
Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace - _wldu
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-performance-review-process-blamed.html
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nickelcitymario
I'm always baffled when I see the stuff employees complain about in SF. Not
that they're wrong, but my experience is that these things are 100% standard
across the board.

I've never worked somewhere that I could openly call out my chief executives
in front of the whole team and not expect that to be a thoroughly career
limiting move.

I've definitely never worked anywhere that I could organize protests and still
expect to have a job by the end of the day. (I'm aware of unionized workplaces
that do this on a semi-regular basis, but that's about it and you can bet that
participation guarantees you won't be considered for joining management any
time soon.)

I hesitate to say y'all are entitled, because maybe you're right to be doing
this. Maybe I'm jealous. I dunno. But I feel like at a minimum the people at
these companies don't recognize how uncommonly privileged they are to even be
able to voice their concerns like this.

By all means, fight the good fight, but if you ever leave the valley... good
luck to you.

~~~
fipple
The fact is that the big tech companies are feeding at a trough of money that
seems to be infinitely deep, but only a million or so people worldwide have
the skills to build and implement Internet services at the billion-user scale.
Until the money trough runs dry or the skills pool deepens, employees will
still have the tech companies by the balls.

~~~
mathattack
This article contradicts that.

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m0zg
All big companies I worked at so far suppress internal dissent. It's just the
nature of the beast. Your boss doesn't want her boss look bad, and she also
doesn't want to look bad herself come review/promo time. Hundreds of thousands
of dollars are at stake. So all communication upward gets massaged with that
in mind. By the time it gets through 5,6,7 layers of management "shit's bad"
becomes "everything is awesome" even if the initial message gets out at all.

~~~
smacktoward
The classic (and hilarious) book _The Systems Bible_
([https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-
Large/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-
Large/dp/0961825170)) has some deliciously tart words on this subject:

 _We present the Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings (F.L.A.W.): THINGS
ARE WHAT THEY ARE REPORTED TO BE..._

 _The net effect of this Law is to ensure that people in Systems are never
dealing with the real world that the rest of us have to live in, but instead
with a filtered, distorted, and censored version which is all that can get
past the sensory organisms of the System itself..._

 _This effect has been studied in detail by a small group of dedicated General
Systemanticists. In an effort to introduce quantitative methodology into this
important area of research they have paid particular attention to the amount
of information that reaches, or fails to reach, the attention of the relevant
administrative officer or corresponding Control Unit._

 _The crucial variable, they have found, is the fraction Ro /Rs, where Ro
represents the amount of Reality which fails to reach the Control Unit, and Rs
equals the total amount of Reality presented to the System. The fraction Ro/Rs
varies from zero (full awareness of outside reality) to unity (no reality
getting through). It is known, naturally enough, as the COEFFICIENT OF
FICTION._

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strikelaserclaw
Are there people who still believe the PR nonsense of big companies like
Google and Facebook? At the end of the day by agreeing to work for these
companies, you gain prestige, $$$, and maybe something interesting to work on,
that is pretty much it and those are only offered to you because you bring in
much more $$$ than you get in perks or $$$. If you are naive enough to think
that these corporations are interested in anything but making money, you are
sadly mistaken.

~~~
tdb7893
This comment makes me want to work for a large company. If all they provide is
lots of money and potential for interesting work then that sounds great!

~~~
efields
Doesn't even have to be large. I work for a public company that has a staff of
< 200\. Small engineering team inside of a non-software company. We solve
business problems. Sometimes that means building SPA web apps. Sometimes it
means coding up the corporate site redesign. It's up to you to make it
interesting. I think it's interesting, and I always try to play a part in a
project that works toward advancing my career goals.

Pace is slower than the start-ups I've worked at in the past, but salary and
incentives are above most tech start-up "competitive salaries" I hear about.

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andrei_says_
May I recommend Dan Lyon’s Disrupted as a deep, touching, funny and horrifying
portrayal of what startup culture can look like?

It’s one of the best books I read last year.

~~~
johan_larson
Facebook was started in 2004, so it's a good 15 years old now. It also has
30,000 employees. That's way to big and way too old to be a startup in any
meaningful sense. It's a big and powerful, but young, company.

~~~
stcredzero
Its cultural roots go back to a startup, however.

~~~
munchbunny
By that standard, almost every company's cultural roots go back to a startup.

~~~
stcredzero
So, such a period would be a sensible time and place to look in an examination
of cultural factors. The fact that Facebook is still young means that those
roots are closer in time than for other companies and would seem to make that
more relevant.

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gamechangr
>The message was clear in August 2016 when the company laid off the editorial
staff of its trending news team, shortly after some workers on that team
leaked to the press that they were suppressing conservative-leaning stories.

So - All the claims of censorship for conservative views. it's true then? I
previously thought it was an excuse.

How can we have a dialogue as a nation, if we don't allow opposite positions
to speak?

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KKKKkkkk1
A large part of the article is about the review/promotion system at Facebook,
and it highlights that:

-Facebook has twice-a-year performance reviews.

-The reviews involve peer feedback, some of it blind to the reviewee.

-Managers have quotas for performance categories.

I believe those features are standard at most big US companies, with some
exceptions like Microsoft.

The consequences are (a) twice-a-year crunch time, (b) pressure to deliver
bullshit results, (c) pressure to be popular, and (d) employees are
incentivized to sabotage their peers.

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JDiculous
This is every job I've ever worked at, nothing about this is unique to
Facebook.

I'm glad this is actually getting attention though. At least it's a step
towards getting this problem fixed. It's downright degrading that we have to
(especially in the tech industry) pretend like we love everything about our
jobs and being cogs in top-down authoritarian organizations.

