Ask HN: Will Facebook be a badge of shame on a resume? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will Facebook be a badge of shame on a resume?

42 pointstimmytokyo37 comments

As more people become aware of Facebook's deleterious effects on society, will having Facebook on your resume be seen as a liability? Is it already a liability? It's certainly happened to ethically challenged companies before. Former employees of Enron, for example, found it difficult to get work after Enron imploded. Similar reputational damage greeted employees of Arthur Andersen.

I'd love to hear from anyone involved in the hiring process at their organization.

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It's amazing the level of scrutiny this social media company gets.

Sure, social media has created new issues. Let's say you don't buy into "the doing something for the first time in history and not getting it right all the time" narrative and you take a "this is all deliberate" bent.

1. Oil and coal companies literally kill thousands of people every year and destroy the planet we need to live. Indisputable evidence of coverups etc.

2. News Corp deliberately spreads misinformation for Murdoch (a large part of Facebook's claimed evil is that they spread news corp)

3. Name a war crime without a major government feeding arms to both sides. In how many of these cases is it your government?

Seems like people don't like getting fed a real reflection of the people, corporations and society around them, more than the crimes against humanity (often literally) themselves.

> Oil and coal companies literally kill thousands of people every year and destroy the planet we need to live.

Facebook has been used to incite genocide: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

and enabling the spread of anti-anti-COVID stuff likely has a decently large body count, as well.

Is that a problem with Facebook or Facebook’s users?

That's a false dichotomy.

Why does it have to be one or the other? It’s both. We are all human and flawed in some way. So, naturally, those flaws will be exposed or even exploited in a platform like Facebook.

The difference between humans pre and post social media is that the we have a platform now that amplifies many voices.

We also treat it as a news source - and as we know, bad news has always outsold light fluffy good news when it comes to competing for our attention.

Couple that with the issue that engagement (comments, likes, shares) increase how visible a post is and you get the recipe for how to rapidly help polarize a society.

This is of course to say that we were already polarized and already arguing with each other, but now we can do it with more reach and with a louder voice.

I suspect it's because Political power is just not easily quantifiable except when it's deaths, and then it's easy to lose perspective in both directions because we typically have less of an anchoring experience, and the brain shuts down.

By contrast you know how much you make and your circle makes and you can easily imagine (rightly or wrongly) what you would do with 10x, 100x, 10,000x, or 100,000x as much, and then it's X person/org is not doing Y good thing that I imagine myself to do, and probably also doing all the Z things that I won't admit I would do. It's easy to make big companies and rich people to be their worst while also totally ignoring that jfk raped his intern, for example.

Not in the eyes of a reasonable employer (with the exception of maybe a handful of titles).

Facebook's net effect on society is very complex and any employer who would throw out your CV for having worked in a competitive, controversial and (probably) challenging work environment isn't worth caring about anyway. Let it come up and speak honestly.

Employer might fit your definition of “reasonable” but a couple of individuals (or even a single person) could easily keep ex-FB employees from getting through the gates.

Nothing unique about Facebook here. "ex-FB employees" could be replaced with a different company, gender, race, political orientation, religion, etc. Still not a reason for someone to assume taking a role at Facebook is a bad move for them.

Facebook is hated among a loud minority.

Most people don't much care, and even among those, unless you're a decisionmaker with questionable record, I wouldn't worry.

I've also never before heard that rank and file Enron or AA employees suffered such reputational damage.

As the kids say: LOL. While the pundits here and elsewhere on social media may rant about Facebook being evil, Google being evil, Amazon being evil, etc., they have little to do with the real world. I mean, IBM was the hated monopolist of the '70s-'90s and Microsoft was one of the most loathed software companies in the technology industry in the '00s and there isn't any significant prejudice against their former employees.

Yes, there are many bad things one could say about Facebook but I think the relevant sentiment here is "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." How many employers are there that are above any kind of criticism? In most employment searches, hiring teams will be interested in how you worked as part of a team, not in pessimistic interpretations of your employer's ethics.

Here's what I would do if someone who previously worked at FB applied to my company.

It depends on what you did at FB. If you were simply a programmer or techie, working on DBs or frontend development, or whatever, it's completely okay. It's completely okay if you were in a management position overlooking technical stuff like this too.

If you were a techie who worked on features that are questionable (eg, tracking users accross sites, shadow profiles, collecting data without consent, etc), I will possibly still hire you, but I will ask you how you felt working on those features.

Simply because I would not feel comfortable with someone working in my company who had no doubts and was completely willing to work on stuff like that. Personal preference. Ethics and morals are important to me.

If you were in a management position, and were in charge of unethical features and privacy-invading practices such as the ones mentioned above, I would not hire you.

Not overall. Sure, some employers might make the assumption that every single employee at Facebook bears responsibility for every single thing Facebook did, none were neutral let alone tried to improve things while there, etc. Most will reject that idea, or the idea that personal morality should be injected into the hiring process. Even among those who subscribe to it, that is likely to be outweighed by the fact that Facebook engineers have experience dealing with a scale and complexity few other employers can match. Facebook engineering has a pretty good reputation (whether one believes it's deserved or not) independent of Facebook as a commercial/political entity. Sorry, but Facebook experience will continue to be an asset on a resume.

Disclaimer: ex-Facebook myself, but I'm out of the game now so I don't really have a stake any more.

Yes, or at least I hope people will believe that. It’s dangerous to have people believe they can work for an organization and not be responsible, to some degree,for its actions.

Are employees at McDonald’s responsible for obesity? Are car salesmen responsible for pollution? It sounds like you think yes and I just want to make sure.

If your job is to sell unhealthy food you should recognize that you contribute to a less healthy community. Picking one negative or positive externality misses the point though. People should feel responsible for their actions.

Working at McDonalds does not make you responsible for obesity, no.

It does make you responsible for being the kind of person who works at McDonalds, though.

Same goes for Facebook.

I think one of the issues ex-FBers may have is the inflated expectations of total compensation. FB is a place where you get excessive comp relative to the rest of the industry. A hiring manager needs to consider that when reviewing resumes.

I get the argument here but. If we look at stock price as a proxy for forward and future expectations relative to its monetary impact to society. Then I’d say it’s way too soon to be talking about Enron and Facebook in the same sentence.

User growth continues to be strong. Ad business is unchanged even with the boycott. Investor and institutional dollars still flowing in (you can’t just blame Robinhood investors here)

Where is this acting like Enron materially?

No, unless you're a senior figure who's name will be published there is no reason why any employer would care. If you have the skills why would they?

No. At my org, I look at technical resumes and I'm directed to pass people I believe could pass a technical interview (among a few other factors). Greater scrutiny will be applied later in the process. I know that people who have worked at facebook can pass a technical interview so it's easy to pass them onto the next round.

No, next.

No, especially if you work on one of the many integrity teams internally trying to make it better.

Just like Wernher von Braun wasn't allowed to work on anything after he left Germany.

No, in the same sense that working for the military tends not to.

As more people become aware of Facebook's deleterious effects on society, will having Facebook's ReactJS in your application be seen as a liability?

Before React moved to an MIT license (forgot what they were previously) there was absolutely talk about companies moving away from React. Wanna say this was maybe late 2015/2016. I remember Wordpress (company may be wrong) was about to start moving everything away from react in a week. It was huge news in the Frontend world.

We ended up not going the React route, but I literally ran the reasons why it could be problematic by a boss who is a licensed attorney, and he had no concerns. In situations where the rubber hits the road, the opinions expressed on message boards and in worker bee communities aren't necessarily reflective of the decision makers' opinions.

I have disdain for Facebook as a company _but_ I am hiring a data scientist now (NLP focus, if you're interested/know someone) and would gladly hire someone from FB.

I've already interviewed someone who worked at FB and it was definitely a subject I would touch on in the process - their thoughts on working there, why they joined and left/were leaving, etc.

Their product is destructive but their engineering is great. If I were hiring an ethicist, on the other hand...

No.

Mostly because people are in so much demand, and the average IC really does not have the ability to change the organization.

Depends on the year. Working at Facebook post-2010 is a strong negative signal for me.

If anything Facebook is a positive given most of their engineers are highly qualified.

edit: to the people downvoting me, I can tell you for certain that having facebook on your resume as a software engineer gets you interviews

Everyone has made some mistakes in the past.

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