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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The email snippets are impressive on multiple levels, mainly how fucking stupid/arrogant people at FB must be. Openly talking about MITM, and then getting multiple other companies to include this kit in their products as well is just beyond stupid for putting in writing. "Hey Zuck, I have an idea on your proposal. We should get together to discuss in person" would be suspect, but at least it's not incriminating. It's like these people have never seen a movie, or read a news article on other companies getting caught.

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A piece of advice I've taken to heart is whenever I'm sending something in writing, to think about how I would feel if I needed to repeat the same things in court or if I found those messages in the news. Not that I've ever said anything near that egregious but it still helps.

Whenever I'm discussing something in person I think about how I would feel if it turned out my employer was breaking the law and me not putting it in writing stopped the injured parties from obtaining just compensation.

It sounds like you have a soul and/or morals. The people writing the emails in TFA clearly have neither.

So send a follow up email post meeting recapitulating the key points.

Sorry, you’re not FAANG material.

When putting down something in writing, you should also remember cardinal Richelieu's quote: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

"Dance like no one is watching; email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition." - Olivia Nuzzi

https://web.archive.org/web/20141214193908/https://twitter.c...

The way I heard it from a corporate counsel is "The E in E-mail stands for Evidence."

More importantly these days, have the same thought every time you write a comment on Slack or Teams.

And this is exactly why so many of the larger companies are embracing either more ephemeral messaging modes or outright deleting history.

https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2024/01/26/feds-warn-compani...

elaborate? was there some specific case?

Trouble at many orgs regarding the Israel vs Palestine conflict. No matter on which side of that clusterfuck you are - unless you are in a lobbyist group for either side, someone at your org will be offended and raise a stink.

No, just that there's no reason that your instant messages can't be used against you, and in some organisations, regulations mean that the chat history has to be logged and kept.

This is excellent advice. Another thing I will add is if something is not ethical, misleading, or dishonest, just do not do it. The world will be a better place if people behave ethically. Also, I strongly suspect that long term success in business requires ethical conduct.

"Did you see Brian's hat? He's still fucking wearing it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2k-BNySLI

Don't do the voice

So you'd rather they were smarter and able to hide the traces of their malicious behaviour?

The real problem here is the complete absence of any kind of ethics. It sounds like the kind of place where if you consider ethics to be a blocker you'd be laughed out of the room, or fired. Corporate culture is to chase profit above anything else. It's especially bad in software, though, as so many people don't even seem to think about the ethical implications of their actions ever.

Yeah, if your first thought is “Is you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy?” … you are not learning the right lessons

Billionaire bosses are all surrounded by opportunists and flatterers. Over time like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the size of this group grows to unmanageable dimensions, cause anyone acting moderately sane will be treated as an existential threat to their lives of fantasy, domination, manipulation, luxury, leisure etc and pushed out.

> acting moderately sane will be treated as an existential threat [...] and pushed out.

Or converted, by making them take actions so that "if we go down you're going down with us."

Organized crime works that way too, come to think of it. They may call it "loyalty", but it really means "give us a way to coerce you into compliance."

Thankfully our fearless American regulators would never shy away from hanging these scoundrels out to dr- hey wait, where are the lawyers going off to?

The lawyers are off in the Hamptons this summer with the same people who are the root cause of the 2008 financial crisis.

To paraphrase Clarke's three laws, a sufficiently advanced quantity of yes-men and tech industry bro "move fast and break things" types is indistinguishable from a hostile malware actor.

Their contribution to the genocide in Myanmar has said everything about Meta you'll ever need to know. It's a tragedy that working for Meta is generally seen as neutral whereas working at any defense-related companies is often met with scorn, despite the overwhelmingly greater negative impact that working at the former has.

And this doesn't even touch upon Instagram.

I guess that they pay too much and employ too much of our industry, greatly reducing criticism because we all have a friend who has worked at Meta or we may even have applied ourselves at some point. Whereas we don't know anyone who has been at e.g. Anduril at the likes.

I have several extremely talented friends at Meta, and the one constant is they left any attachment to the output product when they entered the workplace. Whereas they previously (at other top tech companies) did take pride in their employees output. Meta is “success at all costs” and heavily metrics driven.

I think that’s what contributes to things like Myanmar and other countries hate speech proliferation. When you don’t care about how your product is used, and can focus on just the technical aspect, you lose any sense of responsibility.

Conversely, we’ve hired many ex meta people, and they’ve always almost all unanimously said how much they NOW like having pride in the products they create, after jumping ship.

Imho it’s an issue of top down culture from Zuckerberg, and previously Thiel.

> Conversely, we’ve hired many ex meta people, and they’ve always almost all unanimously said how much they NOW like having pride in the products they create, after jumping ship.

Just curious, did the ethics of their prior projects ever come up during the interview? I think I would have a problem hiring someone who worked on a product despite having ethical misgivings about how the product affected end users. Unless they could explain the extenuating circumstances that forced them to work on that product (sick family to care for, work visa being held hostage, and so on). If their response was simply, "I made metric X go up and got paid Y to do it," I don't think I could hire them in good conscience.

It’s a very easy question to dodge so doesn’t add much value.

Most of them just bury their heads in the sand and say that the negative effects weren’t made known to them, and they started looking for new work after they found out. Short of interrogating them, you can’t really suss out of its true.

Instead we ask what they’d do in hypothetical scenarios around our own products.

If any of these miscreants were looking for a new job I bet the place you work would be getting in line to put them through an interview loop.

I'll take that bet. Of course, you have no idea where I work and I do, so you're not a good gambler. The stench of social companies is noticeable by people that do not have their heads in the sand. Companies that still believe that ex-FAANG are automatically gawds deserve what they get.

That might be an increasingly common view on the shop floor, but how confident are you that it filters up through all levels of your org?

there's 5 people in my company, and we talk daily. want to split 10s since you've already doubled down?

btw, I can add my crypto wallet to my bio so you can pay up if you'd like /s

How much does your company pay IC8 or equivalent per year? $2M liquid? $3M? Hard for anyone to feel moral qualms when they’re earning generational wealth.

Plenty of people in our democracy choose to work in noble professions that don’t pay well but are the bedrock for society.

Excusing people’s ethics because of money makes it worse not better IMO. Especially in the context of tech where there are plenty of well paying jobs that don’t make money through increased misery.

> But some things will never change

> Try to show another way, but you stayin' in the dope game

> Now tell me, what's a mother to do?

> Bein' real don't appeal to the brother in you

> You gotta operate the easy way

> "I made a G today" But you made it in a sleazy way

> Sellin' crack to the kids.

> "I gotta get paid," well hey—

> but that's the way it is.

(Tupac - Changes)

Post-COVID big tech ex-employees aren't really what you would expect a decade ago.

And people that think like you are the problem. Ypu should be calling immoral asshole things out. Not frigging trying to do them and not get caught.

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