
When Chinese Employees Ask for Justice, Facebook Silence Their Voices - AFascistWorld
https://en.pingwest.com/a/3649
======
smaili
It's quite the lengthy article but the crux of what they believe led to his
suicide is here:

 _Relevant sources unveiled that before Mr. Chen’s last PSC, he had already
been under pressure from the advertising department, so he expected to shift
to other groups to maintain his job in Facebook and the opportunity to work in
the United States.

According to informed sources told PingWest that, Mr. Chen’s group had
undergone organizational restructuring, during which the group’s original
manager hopped to another group. A new manager was hired to lead Mr. Chen’s
group, but the manager soon realized that many of his ICs were already
transferring groups, resulting in a sharply-increased workload per capita
within the group.

Mr. Chen, who was already in high pressure, submitted his transfer request as
well, and was pre-approved by another group, meaning that all that’s left is
to have his own manager sign off on the transfer.

The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay
on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the "Meets Most" rating,
which factually voided Mr. Chen's transfer request because the other group is
very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible
rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Chen, who had been on the verge of collapse, was mentally pushed off the
edge by a Facebook robot, according to people familiar with the matter as well
as other employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace social networking app.

Two weeks before the tragedy, the Facebook advertising system experienced a
Severe Site Event (SEV), which is essentially a server crash. A SEV management
bot created a task for the SEV to be resolved and assigned the task to Mr.
Chen, requiring him to fix the bug and submit the SEV report before the
deadline, which is roughly one hour after the time of his death.

Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring
the SEV rejected the change and maintained the deadline to be met in 12 days._

It sounds like the already existing pressure in Ads + reorg + new manager
blocking his transfer request + SEV caused him to just give in. Given
Zuckerberg's public push on transparency, openness, and wanting to connect the
world, I'm honestly quite surprised and disappointed at how secretive they've
been on this tragedy.

~~~
michannne
Man, I can't imagine working in such an environment. It feels so detached to
normal human interaction.

Couple questions as I don't (and largely have no intention to) work in Silicon
Valley:

\- Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial
employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they
were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be
based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the
employee to switch teams?

\- > Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot
monitoring the SEV rejected the change

Maybe someone who works at FB can clear this up but how does this work? A bot
opens a ticket, dev attempts to change a dropdown field and another bot
decides whether to revert or not? Or is there a human involved, and do they
have override powers?

~~~
bcyn
> Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial
> employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if
> they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer
> be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the
> employee to switch teams?

1\. This allows internal transfers to avoid reinterviewing. I think many would
agree that going through the same interview process is not productive,
especially with the types of interview questions asked at FB (predominantly
Leetcode style). This reflects FB's standard hiring process for engineers,
where engineers are hired into a "general" pipeline and not to a specific
team, with the implication that once they pass FB's interview, they are
qualified to work on basically any team. The performance requirements are
there so that engineers cannot just change teams every time they perform
poorly.

2\. I think the incentives are intended such that the very worst case for a
manager is being forced to fire an employee for poor performance -- it means
the manager was unable to help the employee improve their performance. Having
them transfer within the company reflects much better on the manager. In
practice, this may not be true in all situations.

In the general / common case, this system is great for engineers in terms of
internal mobility.

------
citrablue
This article appears to have some fundamental misunderstandings. Their
description of the review system is not stack ranking, in which employees are
ranked in a hierarchy and the lowest on the totem are fired. Instead, the
"meets/exceeds" scale has been pretty standard wherever I've worked.

Further, it seems that FB HR asked the source of this article to not speak to
the press about an internal event that involved a very sensitive issue. Yet,
the journalist repeatedly states that Mr. Yin was asked to speak with nobody
about the issue. It looks like he ignored the advice, and became a very
visible interviewee, even appearing on public news. He told his manager after
the interviews - what was he thinking? It's pretty obvious that FB doesn't
want it's employees speaking to the press.

This article's inaccuracies in an attempt to spin a tragedy into some sort of
Facebook conspiracy reinforces the correctness of the company's "do not speak
to the press" attitude.

~~~
cwmma
a meets/exceeds scale becomes stack ranking when the proportion of different
ranks is capped so that even if everybody on a team did well, some would have
to be given the lowest ranking

~~~
whoevercares
“Meets most” is just the politically correct version of PIP or “you should
look for other jobs now”

~~~
pbalau
that's "meets some". Meets most means you have 1 or 2 secondary axes you need
to fix

------
jeffk_teh_haxor
My brother, a GP doctor, said that he writes a _lot_ of scripts for
antidepressants every performance review season. Performance management sucks.

The racial tenor of this article seems bizarre and over the top, though?

~~~
throwaway66920
maybe I’m missing something but people don’t normally take antidepressants to
deal with one off periods of stress, right?

~~~
jeffk_teh_haxor
If the period lasts months, then sure. People go on meds for temporary events
all the time, e.g. Seasonal Affective Disorder.

------
throwaway66920
Seems like there’s a few things at play here

Foremost it sounds like Facebook has a shitty performance management culture.
Let’s forget intent for a minute. Looking at the details offered, it’s just
bad. If you get a rating of “meets most”, and that’s really bad then your
system is off the bat not clear.

The implied story I got was about Chinese worker and visa abuse. But it sounds
like it’s more just bad company culture with high degrees of competitiveness
and finger pointing. I don’t see anything especially relevant to his race or
immigration status. The idea that they’re dangling anything over his head (as
is a common and important problem for many low skilled tech workers, (which
probably doesn’t describe this guy)) because it’s implied they were going to
push him out.

The internal push to silence any internal discussion on it is shameful.

But overall this seems like the result of organizational incompetence rather
than malice. And I don’t think it should be surprising to anyone that this is
the case because you’re going to be selecting for a very specific profile for
a company like Facebook. Namely, people who put higher value on money and
prestige.

------
whoevercares
This incident has gone wild on popular overseas Chinese forums criticizing the
double standards and mistreatments. It’ll be interesting and eye opening if
someone could translate the information shared there.

~~~
yorwba
Since you seem to be active in those forums yourself, maybe you could do the
translating?

~~~
whoevercares
It’ll be way too risky to expose the threads. Some user ids and conversations
can be used to infer the real identity

~~~
yorwba
Then why mention them at all?

------
bigpumpkin
How can Facebook be claiming to protect the family's privacy when it is in
fact preventing employees from speaking to the press about bad working
conditions?

~~~
HALtheWise
By doing both? Both the family and the company want to avoid a media blowup
about the death, so keeping quiet protects both the family and Facebook's
corporate interests (and probably also the mental health of other employees).

The argument people are making is that it doesn't protect society's interests,
but as far as I can tell, Facebook isn't claiming it is.

~~~
inimino
Being quiet about the specifics of the individual case does not prevent them
from having a transparent discussion of company policies and practices that
may have contributed. The argument is that this does not protect _employees '_
interests because it allows these practices to continue unexamined.

------
jonnybgood
Is his suicide linked to some kind of maltreatment of Chinese employees at
Facebook? The article doesn't make that clear.

~~~
tanilama
Not mistreat Chinese employee per say. The individual is operating under big
stress, and the manager is deliberately playing politics to prevent him
switching teams, threatening to put his job at jeperody.

I don't feel like this is engineered to target Chinese. But if all proven,
Facebook's internal culture seems fucked up...Maybe that is why it doesn't
want even its employees to talk about it.

~~~
jeffk_teh_haxor
That's usually SOP at companies which have suicides. Suicidal ideation is
contagious. They'll bring in a grief counselor, and encourage you to talk to
_them_ , instead.

~~~
tanilama
Well, yes and no

Suicide is one thing. But Facebook's refusal to change anything as regarding
to the cause of this employee's passing is jarring, for stuff like fire fast,
highly stressful Sev meeting and etc, and super high peer pressure.

Even Amazon does change its way of handling internal transfer after employee's
attempted suicide.

Not to mention there are Facebook employees defending on other places,
claiming this is nothing burger, because Facebook's suicide rate is below
national average, which ironically signals the issue is indeed internal and
not normal.

~~~
catalogia
Comparing against the national average seems like BS anyway. The suicide rate
of employees in any given company should be compared to suicide rates of other
populations of people with comparable incomes, opportunities, etc. For
instance, how does the suicide rate in Facebook compare to Google? Or how does
the suicide rate in one Facebook department compare to another?

------
thaumasiotes
> to hold a vigil for a Facebook employee who took his own life after
> allegedly [being] bullied in the company and suffering extremely excessive
> work pressure

> Most Attendees wore black

Huh. Why not white?

~~~
zeta0134
In America at least, black clothing (typically formal wear, the specifics vary
from place to place) is strongly associated with mourning. It's traditional
garb at funerals and gatherings to pay respects for the departed. This may be
different in other countries, and it's not a universal practice, but it's
common enough that most everyone understands the meaning.

~~~
inimino
For context for those who are not already aware, since this is being
downvoted... white traditionally has the same associations in Chinese culture.
So it was not an entirely unreasonable question. The answer is just that this
happened in the US, not China, and wearing white in the US would be unusual.

~~~
thaumasiotes
But this is an event for Chinese migrants, not even American Chinese.

~~~
CydeWeys
It happened in the United States. And who says it was exclusively attended by
Chinese Nationals?

~~~
thaumasiotes
The article.

~~~
inimino
This is a pressure tactic against Facebook. They are also carrying signs and
chanting slogans. Of course the signs and slogans are in English; wouldn't do
much good in Chinese. So it makes sense they would follow the custom of the
country they are in and the company they are trying to pressure.

