"Chief of Advertising Integrity" does anyone take that title seriously? Forget advertising, Facebook and it's CEO himself has no integrity.
That resonated for me because I've seen that happen in software, that classic pattern where cowboy coders ship garbage to QA. The lowest bug rates I've seen are where everybody cares about quality.
With Facebook, I expect that "Chief of Advertising Integrity" is sort of light a lightning rod. The job is not to solve the problem, it's to take the hits.
For your QA team example, the mistake made in some organizations is explicitly removing testing from developer's responsibilities.
It's a matter of BOTH/AND -- you need to have BOTH central teams responsible for long term health of {safety,privacy,security,testing,etc.} AND hold developers responsible to deliver the recommendations of and use the tools developed by central teams.
In games, when QA reports into the same person managing the product, things run smoothly and everyone remains aligned towards shipping a good product. When it's a separate org that loans people out and has OKRs that don't connect to individual products, they become horrible trolls who are only out to fuck the product up by submitting so many bug reports that it can never be released. Sim with whole-company legal teams ("never ship anything, we might get sued") and shared security ("never run services or we might get hacked") and ops ("never use servers or they might crash"). Alignment is everything.
In about two weeks of putting engineers on call for their own services, most of the major problems were fixed.
It's easy to write buggy software when you aren't the one who gets called at 2am to fix it. Once you start being responsible for your software, the urge to take shortcuts really evaporates. On the other hand, a team that is not responsible for their output will always cut corners - it's just the way it goes.
> half at work on their time off
i mean not constantly. Also if you're on call, you're always paid for doing so regardless of what happens. This talk isn't about compensation, but about the model of work.
On the flip side, I get nervous when I hear something akin to "We don't have QA here", sometimes as a matter of pride. Think of those times when you've heard someone snear at "Safety First", but for QA or testing.
Perhaps one ideal would be to promote a "everyone cares about quality" environment whilst still having some people focused specifically on QA.
For example, it avoids them actively having to say they have a “fake accounts team” (which would in turn indicate they have a fake accounts problem). Instead it’s part of the “Community Integrity team”.
Teams have absolutely been identified by specific problem areas, so your reasoning doesn’t hold up. For example, “FNRP” stands for Fake, Not Real Person (which distinguishes from celebrity impersonation etc) per https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/revealed-facebo...
At this point, its research is nearly 40 years out of date. Is it still worth reading? And are there more up-to-date versions?
I recommend this book to everyone with a white-collar job. It's an incredible read. The research is a bit out of date, but the truths still hold. If anything, the age of the research is somewhat helpful. The phenomena these days are more subtle, and many of us work in companies with flatter hierarchies than the 25+ level pyramids the author studied. So the distance in time forces you to reflect on what has changed and whether the results are relevant to you.
You will recognize so many of the situations as reminiscent of things you have experienced and haven't been able to put into words. It is 100% worth the read.
"Advertising" for example could mean the benign "show me a picture of some product" or it could mean "identify who I am, how I behave, where I work, how much I make, who I know, and maintain and share a dossier on all of it"
But if parent is correct, the role is to enforce things users want (regarding spam/fraud/illegal goods), which matches standard notions of integrity, so it’s not doublespeak.
Gotta love these headlines /s
So it takes a lot to make me think something is worse and meaner to consumers than Amazon. But sure enough, Facebook is it. Their ads are about 60% complete scams, from what I can tell. I get all these ads for $200 Lego sets for $30! And there are hundreds of comments from people who have bought. Guarantee they all got 1 Lego brick in the mail 8 weeks later, and the site that sold it to them is gone.
This would be bad if it was an occasional thing, but most Facebook ads I see are EXACTLY like this. Bait and switch. They send you a thing so you can't claim they didn't send you anything, but Facebook is making bank off of these dishonest scammers and seems not only not to care, but to encourage it. Oh and the thing they send you is from China, so sending it back costs more than you spent.
Illegally using Facebook log data to breach the accounts of journalists who he did not like.
[0] https://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-us...
Something I’ve learned by observing judgments people around me make about others is that I’d rarely deserve or want to be judged the same way, and that the people making judgments would typically feel the same. If I were Mark being judged by messages sent online as a teenager/young adult, I don’t think I’d feel like it was rational or kind, and more opportunistic rather than necessary, productive, or helpful at all.
Having said that, evaluating him by more recent information doesn’t make me feel great about him by any means. I’m not defending him. I just don’t believe the messages are very useful information anymore - even if at the time they were perhaps an indicator of what’s to come. It’s probably more useful to look to current events to understand who he is in the present.
I see these messages passed around and referenced often and frankly it has begun to appear like a crutch for trashing the guy. Given his position in society and the amount of information available, we should all be able to collect and reference more recent and relevant information.
(hopefully)
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/6/17203114/facebook-mark-zuc...
Isn't that normal? There's a reason so many buildings have a person's name on them. Carnegie Hall, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Guggenheim Museum, The Getty, The DeYoung, Coit Tower, ...
AFAIK Half the buildings on any college campus are named after the donor that paid for it.
You want hospitals, how about the Huntington Hospital, Sutter Hospital, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, Helen Diller Medical Center, I'm too lazy to go look up more
Yes, that's just one of your points but if you're reaching that deep to find fault it detracts from your other points as it makes them suspect.
Maybe you and I and countless of other people chip in some money at the end of the year. (in fact in proportion to our income we donate more), and I don't see ordinary people forming a union to name a hospital, we just click the donate button and go on with our lives. Like Chuck Feeney btw, to name one very wealthy person that is way less vain.
It’s something I’ve witnessed a lot of successful people doing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
There are so many problems surrounding Facebook and its CEO Zuckerberg that it's pretty difficult to choose one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgbIiQSzEk
That's the peak of cynicism that could only compare to politicians like Putin.
Since FB A/B tested the effect of both and let academics analyze the data, that somehow means they are demonic.
The joy of my life was seeing Zuckerberg getting absolutely owned on his own Facebook page by thousands and thousands of Indian people who wanted nothing to do with his money-grubbing initiatives.
1 The story of the Onavo founder they took on after the Onavo purchase was one example.
I'm sure you can think of a few other for-profit businesses that do what they say and say what they do.
Making devices that are helpful and not lethal is motivational and fulfilling for employees, and great PR.
Disclosure: I worked at such a company, and have much respect for the care and capability of almost everyone I knew.