
Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company? - helical
How do they feel about Facebook&#x27;s business practices etc?
======
cornholio
I think the way this problem is framed succumbs to an outdated world view, an
image of the samurai computer hackers that put themselves in the service of
the corporate lords - but are ultimately responsible for their actions against
society and can choose to rebel. They are rare and prized and thus their
collaboration is valued by the lords.

This is a romantic vision that the companies themselves like to perpetuate,
but it's no longer true for a decade or more. It's irrelevant what the
Facebook employees think, just like it's irrelevant what the employees of
McDonalds think about the health of their customers. They are not unique,
precious snowflakes of rare skill, they are replaceable cogs in a machine that
exists for a single purpose, profit. Massive IT education programs now
underway everywhere in the world will ensure that the corporations will have
vast masses of foot soldiers so they can concentrate on what matters: creating
competitive advantage and market dominance using the strong network effects
technology affords.

Silicon Valley has bred an ultra-aggressive type of capitalism that will crush
and automate the old competitors away but will no longer redistribute the
wealth to the workers, as capitalism has done for the last few hundred years,
because it no longer needs them. In this economic war, developers are rich
mercenaries, not noble freedom fighters. The likes of Facebook and Uber are
simply the expression of that social reality, a glimpse into the world of
tomorrow.

~~~
feral
Nonsense, at least today.

If 'massive IT education programs' had made engineers disposable, then
salaries would be a lot lower. (If you need 'data' on this, Glassdoor says FB
SWE salaries are >120k, total comp will be a lot higher. Compare that to a job
with an actual disposable workforce.)

>In this economic war, developers are rich mercenaries, not noble freedom
fighters.

If you said developers were poor mercenaries, that'd be one thing. But if you
are rich, then you can choose to work somewhere compatible with your morals.

And if you don't make that choice, its on you.

~~~
RestlessMind
Can you please share a list of companies with strong morals and are above
criticism?

------
vernon99
I left Facebook a few months back so I don’t have anything holding me from
sharing my honest take. Also I was involved in platform development a lot.
Don’t envy the folks who stayed btw - now it’s gonna be much harder.

In short: Facebook does care about user privacy a lot. Some of the worst pains
we had in platform development at Messenger were related to convincing privacy
team to let us open more info to developer. And we usually fail. There was and
is a strong sense of internal paranoia around leaking any user data, even if
anonimized.

Whenever there’s a chance of a data leakage of any sort, everything halts and
the whole team is in on it. I personally spent weeks of my life in such
meetings, redesigning whole parts of the product to avoid even simplier things
like anon user tracking by developers with no explicit consent etc.

So when I hear people saying that Fb intentionally does something bad or
doesn’t care - those people really don’t have clue.

Current situation is a byproduct of two things: 1) legacy decisions (that were
reverted in 2015) from when the company was younger and more open and didn’t
have those protocols and 2) just the very sensitive nature of this data. This
is a social network. What would you expect it to give developers from it’s
API? If not your info and parts of your graph. Even those days are over now
due to (imo) unjustified paranoia.

Ads targeting is another example of that. The fact that you see targeted ads
_does_not_ mean advertiser knows _anything_ about you individually. It’s fully
anonimized for them!

And no, there’s no evil intent to make the UI more confusing to get more of
your data. It’s the opposite at that point, Jeez, folks, take off your tin
hats. Many things to question Fb about (most notably product innovation) but
here they are doing their best.

~~~
teaneedz
Average users see years of Facebook not caring enough about privacy, with a
CEO and COO making anti-privacy statements.

Things have changed? What about that Real Name Policy?

Anonymized data? The world of data brokers might disagree.

The shady world of farmers and affiliate marketers rely on the ease of
Facebook data mining.

Tin hats? Facebook has relied too long on users not understanding what happens
with their data behind the scenes.

Personally identifiable or not (trivial matters) the fact that Facebook and
its devs fail to see the harm that this platform is causing from its gluttony
of user data is mind boggling.

------
lifeisstillgood
Imagine that software development / engineering was a profession along the
lines of law or medicine - no one could "practise software" without belonging.

Now imagine we are drawing up the ethics code for that profession - is what
facebook did something that could reasonably be banned? Is there direct harm
involved?

In my (very personal) view Facebook is just an example of an externality -
this loss of control over data is a form of pollution, and the costs are
rarely direct harm to individuals, even though society as a whole seems to be
being harmed.

So rather long windedly, i don't think this is something to beat up on
individual Facebook employees - this is something for society level regulation
- look to the GDPR and its successors

Medical ethics jumping off point:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics)

~~~
jacques_chester
The IEEE Computer Society and ACM jointly adopted just such a code of ethics.

[https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-
ethics](https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics)

None of it gives Facebook engineers any comfort.

They are responsible for the fruits of their efforts. Recent revelations are
of _degree_ , not _kind_. The consequences of engineering work were reasonably
foreseeable and the consequences were not at arm's length. Facebook's business
model has been clear and well-understood for years and years now. This is not
technology being misapplied by someone several steps removed from you. This is
technology misapplied by Facebook and Facebook's immediate customers and
Facebook engineers enabled it.

Technology work has dimensions beyond "it's interesting" and "they pay me a
lot". I hold us as professionals. We have duties which go beyond our own self-
regard.

I am unsympathetic to anyone at Facebook feeling moral disquiet. I think you
know what you ought to do.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am dubious about the value of a "public interest" clause as the basis for
everything - that tends to be "whatever we agree post-hoc".

Look at medical ethics ideas of "do no harm" \- or the more modern
interpretation "do more good than harm"

It is perfectly arguable that Facebook has been doing more good than harm. And
that is not something one should ban under a code of ethics.

NB I personally do not think that Facebook's actions have been correct, or
worthy or defensible. They have hoovered up everything and left it lying
around for anyone to collect - it breaks every Data protection rule set since
the 1980s (due care etc). They can and will pay at some point down the line.

But data is like ... oil. It has massive externality costs, but wow has
society benefited. From the data footprints we leave we can (if it is well
managed(!)) expect improved medical research, improved mental well being,
reduction in crime, improved trade, greater econmic equality. Yes there will
be costs. And we need to manage those as only externalities can be managed.
But the mass collection and processing of our PII data is not _just_ negative
cost.

Edit just to be clear this is not an attempt to justify ends with means, or
defend facebooks actions - but to note that just because JP Getty was
unethical it did not stop ambulances getting petrol engines, generators
lighting hospitals and plastics encasing artificial hips.

It's complicated.

------
PunchTornado
As an ex-fb employee I don't think fb did anything wrong and fb is just a
scapegoat now.

Media tries to blame brexit and trump on fb instead of realising that a large
portion of the population actually want trump, brexit, no immigration, muslim
bans etc. Hey, but it is easier to think that the people were tricked into
voting like that.

~~~
phaus
I live in the rural South and although it may sound ridiculous to you, I've
met more people here that believe all of the inflammatory, fake nonsense they
read on FB than I have that don't. They use it as a primary source of news and
they allow it to shape their view of the world and therefore their beliefs on
certain political policies. While it's difficult to quantify with a specific
percentage, there were absolutely a large number of people tricked, in the
literal sense, into voting for Trump. These are the people that are Ill
informed enough to think that women are certain to get raped by a pack of
muslims if they ever try walking down a street anywhere in Europe.

Note: Surely this doesn't account for everyone that voted for Trump, but it is
possible that it made enough of an impact to change the outcome.

~~~
PunchTornado
Fake news is one thing. Targeted ads are another thing. I don't think that
targeted ads can change that much. Fake news I agree, can be brainwashing, but
fb does all it can to combat fake news.

~~~
thisacctforreal
It's all based on emotional manipulation.

Have you seen Nix's presentation at the 2016 Concordia Summit?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc)

For what targeted ads lose to fake news with having to stay clean, they regain
with psychological accuracy.

------
danpalmer
Facebook used to have a little book that they gave out to employees that was
almost like a manifesto for what Facebook was, and should strive to be.

The book claims strongly that Facebook is a communications company, who want
to help (not force) people be more social, and that advertising is purely a
side effect intended to enable them to achieve that mission. It was quite
cliche, but overall I got the impression that it was honest, I really do think
that Facebook the company, and by extension, many of their employees do see
themselves like that.

I personally find that to be a little naive, but then I am more sensitive to
privacy issues than the average person.

------
Baeocystin
Can they post an honest answer here, and be confident that it couldn't be
traced back to them?

~~~
mh-
Guess that depends if they have the app installed on their phone.

------
matte_black
I went out with a girl who works at Facebook (she does software development)
and asked her this very question.

Basically her response was that the whole incident really isn’t even
Facebook’s fault but rather the third party developers. Even though Facebook
could have done a better job of protecting data, it’s a waste of time to do so
as these companies will always find a way to violate the TOS. It’s a bit like
fighting software piracy or ad-blocking, hackers are always getting a step
ahead. No company is perfect, despite everything Facebook still does a lot of
good in the world, and as a company it’s going to keep doing more of it.
There’s a lot of people who hate Facebook for personal or business reasons,
but in the end there’s no fundamental reason why Facebook is a bad company
that shouldn’t exist, it’s only going to get better anyway.

~~~
danpalmer
I roughly agree with this in terms of the recent events, but Facebook has been
doing creepy stuff that I think many people disagree with for a long time, and
that seems to be getting worse.

Advertisers being able to target so effectively, by salary, by socio-economic
status, and by hundreds or even thousands of metrics. I think that's still
bad, and I don't think I could work on a product like that.

~~~
matte_black
I’m still amazed that people think really efficient advertising is creepy.

~~~
danpalmer
Really? Why do you think it's not creepy?

~~~
18pfsmt
Because their finances depend on efficient targeting?

I'd prefer to get the mainstream to back things like Masotodon (openSocial),
Matrix, and Scuttelbut, than call for regulations, but we have to be educating
folks about the benefits such federated/distributed networks.

~~~
danpalmer
It can still be creepy, even if it's what's required for them to operate. If
they can't operate without being creepy, perhaps they don't have a viable
business model.

------
cies
> What do Facebook employees think about their company?

You mean "their employer"? Or maybe most have some small % of stock, but to me
my tiny-% stock holdings do not make those companies "my companies".

------
candybar
I don't work at Facebook but I don't know if there are any major companies
(tech or non-tech) that are significantly better about this? Nearly all
Fortune 500 with any significant digital operations are tracking everything
they can, especially all media companies. Marketers want all the data they can
get to better target people and better measure ROI - so either you're using
the data you gather to better sell stuff or you're gathering data to sell it
to people who can use it to better sell stuff. Big technology companies seem
way better about this (from the perspective of the user) - non-tech companies
have much worse practices when it comes to safe-guarding data, are generally
not as conscientious about privacy implications and are much more prone to
using shady third-party vendors who are not accountable to users and more
likely to abuse data. This, of course, includes nearly all ad-funded
publishers, where all this criticism of Facebook (and Google and Amazon and so
on) abounds. The journalists that are writing about this and tsk-tsk'ing at
tech are literally paid by their employers maximizing yield by selling user
data.

This whole big data thing along with all these related jobs (big data
engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, etc) - what do people
this was all about? Why do we have all this data now that we didn't before -
it's because everyone is tracking stuff. So where should we all work if we
don't want to be part of this? If you're not doing this directly, you're
probably paid by someone who is.

------
ex3ndr
This was my first question at job interview to Facebook. Luckily i got an
indian developer and i knew about how aggressive facebook in his home country
(does everybody remembers free basics?) and i asked about what he thinks.
Answer was simple - this is a form of a competition. I think "competition" can
easily justify doing shady things - any of your competitors eventually will do
the same and because of this there are no reason to not to implement something
like phone book scraping.

~~~
jacques_chester
Two wrongs don't make a right.

"Aw, but everyone else is doing it!" has never been the basis of a respectable
system of morality. It's playground ethics.

~~~
drjesusphd
Well, many people seem to excuse luminaries of the past for things like
slavery saying things like "It was a different time. They should only be
judged through the lens of their own culture."

It might not be a respectable system of morality, but it's a popular one.

~~~
jacques_chester
I hardly think 10 years ago qualifies for this point of view.

------
staltz
So far no Facebook employee has answered this thread (unless they did so
between the lines). Considering that Facebook has 25k employees, this must
mean they have some very harsh policy on keeping quiet. Either that, or a
strong culture that brainwashes them to actually believe they are working
towards the naive mission of connecting the world. Or all of the above.

~~~
kridsdale1
I am a FB employee. And I ain’t sayin shit. It is as simple as weighing losing
my job and being deported from the USA on one hand, and being a participant on
HN on the other.

------
yodsanklai
I'm interested in the answers. I'm having upcoming interviews with Facebook,
and I wonder if the recent events should be addressed in the "culture fit"
interview.

My personal opinion is that the problem is not so much with Facebook but with
the legislation. Corporations like Facebook are there to make profit within
the rules defined by society. I hope there will be stronger laws to protect
our privacy and data, and generally more awareness on the issue.

~~~
Vinnl
> My personal opinion is that the problem is not so much with Facebook but
> with the legislation. Corporations like Facebook are there to make profit
> within the rules defined by society.

This holds true as long as those corporations do not influence what the law
looks like (i.e. they are the results of a democratic process). The question
is whether that is the case for Facebook.

~~~
test6554
It is also important for industry to inform the public about how certain
legislation impacts them, their products and the quality/quantity of jobs.

~~~
Vinnl
Yes, that's what makes this a difficult problem. You don't want to ban
companies from influencing legislation, but then you also can't say they were
just playing by the rules, and that they did not influence the rules not being
tougher on them.

------
nikivi
I don’t think they can disclose that. Besides they get paid pretty well to do
their work and not ask questions about the ethics of it.

------
orbifold
Facebook, along with the military industrial complex is among the places I
wouldn't work for any amount of money. Privacy is a human right and Facebook
is by far the worst human rights violator and enabler in this respect. Their
behaviour is clearly evil, exploitative of human nature and at least for some
people using facebook decreases their overall well-being and mental health.
People like this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94s0yYECeR8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94s0yYECeR8)
are clearly intelligent, articulate and competent, yet they are working on a
product that is explicitly designed to be addictive and create an echo
chamber, as he nicely explains in the talk (if you are curious how click-bait
is formalised go to ~34min).

------
golergka
Facebook employees and tech workers in general have a much wider spectrum of
opinions that what echo chambers like HN allow. I personally know a lot of
Facebook, Apple and Microsoft employees who voted Trump. Palantir employees
who are very proud about their jobs and believe that they're making a positive
impact on the world. Uber employees who believe that they're engaged in a good
fight against regulation and bureaucracy. What's common for all of them,
though, is that they generally keep these opinions to themselves and know
better than venting them on HN, Techcrunch and social media.

~~~
qwerty456127
There is nothing wrong in telling what do you feel about something when you
are asked. And there is no problem in expressing an unpopular opinion on HN as
you can sign-up anonymously at any time and just share whatever thoughts you
want.

~~~
adav
To play devil's advocate, in an arena where all comments are ordered by votes,
the unpopular opinion would simply be downvoted to oblivion and not seen
anyway. Why would someone with a contentious opinion go to the bother?

~~~
qwerty456127
Many (not the majority but still many) people scroll straight to the bottom to
see what happens to be there after reading the top comments and also quick-
read the comments in the middle (as there actually are many valuable comments
on HN).

Anyway, hesitating to say something is not always the best idea, maybe it
ought to be said aloud while everybody hesitates.

------
kisstheblade
I think the more salient question is "why do people post everything on
facebook (and other services)". No sane person can be surprised that this is
what happens with your data that you freely give away. And what I have been
hearing nobody actually is surprised. Nor do they care in the end. Selling
adverts is just an extremely lucrative business, get over it. It is what pays
for your entertainment (sports etc), information (magazines, internet sites
etc) and just about everything.

------
shabirgilkar
I fail to get an answer about, "How a founder of a company would fail to think
that what would happen to this humongous data which his company is collecting
if landed in wrong hands?" Maybe he is noble soul leading his company now and
tomorrow he would be shown door and someone creepy comes to lead.

I think Fb would be known in history as a major data provider to AI bullshit
acts.

------
billysielu
I'd assume that most employees don't have anything to do with dodgy stuff.
Interested in knowing if I'm right or not.

~~~
rco8786
...who is doing it then, if not employees? Truly perplexed by your comment.

~~~
Yoric
I think that the keyword in the parent post is "most".

------
dovik
Hope they think what they want.

------
Dowwie
The groupthink against Facebook needs to stop

