I would guess it's some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn't they trust us, we're Facebook!".
The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.
The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.
The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation.
Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they're trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it's all said and done, over $1M is wasted.
Welcome to life at a big tech company.
But you forgot the most important thing: What happens once upper management reads an article like this and realizes they f*cked up badly again?
Yes, more of the same hierarchy, compensation, promotions, and "culture".
Welcome to "efficient" big corporate hierarchies.
Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.
> Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference.
I'd never stopped to think about it, but I think the world would be a much better place if more people did.
To clarify: nothing good for you. Ignoring ethical issues, Facebook certainly benefits.
I studied Electrical Engineering and in my experience, the only thing my classmates cared about was the technical aspects of the field, and often they couldn't see the big picture. Great talents of course, but more like robots, not even capable of understanding the humanitarian aspects of life. Such a waste.
Disclaimer: It's just my experience, not necessarily true for all engineers and engineering schools.
If somebody offered me five to eight times as much as I make today with a huge boost in status and other positive side effects, and all they ask is to quiet down those silly principles, I'm not so sure I'd say no. "You can still do good in 5 years when you've made enough money to be set for life", I'd probably tell myself.
The worst thing is, sticking to those principles just means someone else will take the job.
Coming out of university, I had one job offer (it was a bad down market at the time). My principles made me say no. I didn't want to work on guidance systems for military applications, thank you very much. That choice has cost me a great deal in earning potential. Even so, I would find it hard to blame someone for compromising their principles.
Disclaimers: I'm not an engineer, but my CS degree is ABET accredited. I also took a few more Archaeology, Cog Sci, and Philosophy classes than strictly necessary.
Did a Bachelor's + Master's degree in CS in Europe. Only around 5% of my coursework had (and could!) be outside CS. And you could fill that with things like Game Theory 102 or Copyright Law 101 or something without issue.
When I was in college I did have to take philosophy 101. It and all of the other core classes such as biology and English were nothing more than annoying hurdles. I do enjoy learning about philosophy and such, but that is not at all what happened while I was trying to get my degree.
Though to be totally honest, to a large extent I considered the entire degree earning process to be little more than an about hurdle to entering the job market. I spent practically zero time reflecting in any of it during the process.
Is it a worst practice in our industry right now? Yep. Is it nefariously evil, probably not.
Tech talent of all sorts generally don't know how the business manages money and what rules might apply to that management however.
on edit: added even, removed extra letter at end.
Still less than what they spend on management.
It is part of the norm but the norm is horrifying and stupid yet you are the crazy one for suggesting something different like actually listening to the people you pay to think.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
Before these companies where FAANG most of them were small, crazy startups that were able to easily acquire talent because tech was pretty boring at the time. You could pay market rates, but give someone an exciting project and they'd join you. That allowed all of these companies to completely disrupt the market. Having disrupted the market they are no longer interested in this happening again.
The current hiring practices are to basically drain talent from the startup pool. Paying an engineer 500k is much cheaper than acquiring the new darling startup they ended up creating (DeepMind), which is much cheaper than acquiring the now large company that is threatening you (instagram), which is still much cheaper than allowing existential threats to you to eventually IPO.
There's the added benefit that you now have a bunch of great engineers on your team, but this isn't the real purpose. The tech giants of the past, IBM, Oracle etc all failed to realize how important it was not only to have good engineers, but to also remove great engineers from the market.
Facebook's would most probably not call it off. Or just resurface the same thing at another time with another name or excuse.
I’ve worked in these megacorps and I understand how easy is to believe everything they do is awesome.
“We’re just doing it to make it easier for our users” or “we’re Facebook, we know how to securely handle their passwords”
It’s very easy to _believe_ these things when you’re in the inside being showered with money and being told how amazing you are all the time.
Now, I can understands that someone working for SpaceX can think they're all amazing, but if you work for FB? It's like working for MS in late 90s - maybe good for you cash-wise, and that's pretty much it.
It was clean and light and fast, unlike MySpace which was often described as a messy, bloated pig.
As technologists we like to think that we are above this behavior, but we are not. All it takes is someone to wave enough dollar bills in front of our eyes and we'll mostly justify our actions with a mixture of whataboutism and by saying "I'm just a lowly cog in the machine".
I'm seeing a great many parallels in the short term predatory and risky behavior in the financial machinations of the past and the behavior of tech firms including FAANG today. Even with the best intentions, the system eventually evolves to a point where the show is being run by fundamentally the same sort of people in both industries. Perhaps it is because it is these sort of people who strive in a cut-throat corporate environment that is itself in a cut-throat capitalist environment.
I'm not saying this as some sort of hard line leftist either - hell, I work in systematic trading so I'm as much part of the system as one can be. Yeah sure, I should hold true to my morals, but what about all the others who are willing to replace me at a moments notice? I'm just a cog in the machine, my action will not make an ounce of difference and only cause hardship for myself.
Oh the irony!
Certainly, you're right that we depend on each one to say "no, I won't do that", but I feel like there's a difference in quality: evil intent vs willful ignorance/negligence. There might be borderline illegal tax-dodging with large tech companies, there might be irresponsible data security, but there's not a lot that is comparable to the cum-ex-trades that large banks engaged in: no active defrauding of the government and/or citizens. Granted, it may happen once tech corporations have as strong a grip on governments as banks do, and feel secure enough that they won't have to face repercussions if it blows up.
Plenty of banks, and not just the large, global ones have actively engaged in tricking their customers by selling them junk and hiding and/or downplaying important details to get their sales provision, and it wasn't something that was "only known at the top". I've yet to hear of scandals of a similar magnitude in tech. Chrome doesn't contain any hidden crypto-miner, and if it ever will, I doubt that an investigation would reveal everybody on the team knew about it - it would likely just reveal a security breach or a small amount of people subverting the processes.
I do completely agree that tech isn't all sunshine, however. Behind pretty much every large scale data leak is an engineer that said "well okay if you want me to put this database server on the public internet and remove the password, I'm happy to do it" instead of refusing, and behind every horrible overreach in surveillance is an engineer that just blocks out the impact his work has on real people. There are people working on killer drones after all, and I don't think any of them are naive enough to believe that "they only target the bad guys".
Oh so you are saying that the willful and deliberate exploitation of people's private data, the willful and deliberate ignorance of laws by companies like Uber, the willful and deliberate "research" done by tech companies to determine the most addictive products to entice people to buy in and stay on particular platforms, the willful and deliberate exploitation of minors by tech companies to get them to spend their parent's money on whatever stupid game or product is the fad of the week, or the fact that there are tech companies running targeted campaigns to influence voter opinion based on stolen private data is all just ignorance/negligence?
I strongly disagree. There is just as much rotten in tech as is in finance, the only difference is that many of the shenanigans enabled by tech have not been outlawed yet. Borderline illegal tax-dodging by large tech companies is business as usual compared to the other crap that they do, but being disruptive and breaking things is hip and cool, and it's Us doing it, and not Them, so we let it slide.
You say that banks are willfully selling junk to customers, and this is true. But this is exactly the whataboutism I was talking about. Tech companies mining people's most private data to get them to buy stuff they don't need is just as insidious, if not more in my book.
I don't see Facebook openly admitting to their users that every single bit of their and their loved one's lives will be exploited to the max to allow thirds parties to influence their opinions based on the wishes of the highest bidder.
I don't see them warning their users that right now they are (maybe) not being profiled by governments for thought crimes, but the data is all there, so if in 10, 20 or 50 years time the government changes, this is a definite and very real risk.
Again, let me make that clear: I'm not arguing that every company in the tech industry is staffed by angels, but that intentional bad actors in tech are the exception, not the norm.
> Borderline illegal tax-dodging by large tech companies is business as usual
And I haven't said it wasn't, I've merely compared it with what the largest banks have been involved recently. I don't know if it got worldwide coverage - this is what I was referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
> I don't see them warning their users that right now they are (maybe) not being profiled by governments for thought crimes, but the data is all there, so if in 10, 20 or 50 years time the government changes, this is a definite and very real risk.
And I'd love for them to be legally required to explain privacy considerations to their users in such a way that informed consent can be given. Again: I'm not "pro big tech", I'm saying that big tech still has some room if they want to rub shoulders with big finance when it comes to amoral business practices. Big tech operates in a grey area, big finance hasn't seen anything but #000 in decades.
Just to be completely clear, are you arguing that the opposite is true in finance - i.e., that the norm is to be intentionally malicious?
This doesn't go for day to day interactions between you and a bank clerk, but rather for product development, sales etc. Fortunately, the industry is much more heavily regulated that the tech industry.
We routinely have clients ask for more tracking data on users and we explain/teach why it is a bad idea. In some way these FB stories help me, because I can point to these articles and ask 'do you want to end up associated with this?'
It's also why manufactured scarcity (especially in housing) enables people who wish to apply engineering effort in unethical ways.
If 10 engineers are bidding on 5 houses, the 5 highest-paid ones will get it. Any pay raise they get will get dumped in to their house - give them all 100k raises and the house will go up by whatever another 100k a year in mortgage payments gets you (I simplify, but not that much)
Not only that, those 5 highly-paid engineers who got the houses have every incentive to make it illegal to build more.
It's hard to stick to your principles when it means getting kicked out of your home, pulling your kids out of school, your spouse having to move away from their job, etc.
It's not just housing, of course, it's a huge part of it. The engineer with a $750 a month mortgage will have a MUCH easier time saying "fuck off this is evil" than one with a $7500 a month mortgage.
Most of this is, as you've correctly spelled out, just due to perverse incentives, and there's not really any intentional malfeasance. The REAL problems start when you get a neurotic psychopath with a modicum of power, and an agenda to climb the ladder, who pushes through ideas they KNOW are bad for the company, as a whole, in the long run, but do so anyway because they know it will help their career in the short run. I've been powerless to try to stop this from happening at two Fortune 250's.
I would argue that the people at the top making these decisions are not ignorant about what is going on.
It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions.
Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess.
I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management.
Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders.
It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see.
Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems!
Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure.
There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical.
If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that.
I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.
You can't? We'll help you!
You don't know how to? We'll teach you!
You don't want to? We'll force you!
I guess these companies work pretty much like totalitarian regimes but at least you can quit without being shot.
Probably all approaches are needed.
I'm simply stating, that if no one is on the inside, then we're missing out on a possible interaction channel that could help changing FB.
Simply trying to get in to be on the inside - without lying, is better than not even trying.
Of course, trying to advocate for better political control (privacy, transparency, lower barriers to enter the market) is important, and can and should be done while trying to engage with FB, trying to get close to their internal decision making process.
And, naturally, not everyone has the affinity to work at FB, but since it's a spectrum, likely there are a lot of software engineers that do have some ethical concern with regards to what and how FB does, and they shouldn't be discouraged from working at FB, but they should be very much empowered to be able to stand up and leave when their moral compass signals.
With all the shit being fired at Facebook from all directions these days, I just want to see the faces and reactions of those who thought "Yep, that's a good idea!" when this concept was originally brought up. It's really stretching my curiosity and imagination to the point where I start wondering what type of people they are hiring at Facebook these days.
Is there a name for this phenomenal in psychology where one would insist on doing the exact same things other people are criticizing them, but with an increasingly higher intensity the more they get criticized for it? This is exactly what it is.
LI are awful for many reasons, but they do honour these things.
Pretty quickly, people learn to keep their mouth shut.
Also, many, many FB engineers are early-career folk who are fresh out of school. More senior folk are few and far between and are even more strongly incentivized to keep their mouth shut, because their bonuses are bigger.
I guess this is what happens when a startup gets big. They keep all the toxic baggage of startup culture (edit: "move fast and break things") while gaining the impact on people's lives that big companies have.
I think Apple is the only one of the FAANG that's jettisoned startup culture, and I think that's why they're doing so incredibly well.
https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2017/11/08/new...
Let's not underestimate the power of precedents: someone else said it was crazy at ANOTHER COMPANY, didn't get their idea through, and now other companies are copying it.
Additionally, a lot of people in the comments mentioned how engineers are ignored. Being able to convince your peers (like a product manager) of something is a skill, one that is fairly uncommon among "top tech talent", but happens to be a minimum requirement for roles like PMs. Saying "We can't do that, it's crazy!" and expecting everyone to just agree with you because you're awesome at coding just isn't going to cut it. Yeah, maybe the PM should have realized it was insane on their own. But let's consider that given hundreds or thousands of people in a company, crazy ideas might get deflected thousands of times, but it only take one "failure" for it to slip in.
I have never had a higher level person worrying at all about security except as a nuisance when prodded.
Maybe they hired someone who worked at border controls?