The idea of doing a public campaign over this is so myopic that I cannot fathom the thinking about it. Who’s going to rally for Facebook? Did they really expected Apple to change this?
The ad should scare investors much more than Apple’s move.
The ad should scare investors much more than Apple’s move.
He will be excellent no matter where he is because he is given essentially free reign to work on what he enjoys the most.
And if that changes it will be unlikely to be the company that did it, since a person in his position would just move to another company and re-acquire free reign.
Sure, they do bad moves there as well, but oculus is where it is purely because Facebook decided to burn billions of dollars there.
I think they know they need to use money to overcome their reputation.
Maybe it's because I don't live in an SV or other techie bubble that I see this, that I give more credit to the average person. Because I'm not stuck I'm an echo chamber of "general public are naive and don't care". They do care, they are more aware of some of these issues than you think. Assuming the only people who care or think about these issues are techies is an extremely condescending & patronizing view towards the average person.
Perhaps it helps broaden my view that live in a densely populated but not very techie/tech-company area and I have a large social circle of non techies. It shows me that your so-called bubble where hn/sv/techies make sweeping generalizations about the average person is often based in stereotypical fiction instead of reality. My age 65+ parents and in-laws couldn't tell you the difference between tcp & udp, setup a WiFi router, or understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database or know what Full Stack means. But they have opinions on Facebook, and they aren't good. My few dozen coworkers of all ages are the same.
Your own self-satisfied bubble of congratulatory "we techies are special and have a special perspective" bubble is blinding you. Ask anyone with a moderate interest in politics how they feel about facebook and the answer is mostly going to be "not great".
Most don't care enough to quit facebook, but as per the point of my original comment, facebook isn't going to have any sort of easy time whipping up public support against Apple for privacy issues they mostly don't care about one way or another.
They also have some amount of good they do.
Despite Facebooks evil, there is good that comes out of it.
Also, OSS tech that's in service to ad tech may still not be enticing. Even if it's not directly used for ad tech, everything you would do for facebook would ultimately be for the purpose of ad tech. Rationalizing that your particular work has non ad-tech related applications seems like just that: a rationalization. Other companies offer OSS work opportunities, as well as the opportunity to carve out, say, 5-10 hours a month to the project of your choice regardless of your day job.
I'm not coming down on one side or the other of such a moral choice. I don't think things are that simple. I think it's a spectrum, and people should weight these things when making a decision, if they have the luxury of doing so.
And I have to say, at this point ad tech is probably only one of a few major problems with Facebook content. News feeds, memes, etc. that are rewarded with shared & likes for being the most inflammatory/emotionally manipulative are at this point at least as bad as micro-targeting of ads, and I personally think are much much worse.
FB recruiters are super aggressive and I have zero qualms unloading on them for their BS behavior, every. time. I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages. The first two "buzz-off" messages were polite, but now I'm just downright rude and respond with my actual opinion on their employer (and subsequently what I think about them working for that employer).
Facebook is a bad company that does bad things. If you work there, you're gross.
This is like complaining to the person who called you about your vehicle warranty or any other spam auto-dialer. Recruiting is a numbers game so sending you an email with thousands of others requires no effort on their part.
Sorry, not changing my opinion here.
I think that's a touch harsh. What if you just make sandwiches in a canteen?
FTR, I do think that's a bit unfair. Judging other peoples' circumstances is a perilous pursuit.
But I will say FB is parasitic on and dangerous to society and is run by amoral shitbags, I don't believe anyone with a sense of ethics or self-respect should work there.
Likewise it just seems so selfish to talk like this during a pandemic situation where so many people (including people in tech) are out of a job.
Recruiters offer phone calls not jobs. You still have to grind to pass the interviews.
This is not entirely true. I have seen excellent people go to Facebook because they gave out the highest offers. Now whether they get people with good ideas is something I don't know.
So you name an amount and either take you or not?
Since you are on the outside now, do you still agree with their mission and tactics or do you see them on a path towards 'user-engagement metrics over everything' ending in destruction.
HR industry would like you to believe that, but it's an intentional bastardization of the original research by Kahneman and Deaton (1), twisting their words to fit their cost cutting agenda. The original finding states that past a rather high threshold (~$75k), additional raise alone is an insufficient motivator. Below that threshold, money alone works just fine as a motivator. Above that threshold, pay hike still enhances other motivators.
In Bay Area, I agree that ethical concerns likely dwarf money. $120k/year in Europe would let them scrape the creme de la creme, despite near universal dislike among tech-crowd.
(1) https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.abs...
I know tens of people from my past who currently work in Facebook. When I knew then, they were all decent people with long careers in the tech industry. Yet, they chose to work for FB.
A fresh grad son of my ex-Boss is starting his career with FB.
Unfortunately FB's brand is not as tainted, yet, as it should be or as some of us in the HN echo-chamber like to believe.
> Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company
> How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?
> Although we all subconsciously look for signal on integrity in interviews, should we consider whether this needs to be formalized in the interview process?
> This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-le...
Oh the irony.
It is to show a credible commitment to Apple's other adversaries, in an attempt to rally enough power to take them down a peg and (more importantly) win some control over the Iphone platform.
If Facebook had a continuous, long term, PR campaign, where they reasonably established themselves as helping small businesses, and then they did this. I would get it.
But like this? In isolation, it feels more like a knee jerk reaction and not a thought out messaging campaign.
My guess is that the root cause is one of internal perception vs external perception. They see the threat and honestly believe they're in the right. That's how they rationalize it, but the rest of the world assumes more nefarious intent (which is also exaggerated, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle).
And I'm not sure what unfair 'nefarious intent' people are assigning - FB have made it clear that one of their goals is reducing Apple's control over their own platform.
This campaign seems very unlikely it will change public opinion or make Apple change their position.
Perhaps the campaign helps to build a position in terms anti-trust legal proceedings? As the least vertically integrated of the big tech companies, it helps build a case that they are the victim, not the perpetrator - Apple is using its market power to shut them out.
Facebook’s argument is “but it isn’t in our customer’s interests”, and they may add “if Apple adds such a feature, it should be opt-out”.
That first argument doesn’t have any value. Why would any third party have to accommodate Facebook’s advertising business? The second one is extremely weak, as ‘the world’ is moving towards, or already arrived at “opt-in is the only good choice”.
They also publicly stated that Apple’s opt-in doesn’t apply to Apple’s own adverts. _If_ that’s correct, they have a good point, but I think that’s a very, very big _if_.