Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

I still haven't fully grasped that we reached this point of perversiveness online. We have brilliant minds and a ridiculous amount of money working on making Alabama's soccer moms click more ads, and we have reached the point of making people addicted to websites to reach that goal.

Obviously this is nothing new, and the cigarette industry has been profitting off addiction for decades, but I never expected the same thing (except the very immediate threat of lung cancer) to happen to tools that could have been optimized for so much good instead.

And the worst part is that some of it is just so incompetent. I've been trying to break away from Facebook for a while, and recently (the past year or so) I started realizing that my Facebook feed always shows me the exact same posts in the exact same order for days, to the point where I know exactly what post will be first when I open the website. Where is all the Facebook money going? What are these people working on? What are they doing?

Fixing bullshit left by others, refactoring parts of the machine, copying other apps, working on pointless panels and ideas that will be killed in a hot minute or forgotten about, working on internal tools or mostly - fighting internal political battles to get a promotion/more money/authority/status. Most of the people are not there to innovate but to earn money and status for themselves by working at the big F***K

You sound like you're speaking from experience, so I wanna ask: How genuinely true do you think this is? I'm always curious, about the FAANGs in general but Facebook in particular.

Divorced from as much cynicism as possible, what % of level I-III software employees are just there for their resumes?

From Amazon, and according to my extensive experience with the other FANG in Blind, I would very seriously say 90% are there simply for resume and money.

I don’t feel like Blind is a good source. Selection bias at play. Especially with disgruntled employees or the ones who only care about optimizing earnings.

In software? I'd say about 50-60 in S1 and going down to like 30-40 in S3, but a high percentage none the less.

Outside of software, you will probably get to 70+%.

It's not just a facebook problem, its a problem of a lot of large orgs with large salaries and "prestige" associated. People get in just to use it as a "platform" to launch their career, they bring their status and political games with them, read books such as "How to win fake political friends and push your influence to others" and then implement them. They lack real visions, ideas or venues of productivity, so they delegate and communicate and call meetings and push ideas and agendas that only serve to give them the "upper hand" when its promotion time.

Just check out Facebooks internal network, where you gotta play nice and play politics or you will be look down on as "not having community spirit".

Every idea is vulnerable to the monster understatedly known as "business rules." If you want to change how these companies operate, how they treat users, or, really, how the company makes money in a user-driven economy, you have to be able to affect "business rules."

> Every idea is vulnerable to the monster understatedly known as "business rules."

Cool take

Reply on news.ycombinator.com