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Comment by Orangeair | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at a different FAANG (and more recently than 2010), I'm kind of on Mark's side with this one. It got to the point where I worked that anything that executives said would be leaked pretty much immediately, so we hardly ever got any information ahead of when the general public did. From what people with longer tenures said, there used to be more information shared with the company at large, but they had to curtail it due to the constant leaks.

Obviously I don't mind people leaking things that are cause for serious concern (i.e. whistleblowers), but yeah it results in kind of a crappy company culture when the people setting the direction for the company are afraid to share their plans with the people actually doing the work. Maybe that's just inevitable for a company with a hundred thousand employees, though.

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Leaks happen because the personnel conveying the information believe it to be an indication of bad intent. This means that ill intent on the part of leadership was assumed.

An atmosphere of lack of trust is built. It can be through neglect, or through evidence, but it doesn't occur spontaneously. It is a failure of upper management.

Sure, but also could be a human nature desire to spread news. Knowledge is power after all. Furthermore, upper management trusting important news to employees isn't a failure of upper management, but rather, placing trust in employees.

This isn't about a whistleblower exposing something bad. This is about someone going to the press about a (fake) upcoming product.

Don't be naive. You don't leak a fake story to the press because of a lack of trust (???). You do it because you like gossiping. In this case, management would be right to not trust the leakers.

> It is a failure of upper management.

This is such a bizarre take. You don't think toxic employees exist?

Toxic employees exist. Toxic management fails to fire them.

But your GP comment implies that if the management fires them, then somehow "it is due to a lack of trust, which is management's fault". That's.... some circular reasoning there.

> the personnel conveying the information believe it to be an indication of bad intent

Oh man do we have a generation w/ communication problems. News is a spectrum, and the whole point of sharing internally is to learn more so when shared externally the information is _useful_.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Could you explain how this relates to this discussion? I understand The Tragedy of the Commons and I don't see how that concept is relevant here.

I assume that they are suggesting that free and open dialogue is shared "resource" that is exploited via the choice of individual actors to engage in leaks, thereby contributing to the depletion of a resource that they themselves would benefit from.

However, it's only applicable at an extremely general level, and if you wanted to you could draw a connection between this kind of article and any number of new stories, if you're willing to stretch the terms enough. If it were up to me, comment section etiquette would discourage links to generic Wikipedia articles like logical fallacies, Dunning Kruger effect, or more or less familiar economic concepts unless they had some strong connection to the article.

I agree on the etiquette suggestion, with the addition that linking such topics is fine as long as there is relevant discourse along with the link. Drive by linking isn’t very insightful or communicative.

> Drive by linking isn’t very insightful or communicative.

I figured folks would be able to make the obvious connection between a very important Systems Design concept and what OP was commenting on. I guess I assumed wrong.

You know what they say about assumptions?

In written communication, context is king.

huh. I always figured it was the companies pr department doing leaks to drum up interest ahead of release or asses market demand for the products/build anticipation, or maybe executives trying artificially/deniably juice the stock price just before selling stock's.

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