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Comment by Desafinado | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, does most of Meta's creepiness trickle down directly from Zuckerberg, or is their entire executive also this creepy?

Does the executive know better at this point but have toasted the culture and no one can fight against it anymore?

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Culture is often set top down. Look at the current US administration for a public example. People at the top will choose people who agree with them or who are sycophants. Top execs also chose this job and zuck because they have no moral issues with what the company does... Often if you closely associate with someone creepy or immoral it's because you care more about money and power.

That's really only limited to political appointees as far as the US government is concerned. Career civil servants hang around for a long time while their bosses change every 4 to 8 years.

In my experience, a LOT of company culture trickles down from the top. Some of this is by design e.g. CEO consciously and publicly rewards certain traits/behaviors. Some of this is accidental in the sense that CEOs, like many humans, have both stated and expressed preferences.

There is also this effect:

- CEO says "the lights are a bit dim in here"

- that turns into "We need to change all of the lightbulbs in here immediately!"

(this is especially true in firms where the CEO cares a lot about being proactive).

Two great posts/stories about this:

1. This post about smart employees "reading their managers minds": https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind....

2. In Michael Crichton's book Disclosure there is a great line: "Why did you dress casually instead of wearing a suit? Is it b/c you wanted to do that or b/c the CEO did it and you wanted to show you were part of the team??"

There are lots of leaked emails showing Zuck is creepy. Recent one I saw where he is directly in the conversations about targeting teens/children. There's a twitter account [1] that posts emails from tech execs that have come out in legal proceedings - it shows the people at the top are very much informed and driving what happens in their companies.

[1] https://x.com/TechEmails

> is their entire executive also this creepy?

What does this link tell you? https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-told...

Thank that 'Super'AILab supervisor from ScaleAI, Alexander Wang; this guy is really hilarious. He directly turned Meta into a Chinese company (just like how ScaleAI exploits its employees), and so far, I haven't seen him deliver anything that matches his annual salary. Considering that what he does is AI infrastructure, even cheap-to-the-point-of-ridiculous cheap labor for training data annotation. I don't think he's suitable for this kind of big-picture AI research.

I suspect most employees know better, but Meta pays very well and they just want to maximize their salary and their tenure in the company. Also it seems Zuckerberg has became more creepy lately, very much in phase with the current Zeigweist.

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