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Comment by rbg246 | Hacker News Reader

So you are saying..

A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'

Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here

Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.

Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.

And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?

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Developer: Damn camera takes almost half a second to start!

Tech lead: Can we just leave it on or pre-start it somehow?

Developer: But...

Tech lead: I will think of something.

Tech lead to management: We made camera start 150% faster!

Management: Wow wow wow. It is so great to have such an experienced tech lead we pay so much for.

Tech lead drives into the sunset with his brand new Tesla.

You forgot the part where Tech Lead creates a YouTube channel. His Tesla is featured prominently.

"How I made the camera 200ms faster (as a millionaire)"

Hey guys it's Ex-Google, Ex-Facebook, Ex-Tesla Tech Lead

I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

+1 for realistic dialogue

As realistic as this is, it seems like contempt for mediocrity

This is so true that at other companies it often takes a lawyer (in-house counsel) reminding product that something is legally precarious to stop it, and they still push.

For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.

That’s how the explicit narrative goes.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.

Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open. That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous image/video capture.

People will care a lot when news gets out that they were spying on a 13-year-old (or whatever) girl.

This is why Facebook's culture is the real problem, and it won't be fixed no matter how many "independent" oversight boards they produce.

>So you are saying..

If I had to bet my own money on what really happened, I'd guess that it's something along these lines:

DEVELOPER: Camera initialization is adding 200ms to app startup

TECH LEAD: Holy crap! We need total startup to be less than 500ms or users start to think things are slow

DEVELOPER: What if we initialize the camera early?

TECH LEAD: Can you do that without recording? It would be very bad if we were recording things.

DEVELOPER: Yes.

TECH LEAD: Do it.

Conspiracy ensues.

> Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.

Absolutely agree, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think about it or didn't care.

If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.

2020? I was thinking 1980. To my memory, it seems to have started with the Savings and Loan scandals, and gotten worse.

Companies went from optimizing for 100-year growth to optimizing for the next three months.

Is it Facebook's fault that the OS had a bug that triggers the camera notification when the camera is in standby mode?

There's no reputational damage because the world is already split between people who think FB is the devil and people who don't care.

Worth noting this split is like 3 / 97.

I like how it’s people who think Facebook and people who don’t care. Where are the pro Facebook evangelists these days?

same place were pro-reality people are. there isn't anything to be for. it just is.

Considering how many $Billions Facebook has, they can pay me if they want me to speak up for them.

You forgot a third kind: FB employees.

No, I would put them squarely in the Don't Care group because they cannot possibly be in a Don't Know group.

Long back there was similar bug in iOS camera itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2413926

The problem is I can see exactly that happening.

Since net zero people are going to stop using Instagram from this coming out... Yes.

This is very well put

Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company

The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks

He wrote this in college

He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'

Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company

And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)

Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected

So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections

No, he's saying that API usage is not obvious, things are complicated and not obvious and that mistakes happen.

I don't believe for one second that FB is going to be purposefully taking 'illegal videos' of people.

Nor do I believe Facebook is even evil. It's just a social network, end of story.

Amoral does no less harm overall than evil, it's just done to 'the masses', not particular targets.

No one at Facebook gets to claim they were just following orders if they have _any_ understanding of the possible consequences of their work.

(If you believe the authors/operators that specifically maximize profits over responsibility are not responsible for their outcomes, you should read back into the posting about PG&E in CA: deliberately ignoring the wear & tear on 100 year old support hooks on high-tension power lines, thus sparking the fire that burned down Paradise, CA.)

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