Comment by citrablue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citrablue | Hacker News Reader

This article appears to have some fundamental misunderstandings. Their description of the review system is not stack ranking, in which employees are ranked in a hierarchy and the lowest on the totem are fired. Instead, the "meets/exceeds" scale has been pretty standard wherever I've worked.

Further, it seems that FB HR asked the source of this article to not speak to the press about an internal event that involved a very sensitive issue. Yet, the journalist repeatedly states that Mr. Yin was asked to speak with nobody about the issue. It looks like he ignored the advice, and became a very visible interviewee, even appearing on public news. He told his manager after the interviews - what was he thinking? It's pretty obvious that FB doesn't want it's employees speaking to the press.

This article's inaccuracies in an attempt to spin a tragedy into some sort of Facebook conspiracy reinforces the correctness of the company's "do not speak to the press" attitude.

Not just the press, the source was also asked not to talk about it internally

> Based on the information provided by multiple sources, PingWest also discovered that Facebook is actively attempting to block internal discussions of Mr. Chen's death. Employees were discouraged to talk about the incident, verbally and in written form, with other employees

That’s not true. (I work there.)

a meets/exceeds scale becomes stack ranking when the proportion of different ranks is capped so that even if everybody on a team did well, some would have to be given the lowest ranking

Yep, if under some level (ie everyone under a VP with 50-300 engineers) basically every division needs to hit 5/30/30/30/5 then you do indeed have a stack ranking, just under a different name.

The main difference is that being in that bottom 30 is usually not “bad” under that system, ie it will have maybe a 0.8-0.9x expected bonus multiplier. Whereas under most stack ranking systems that call themselves as such, a D grade might mean that if you get another D you’ll be in hot water

“Meets most” is just the politically correct version of PIP or “you should look for other jobs now”

that's "meets some". Meets most means you have 1 or 2 secondary axes you need to fix

Do you have reason to believe this happens?

Why should you take the companies advice to stay quiet when you believe they're the ones who were at fault?

You don't have to follow company rules - but again, company can terminate you with or without reason. In this particular case, Yi was fired because he's "lack of judgement", after Yi spoke to the press without formal approval and acknowledging he works for Facebook and refused to agree to the gap order warning.

Regardless, whether FB is hiding anything, speaking in front of the media representing the company without proper authorization is a common sense taboo. Yi should have know that better during first month of new employee training bootcamp. Also, this is not a of case of whistleblowing as Yi was simply protesting, he neither knew first hand nor had any evidence of FB wrongdoing. Having a gag order in place is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing(FB has had enough negative news lately already and any more of it will affect their bottomline), although lots of time it is, but we simply don't know.

Exactly. We wouldn't expect silence from a factory worker who saw working conditions contribute to the death of a coworker, so why should we expect it from a tech worker who witnesses the same?

Facebook trying to suppress this worker's voice is morally abhorrent.

Part of the problem is a lot of internal conversation about suicide can actually trigger surviving people with suicidal tendencies. It’s a pragmatic recommendation supported by the medical community to limit communication related to a suicide; it’s not just a PR move.

It’s called suicidal contagion: https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...

I agree that's a problem, I mention that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227195

However I think we need to weight that risk with the risk that future suicides will occur for the same reason as the first, not inspired by the first, if the circumstances that lead to the first suicide are left unresolved. Addressing those circumstances means having an honest discussion about what happened, which can only happen if people are allowed to talk about it.

(Obviously glorification/etc of the suicide should be strictly off limits. There need to be guardrails on the discussion to mitigate risk.)

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