
What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook? - iraldir
https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-fired-from-Facebook?share=1
======
finnyspade
So having interned at Facebook, I find this post confusing. They made it very
clear to us during HR onboarding that the only zero tolerance policy was on
unauthorized access to user data.

The harassment stuff isn't a zero tolerance thing. They even told us to go
ahead and ask out other employees if you're interested, but just don't press
if you get a no.

It's pretty clear he accessed data he shouldn't have, and for that a zero-
tolerance policy makes total sense.

~~~
kelukelugames
It sounds like he violated a privacy issue. Probably looked up a friend or
celebrity.

At my last job, a company that sells houses, people looked up each other's
data for fun. I was kind of annoyed that one of the college hires found how
much I paid for my house but that was the norm.

Okay, I should probably specify that I didn't tell anyone my address. People
don't even know my legal name. I worked at and bought my house through Redfin.
Redfin gets my info from my Redfin account. A little different than looking up
an address on Zillow.

~~~
lutefisk
Housing data is public after you close on your house. What's there to be
annoyed about?

~~~
kelukelugames
I worked at and bought my house through Redfin. He didn't know where I lived
until he looked it up.

In their defense, privacy policy is probably better now.

------
hoopism
If you are considering writing a post like this ask yourself: "Am I
comfortable telling people the cause". If the answer is no then you shouldn't
write a post like this.

I know he mentions that it's for "privacy reasons"... but any rational person
is going to conclude that you are not disclosing the reason because it
reflects poorly on you and undermines your gripe.

Now if you are comfortable disclosing the cause, then perhaps there is some
value to be gained in raising the issue. But not disclosing is a no-win
situation... right or wrong you will be perceived to be in the wrong.

EDIT:

Funny that I get downvoted, yet most comments are basically "Clearly this
person did something worse than they realize..."

~~~
chris11
It could just be that he didn't want to make a post with personally
identifiable information. I know if I was in his position I wouldn't really
want my former coworkers to immediately think I was the person who wrote that
post.

------
brohee
"Every morning, I'd get up, hop in the shuttle, and that's when my day began.
Getting breakfast, seeing all my friends"

Confusing friends and colleagues, possibly having no life outside of work.

"She's never at her desk, and she routinely cancelled our regular 1:1 meetings
because she has no other choice"

Stockholm syndrome

"My boss's voice was devoid of emotion, even though we had gone through a lot
together (at least from my point of view)."

The first step is seeing you are delusional...

Am I alone thinking that for this person getting fired is extremely positive
and the opportunity to start anew with a healthier work/life balance?

~~~
JonnieCache
Nah, this post made working at facebook sound super weird, even without the
disciplinary aspect.

The "omnipresent alcohol" bit is really odd too. Now weed is legal in
california, are you also allowed to roll a spliff at your desk and go and
smoke it on your lunchbreak? 420 deploy code every day?

I mean, we have beer o clock on friday afternoon, but generally programming is
pretty hard, and while it may be fun to do all-night coding sessions while
intoxicated at the weekend, getting smashed at work is surely not conducive to
actually getting stuff done, especially in a team? All the espresso is bad
enough...

~~~
potatolicious
I started a new job a few months ago after floating around startups for a few
years. One thing I'm surprisingly happiest about is that the company doesn't
stock alcohol in the kitchens.

We have beer o'clock sometimes, and occasionally the team gets drinks
together, but alcohol is not an omnipresent part of everyday office life. The
constant drinking (a lot of which was high-stress-commiseration drinking) I
saw at startups was so normalized that this was honestly a cultural shock to
me.

------
NotSammyHagar
Hopefully this reminds people, especially if you are working in your first job
at some all encompassing place like amazon, google, facebook, whatever, that
they don't love you. Maybe they give you food, a phone, a ride to work, but
you have to have your own life outside work. Keep your resume up to date. Even
awesome google is not a place that everyone stays at forever.

~~~
uniformlyrandom
That actually applies for any job at any company. Identifying yourself through
your job is dangerous and unhealthy, although good for your career short-term.

~~~
wdmeldon
The difference is that most other jobs don't pretend to love you. They're
fairly upfront about that fact.

------
forgetsusername
> _For instance, on harassment: telling a coworker of either gender that you
> like their clothes can be reported as harassment_

What a terrible society we're developing for ourselves.

~~~
empressplay
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a
one-off thing.

Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing
and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up
isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions
but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire
people for one-off mistakes.

~~~
metaphorm
did you read the linked Quora post? it pretty explicitly details that Facebook
has a whole list of zero-tolerance "violations" that they will fire you for
doing even once, without warning.

~~~
kelukelugames
I suggest understanding Geller Mann amnesia effect. It's very true of Internet
comments, especially about tech companies.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the
newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case,
physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist
has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause
and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of
them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors
in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and
read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine
than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

~~~
metaphorm
are you meaning to imply that the author of the Quora post did not understand
the reasons behind his/her own termination?

I hope you realize that the Quora post linked here is NOT the second hand
account of a journalist, but was instead a primary source from an involved
party.

I don't think the Geller-Mann effect applies to this kind of situation and I
find it more than a little strange that you're suggesting it would.

~~~
kelukelugames
I mean don't blindly believe everything you read on the internet, especially
if it triggers your emotions or is about a popular company. HNers are
susceptible to sensationalism too.

~~~
metaphorm
what you're doing now is basically a variation on concern trolling. what you
just said to me is something like

"I am CONCERNED that you are reacting emotionally due to your biases"

and then you go and cite some article about a psychological research effect to
try and make your point, by quoting something from a fiction writer speaking
about an entirely different scenario that seems to be at-best tangentially
related (and that is a very generous interpretation) to this issue.

what is your actual point? I would suggest you check your own emotions and
biases. maybe you are unduly supportive of FB even in situations where they
ought to be scrutinized and deserve to be criticized.

edit: now that I've looked into it more, what is even IS the Gell-Man amnesia
effect? I can't find any credible sources on this besides the essay Michael
Crichton wrote, where he appears to have simply invented this for his own
rhetorical purposes.

------
AdmiralAsshat
At a previous job, I had a Sys Admin who once wrote a guy up because he used
telnet instead of SSH to connect to a client's server. All I could think while
reading the article was, "He must've used telnet..."

~~~
empressplay
shoulda fired whoever left telnet running on the client's server first?

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
The client themselves would often leave the telnet service running because
their employees would use it to connect to the server internally. Our clients
were not the most tech-savy individuals, either, so if it was an issue where
we needed to fix something and they hadn't bothered to turn the SSH service
on, we could either call them and bounce around personnel until we found
someone with root access whom we could convince to turn on the SSH daemon...or
we could use telnet.

This, to my mind, mirrors the "jaywalking" metaphor. It was bad practice, but
it was either "Fight the client and force them to improve their own security
so that we can safely assist them," or, "Do something we know is unsafe in
order to get the job done quickly so that the client will stop bitching at us
while paradoxically making it more difficult for us to help them."

------
propellerhat
My opinion: This person used someone else's electronic credentials to perform
a task without asking for permission. This person did not have the proper
level of access on their own account to perform this action, so they used
someone else's (likely the "VP" who they were working with on that project).
This would/should get you fired at many places.

~~~
forgottenpass
_This person used someone else 's electronic credentials to perform a task
without asking for permission. [...] This would/should get you fired at many
places._

You mean that thing that happens all the time at every office?

I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me, specifically
because he was sick of my asking whenever I needed to be granted access to new
things. I can't think of a single job I've that involved computers where I
wasn't given access to user accounts that were not mine for reasons of
expediency in the face of inflexable permissions systems.

~~~
propellerhat
Which company do you work for?

------
dnate
I would be interested in what constitutes as "jaywalking" in a software
company. Something everyone does but can be grounds to termination? Can anyone
tell me about specific cases?

~~~
lazyant
maybe login in with somebody else's credentials? or some other security-
related or procedural stuff that he bypassed to make things easier? using non-
authorized (personal) equipment or software? just speculating

~~~
justinsaccount
Yeah, bypassing procedure was my thought. This sentence says a lot:

> If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have
> been in that room.

So I doubt it was something like "Looked at a users private information"

~~~
CocaKoala
Why does that make you think it's not looking at user's private information?

He's running a test, and he wants to make sure his new function retrieves data
properly. He can search for his own name, but out of idle curiosity and
boredom (he's seen his own data a million times, he wants something visually
distinct on his screen), he searches for the name of a friend of his that he
hung out with last week. It's only a few different keystrokes to type the
alternate name, but now he's accessing private information and gets canned.

~~~
justinsaccount
Ah, good point. That sounds completely plausible.

------
nkrisc
When I first read this on Quora I couldn't help but think we don't actually
know that what the fired employee did was actually as common and benign as
they claim, since we don't know what it was. That might sort of change the
story.

------
LukeB_UK
> _I felt stupid for not planning that I would have to give up my devices,
> which were my primary devices and hadn 't been backed up in a while. I had a
> lot of personal things there that I never got back._

Don't rely on your employer's devices as your personal primary devices. Things
like this may happen, or they might want to claim ownership of everything done
on those devices. Hell they could even be tracking what you're doing on them.

Same goes the other way, your devices are yours, if you need a
computer/phone/tablet for your job, your work should provide one. I see too
many people happy to use their own devices at work so they don't have to ask
for things.

------
EC1
This person sounds like a complete doormat. Can't even tell the taxi driver he
prefers silence. Also it sounds absolutely awful working at Facebook, but then
again I am extremely adamant to mix business and personal life. Nobody at work
really knows me at all.

This is the problem with investing yourself and your identity in your work.
When things change, you get crushed.

I hope OP's coffee tastes better the next morning, the air fresher, and the
sky brighter.

>At Facebook, you see posters everywhere that ask you what would you to if you
weren't afraid, that prompt you to proceed and be bold, and remind you that
this is the hacker company.

Almost gagged reading this.

------
ska
It seems a little bizarre to me to think of being fired as being very
meaningfully company specific.

How is the answer not: "Largely like many other places of a similar size and
structure"? In a place with a particularly interesting corporate structure or
decision making process it might be unusual, but Facebook?

------
daodedickinson
I'm glad to see that unauthorized access to user data has a zero tolerance
policy. I've met a lot of extremely skilled, hauntingly sociopathic
programmers who will hack themselves free purchases and then cold call the
companies they've stolen from expecting a bounty. One guy who did this also
hacked the university ID / meal plan card to add fake money to his card and
considered it a public service. There was a major extended power outage here
and many emergency service generators were stolen and this guy opined loudly
and unabashedly that this was "beautiful". He was by far the most talented
programmer in my class year and it makes me afraid to connect to the internet.

------
ArkyBeagle
I haven't seen this thought so far:

Zero tolerance policies must be justified much more strenuously than they are.
Strictly speaking, there should be no zero tolerance policies. Things that are
subject to zero tolerance should be strictly controlled to where those
policies _can 't_ be violated. Depending on a memo being broadcast to "fix" it
won't work.

At work, if there is a zero tolerance policy and someone asks me to do
something that even causes me to _look_ at a zero tolerance policy, I bring
that up and negotiate the ... something down. "We can't do that because..."

I'm not here to debug your policy suite ( unless you ask nicely ) . If it's in
writing, I won't violate it - period. If stuff doesn't get done, then that's
been already decided to be less costly than violating the policy.

------
an4rchy
This post is just a person's account of something they have experienced. Why
is everyone so bent on getting them to identify the issue or saying it might
be other reasons they got fired etc. Take it for what it is, just like any
other story, article or blog post on the Internet. It might just be method to
vent or something fictional. I still don't think it's a valid reason to start
making accusations about what might or might not have happened

------
unwind
Moderators: the title is obviously missing the word "like", as in "What does
it feel _like_ [...]", please fix. Thanks.

------
exodust
"I did a bad thing, a very very bad thing"

"Everyone does it routinely".

So... everyone who works at Facebook routinely does this bad thing they would
be fired for if caught?

Scandalous! We simply must know what this bad thing is.

On the other hand, the post was self-indulgent, boring, empty crap. I'm
putting my money on the author's lack of anything interesting to say, getting
in the way of anything interesting to say.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
I gotta wonder what that anon guy did to get fired.

~~~
littletinman
This is another one of those "I got fired but I won't tell you why" posts.
There was another post on here not too long ago about a guy, who for very
vague reasons, got fired from Google.

I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are
going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. It doesn't help
anyone else because we don't know what mistake you made that we should avoid.
It ends up feeling like the post is very one sided and IMO discredits the
presented "feelings".

My 2 cents for you. :-)

*edited: spelling

~~~
fulafel
> I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are
> going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired.

He wrote "I won't go into what it was to protect my identity and that of all
involved." So the person thinks it would be easy for Facebook or his former
coworkers to identify the case if he told us what specific policy violation
(s)he was fired for.

~~~
jh123908
He thinks it would be easy to identify him from the cause, even though
according to the post many people in the company do it routinely

~~~
ivanca
...is easy to identify him BECAUSE he was fired. A lot of people are caught
jaywalking, but only a handful are fined.

~~~
Touche
But if it is jaywalking (s)he has no reason to be worried about being
identified.

------
maxwellito
On Facebook, you never get a notification when somebody unfriend you. It feel
the same about being fired from Facebook. :(

------
jgalt212
Is it just me or does it seem like many questions on Quora are about working
at either Google or Facebook?

------
stirner
If, as many people in these comments are speculating, the author got fired for
accessing private user data, the question remains: why doesn't Facebook have
built-in security measures that prevent this sort of access?

------
zerr
> Many companies do PIPs (performance improvement plans)

Isn't this a first signal when one should start looking for a new job asap?

~~~
ska
Not necessarily.

As a manager if you have an employee who you believe is basically a good fit
but has a performance issue you would really rather they turn this around than
have to hire again. Particularly with junior people this can often work well.

I realize that some organizations often use PIPs for legal converage reasons
and in that case it may be a foregone conclusion.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
But you don't know which is that case when its assigned to you.

~~~
ska
If you know your company and/or your manager you have at the very least strong
hints.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I disagree - the impetus for it may come from outside anyone you know.

------
empressplay
It's unlikely Facebook would fire anyone without the complainant having enough
of a case to be legally actionable. Thus, it's safe I think to assume that
there was a pattern of unsolicited advances towards an individual. I admit
this is conjecture, but it's a common story and as such makes a valid theory
for what happened here.

~~~
roymurdock
_The only thing she was interested in was whether I had done the action that
was held against me, and whether somebody had asked me to do it. Think again
of what I did as jaywalking. Yes I did it, and nobody made me. I was working
on a special project with a VP at that time, and he had nothing to do with it.
She asked me why I did it, and I explained - jaywalking takes you from point A
to point B faster, it 's not a conspiracy to create a traffic jam. In other
words, in what I did there was no damaged caused, no intention to harm anyone,
and no way for me to profit from it. If a week prior, I had typed a few
different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room._

Sounds like they took a code shortcut, possibly violating NDA/privacy
agreements or using unapproved/a competitor's 3rd party tools. Does not sound
like harassment.

------
junto
I had a similar situation whilst working at a PC manufacturer. The underlying
reason was due to a number of colleagues starting a company on the side. More
specifically, we had registered a company to do some web development for a
"Mom & Pop" type company. However, the project never got off the ground and we
didn't actually do anything productive with the company.

The company we registered was unrelated to the business of selling PCs, but
the end result was that I was escorted from the building along with another
colleague who was also involved.

Two more of my other colleagues involved in the aforementioned side-enterprise
got written warnings. It became apparent afterwards that we had been given an
ethics workshop some months before that hinted that we should declare any
outside company interests, and those interests would be judged as to whether
they were conflicts of interest or not. Sadly, we neglected to mention it.

Two further colleagues who were not involved with us were also removed on the
same day. I have no idea for what reason. Several months later half the team
got made redundant.

The dismissal process itself is familiar to the Quora description, except I
also had a guy from legal in the room. He looked exactly like Marsellus
Wallace from Pulp Fiction, but wearing a $3000 Armani suit rather than a ball
gag.

His opening gambit was to slam a huge pile of A4 on to the VP's conference
room solid mahogany table. As he glared at me, he told me that this was every
single email that I'd ever sent or received while working for said company.

It became clear that they had been monitoring all internet traffic in and out
of the workplace. Whether that was legal at the time in my country is dubious,
but it wasn't worth fighting at the time.

On my dismissal letter I had a strange reason given for the dismissal. It
stated that I had been dismissed "for misusing company resources during work
hours". It was related to the use of work email to organise the handful of
times we got together as a group outside of work. "Hey shall we get together
this evening for a few beers and program a bit?" kind of thing.

The others who got warnings had something different noted on their warning
letters. It specified that they had not declared outside interests in an
external company and that this was against company ethics rules.

After leaving the company I started up a web development company. I continued
to use the company that we had registered and continued to use it for several
years.

Several years later I tried to update my company director record because I had
changed my home address. A letter came back, stating that I had never actually
been registered as a company director. They enclosed the initial application
form from three years previous. The form was completed, but I had neglected to
sign it. Oh the irony.

It suddenly became clear that they had probably checked the company records
and noted that I wasn't registered as director. They probably thought that on
top of everything I was trying to be a wise guy. Sadly, it was just
incompetence.

Lots of lessons learned, but the golden rules are:

    
    
      - Never do anything on your work computer that is not 
        related to your work 
    
      - Always pay attention to ethics workshops and your 
        employment contracts.
    
      - Always be aware that if a company wants to cut head 
        count then heads will roll. It is cheaper to fire 
        people than make them redundant.
    
      - Marsellus Wallace has a new job slamming conference
        tables with piles of A4.
    
      - After completing a form, always remember to sign and 
        date it!!

------
jamisteven
If I were his current boss ide fire him just for writing this article.
Seriously, shit or get off the pot.

