don't spend a lot of time reading the internal groups). For another, I'd like to keep my job. Sorry.

I don't work at Facebook, but Facebook rented multiple floors at my last office building. It didn't help that the employees were by-and-large thoughtless and rude (spreading out in elevators if they were in groups to discourage people from piling in, rushing to get through a door in front of somebody carrying a bunch of stuff just to make them stop and then not holding the door--extremely consistently), but nobody was too worried about making sure they were out of earshot before wondering aloud if they enjoyed making the world worse.

Aw man, made an account to answer to this post cause I'll plead guilty to doing this a few times.

Especially on my way into the office in the morning or after lunch I've been caught up in a problem I'm solving, an approach I just discussed with someone, an idea, etc and have walked into the elevator without realizing there were people inside.

This is in an office building where FB rents multiple floors and is tight on elevators, so I think we might be talking about the same office and I wouldn't be surprised if I maybe I did this before. It's also the first time I'm living in the city, so I did get elevator etiquette wrong a few times when I first moved in.

I never heard any comments about the making the world worse though. The people in the office tend to be quite nice. I did meet someone in the elevator once with whom I had a good conversation about lunch options at the different companies in the building.

In any case, I do suggest pointing it out next time something like this happens. It might be people like me (or me!) who just aren't always aware of their surroundings. And it case this was me, have my retroactive apologies.

Off topic I know but I think this is a group thing, rather than fb specific.

Seen lots of groups display inconsiderate behavior in public, to inconvenience others. Most common example - small group spreads across a pathway to force passers by off the pathway to get by. Always thought it was more of a unconscious dominance sort of thing.

Probably not in a direct way unless you work in PR, but yes. Part of the allure of working at a major tech company like Google, Facebook, etc was being able to brag that you worked at shiny company. Now the shine is off, and your friends and family aren't enthusiastic about it anymore and may even be asking you hard questions. It's not a great feeling. As others have mentioned, the stock price is down, so your compensation is significantly lower. Management is distracted by these problems. Recruiting is probably a bit harder. For many of Facebook's younger employees this may be the first time they've seen a company face adversity like this, and their identity may be wrapped up in working for Facebook. Working at Facebook is still a good job, but I'd imagine that there's lower morale in general, and that turnover has increased because of these issues.

> Do employees at facebook really feel the heat?

Two words: Stock price. A big part of compensation is in stock.

This is the really bad part about equity compensation in a publicly traded company. When that stock starts devaluing rapidly it runs past even your "worst" jaded future predictions, and then it is depressing.

Back in 1998 when a company I helped start was acquired by a publicly traded company, and by 1999 the stock price was over $100 and everyone was feeling "super good" about the future. The internal dialog goes something like this, "This may be an anomaly but damn! even if the stock drops to 50% of its value I'm still doing great!."

In my case the stock dropped in value to below a dollar a a share, 99%+ drop. That feels really really horrible, especially if the future doesn't have anything in it that would rescue or recover the value. Even though there was nothing that I personally could have done (legally) to change the outcome, as an engineer and a person who solves hard problems, it made me feel like a total failure. Like I had let down my family, my friends at work, and people who I knew who had bought stock in the company as a sign of confidence in me.

It is really hard to understand that kind of feeling until you've been through it I think.

Why would you hang on to your own company’s stock if it is publicly traded? That seems like “Enron-ianly” bad financial planning. You are already super-exposed to the company’s health by virtue of being employed there. Why add additional exposure by owning/keeping its stock too?!?

I don't know about Chuck here but I've met a number people who had stock stuck in the lockup period when the bust happened.

It needs to vest before you can sell it.

This is often what people think, but almost everyone I know at IPO'd places are at least partially vested. They want that sweet upside and for a while it works and everyone is getting rich together.

I had to work long and hard to convince a friend of mine to diversify at least half of his investments away from Shopify which was his only asset.

That doesn't conflict with the real fact that most employees have most of their equity tied up as deferred compensation that they cannot sell until it vests.

sell it short now, cover with the vested shares :)

Most companies contractually restrict employees from shorting their own stock.

I can't speak for everyone of course, but for the companies that I have worked for, where I held equity, and the company was publicly traded, there were some strict controls over when and how employees could buy or sell shares, and three of them forbade any sort of option trading on the company stock. When being acquired there were even more restrictions on the stock that I received in exchange for my 'founders stock' in the original company.

Or did you have a specific scenario in mind?

Stock compensation at a lot of companies (definitely at Facebook) is in the form of RSUs, which are shares of stock that vest over time. So employees vesting X number of shares over 4 years are watching those shares go up and down in the public markets without actually having the ability to sell them.

That's not an accident: the reason stock compensation is given is to further align employee interests with the long term performance of the company.

Sorry, yea I was talking only about vested stock. Obviously you can’t sell something you don’t own yet.

Isn't there a secondary market for the RSUs?

The point is that they are not vested. You don't own them until the time restriction expires and you're still employed.

Nope

If they’ve been there for longer than a year and a half I doubt most are sweating. They’re still very much up since grant price, plus they get yearly bonuses and refreshers.

> A lot of it focuses on the negative aspects of Facebook conquering the world, but what about the positive aspects? Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?

I would argue that Twitter does a much better job of connecting the world than Facebook.

Have you tried quitting facebook? I found it the easiest of all the social networks to leave because there's pretty much nothing to miss about it. Are you really gonna feel distraught over missing the bajillionth picture of your high school friend pretending to like holding a baby? Or fake macedonian garbage shared by your most racist family member?

I don't post on facebook, and rarely read posts on facebook.

But Twitter can _not_ replace events, groups and messenger.

A portion of the heat is probably from their peers/friends/family outside the company since the company has such a negative stigma right now. Another portion is due to the fact a significant portion of their income is tied to the market value of the company, which is now back at Feb. 2017 levels and declining, both due to the negative press cycle and bearish long term outlook by the market.

> Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?

My web browser.

I personally haven't felt much heat. It used to inspire more wonder amongst my acquaintances back in 2017, and I could brag more about it. Within the US most comments I get are around the stock as jokes around losing money.

I've still had people ask me for referrals, be interested in what I do and think my job is cool-- just not as much as before.

> Do employees at facebook really feel the heat?

No, they are still rolling in money. If that ever changes, then FB are in trouble.

Until then, carry on everyone.

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