Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

Is his suicide linked to some kind of maltreatment of Chinese employees at Facebook? The article doesn't make that clear.

View on HN

Not mistreat Chinese employee per say. The individual is operating under big stress, and the manager is deliberately playing politics to prevent him switching teams, threatening to put his job at jeperody.

I don't feel like this is engineered to target Chinese. But if all proven, Facebook's internal culture seems fucked up...Maybe that is why it doesn't want even its employees to talk about it.

That's usually SOP at companies which have suicides. Suicidal ideation is contagious. They'll bring in a grief counselor, and encourage you to talk to them, instead.

Well, yes and no

Suicide is one thing. But Facebook's refusal to change anything as regarding to the cause of this employee's passing is jarring, for stuff like fire fast, highly stressful Sev meeting and etc, and super high peer pressure.

Even Amazon does change its way of handling internal transfer after employee's attempted suicide.

Not to mention there are Facebook employees defending on other places, claiming this is nothing burger, because Facebook's suicide rate is below national average, which ironically signals the issue is indeed internal and not normal.

Comparing against the national average seems like BS anyway. The suicide rate of employees in any given company should be compared to suicide rates of other populations of people with comparable incomes, opportunities, etc. For instance, how does the suicide rate in Facebook compare to Google? Or how does the suicide rate in one Facebook department compare to another?

> "Suicidal ideation is contagious"

That seems true. There were some studies done back in the 70s that found a correlation between fatal plane/car crashes and news reports of suicide, as well as a correlation between multiple fatality crashes and news reports of murder-suicides. The implication here being that many small plane and car crashes are actually suicides with plausible deniability.

Of course, taking this to it's logical conclusion, this story should be flagged off the front page since it broaches the topic of suicide and therefore might induce more suicides. (However I think the social value in discussing these matters openly outweighs that risk.)

PingWest seems to be targeting the intersection of China and tech news, so emphasizing the nationality shows that the topic is relevant to their audience. Additionally, they mention that working under OPT or an H-1B visa increases the pressure, so Chinese expats are more likely to be stressed.

Less for being Chinese and more for being an employee on a visa, which leaves them with fewer options.

agree, more correct article title seems to me to be:

"When Employees Ask for Justice, Facebook Silence Their Voices, here's an example featuring some Chinese people"

There's no formal media report on this, the stories that hit Chinese internet headlines are anecdotal and seem quite sensationalized.

The stories alledge that he argued with his Indian boss (which commonly features in all kinds of Chinese stories about Sillicon Valley tech companies), was denied request to change group, an emergency project was assigned to him, attempts to extend the dealine failed, the fear of being fired and family visas revoked drove him to that tragedy.

The story went viral in China, played on his past of being local National Exam champion from modest upbringing, and the popular notion of Chinese being coolies in SV and widely discriminated in the US.

It looks like you've been using Hacker News exclusively for political battle. That's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We ban accounts that do it, regardless of their politics, because that way of using the site destroys the intellectual curiosity that it exists for. Some political overlap is of course inevitable—see the links below for explanation—but accounts whose purpose is to prosecute an agenda rather than meander curiously are not in the spirit of this site and in fact are destructive to that spirit.

Since this is a single-purpose account, I've banned it. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban anyone who wants to use HN as intended in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013092

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Edit: just to be clear, I don't think you were posting in bad faith. The issues are important and I'm guessing you have deep personal knowledge of them. But we simply can't have people using HN as a political platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com