Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace | Hacker News Reader

Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace

cnbc.com

69 points_wldu24 comments

I'm always baffled when I see the stuff employees complain about in SF. Not that they're wrong, but my experience is that these things are 100% standard across the board.

I've never worked somewhere that I could openly call out my chief executives in front of the whole team and not expect that to be a thoroughly career limiting move.

I've definitely never worked anywhere that I could organize protests and still expect to have a job by the end of the day. (I'm aware of unionized workplaces that do this on a semi-regular basis, but that's about it and you can bet that participation guarantees you won't be considered for joining management any time soon.)

I hesitate to say y'all are entitled, because maybe you're right to be doing this. Maybe I'm jealous. I dunno. But I feel like at a minimum the people at these companies don't recognize how uncommonly privileged they are to even be able to voice their concerns like this.

By all means, fight the good fight, but if you ever leave the valley... good luck to you.

Google works that way, with their TGIF discussion (moved to Thursday a few years ago so people in other time zones could watch it on Friday :-)).

The fact is that the big tech companies are feeding at a trough of money that seems to be infinitely deep, but only a million or so people worldwide have the skills to build and implement Internet services at the billion-user scale. Until the money trough runs dry or the skills pool deepens, employees will still have the tech companies by the balls.

This article contradicts that.

All big companies I worked at so far suppress internal dissent. It's just the nature of the beast. Your boss doesn't want her boss look bad, and she also doesn't want to look bad herself come review/promo time. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake. So all communication upward gets massaged with that in mind. By the time it gets through 5,6,7 layers of management "shit's bad" becomes "everything is awesome" even if the initial message gets out at all.

The classic (and hilarious) book The Systems Bible (https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d...) has some deliciously tart words on this subject:

We present the Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings (F.L.A.W.): THINGS ARE WHAT THEY ARE REPORTED TO BE...

The net effect of this Law is to ensure that people in Systems are never dealing with the real world that the rest of us have to live in, but instead with a filtered, distorted, and censored version which is all that can get past the sensory organisms of the System itself...

This effect has been studied in detail by a small group of dedicated General Systemanticists. In an effort to introduce quantitative methodology into this important area of research they have paid particular attention to the amount of information that reaches, or fails to reach, the attention of the relevant administrative officer or corresponding Control Unit.

The crucial variable, they have found, is the fraction Ro/Rs, where Ro represents the amount of Reality which fails to reach the Control Unit, and Rs equals the total amount of Reality presented to the System. The fraction Ro/Rs varies from zero (full awareness of outside reality) to unity (no reality getting through). It is known, naturally enough, as the COEFFICIENT OF FICTION.

Are there people who still believe the PR nonsense of big companies like Google and Facebook? At the end of the day by agreeing to work for these companies, you gain prestige, $$$, and maybe something interesting to work on, that is pretty much it and those are only offered to you because you bring in much more $$$ than you get in perks or $$$. If you are naive enough to think that these corporations are interested in anything but making money, you are sadly mistaken.

This comment makes me want to work for a large company. If all they provide is lots of money and potential for interesting work then that sounds great!

Doesn't even have to be large. I work for a public company that has a staff of < 200. Small engineering team inside of a non-software company. We solve business problems. Sometimes that means building SPA web apps. Sometimes it means coding up the corporate site redesign. It's up to you to make it interesting. I think it's interesting, and I always try to play a part in a project that works toward advancing my career goals.

Pace is slower than the start-ups I've worked at in the past, but salary and incentives are above most tech start-up "competitive salaries" I hear about.

I work for a startup of ~400 employees (okay, maybe not much of a startup anymore...) and can confirm that lots of money and interesting work is available in many more places than just the Power 5.

Well of course there are people that believe that. These multi billion dollar companies invest a lot of resources in promoting propaganda to make people believe it. Do you honestly think industries that rely on a keen ability to manipulate the masses can’t do that to potential employees too?

hell yea, in this era where knowledge workers are more valuable than pretty much anything else, it completely makes sense to do whatever it takes to appeal to them, and of course utilizing propaganda is just good business. Propaganda, it works on the stupid and smart alike, does not discriminate.

I always used to question how people I worked with who are demonstratably much more intelligent than average could fall for things like this but then I realized I seem to have a unique set of circumstances in my life that kind of led me to question everything and be maybe more aware of propaganda than an average person. The more I've observed, traveled, interacted with people, etc the more I have realized people who are book smart are often highly susceptible to propaganda as they often will build up a mental image of the world from 3rd party sources, rather than first-hand experience, because they are so proficient at reading, analyzing, etc.

What ere your circumstances? I also have a different background, and question everything.

The question is at end of day if having strongly independent minds inside the company is better than having them outside the company. Yes its all about the bottom line, but just like costco gets a better bottom line by having extremely low employee churn through better wages, google/fb thinks they get a lot of benefit by keeping even opposed minds inside.

May I recommend Dan Lyon’s Disrupted as a deep, touching, funny and horrifying portrayal of what startup culture can look like?

It’s one of the best books I read last year.

Facebook was started in 2004, so it's a good 15 years old now. It also has 30,000 employees. That's way to big and way too old to be a startup in any meaningful sense. It's a big and powerful, but young, company.

Its cultural roots go back to a startup, however.

By that standard, almost every company's cultural roots go back to a startup.

So, such a period would be a sensible time and place to look in an examination of cultural factors. The fact that Facebook is still young means that those roots are closer in time than for other companies and would seem to make that more relevant.

ty!

best tip of 2019!

...

so far. ;)

>The message was clear in August 2016 when the company laid off the editorial staff of its trending news team, shortly after some workers on that team leaked to the press that they were suppressing conservative-leaning stories.

So - All the claims of censorship for conservative views. it's true then? I previously thought it was an excuse.

How can we have a dialogue as a nation, if we don't allow opposite positions to speak?

A large part of the article is about the review/promotion system at Facebook, and it highlights that:

-Facebook has twice-a-year performance reviews.

-The reviews involve peer feedback, some of it blind to the reviewee.

-Managers have quotas for performance categories.

I believe those features are standard at most big US companies, with some exceptions like Microsoft.

The consequences are (a) twice-a-year crunch time, (b) pressure to deliver bullshit results, (c) pressure to be popular, and (d) employees are incentivized to sabotage their peers.

This is every job I've ever worked at, nothing about this is unique to Facebook.

I'm glad this is actually getting attention though. At least it's a step towards getting this problem fixed. It's downright degrading that we have to (especially in the tech industry) pretend like we love everything about our jobs and being cogs in top-down authoritarian organizations.

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