
Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns - mewthree
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employees-quitting-whatsapp-instagram-cambridge-analytica-report-2018-4
======
leggomylibro
This is sort of surprising information, from my view.

The information about their business model and data practices which people
seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with
these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have
meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what
they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.

The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others
are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.

~~~
sametmax
Exactly.

And I doubt it's a mass exodus either.

If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that
when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart
people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and
security practices.

They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to
end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb
exploded.

And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.

While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is
close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt
FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.

~~~
alasdair_
>While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is
close to Feynman's IQ.

Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume.
(He scored 125 on his test at school).

See: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-
ein...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-
einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-
another)

~~~
luckydude
Unless I'm mistaken, I tested out at 140 a long time ago.

There is no friggin way I'm remotely as intelligent as Feynman was so there
goes any faith in IQ tests being meaningful. Most of the people who have
worked for me are demonstrably smarter than me and none of them are close to
Feynman. Smart people but not at his level IMO.

RIP IQ tests :)

~~~
droidist2
Doesn't it depend a lot on what age you take the test though? Like I was very
smart for my age as a child and I tested very high. Later in life I'm probably
not much higher than my peers.

~~~
mmrezaie
I think the whole point of IQ test is being stable independent of age.

~~~
JoshMnem
It seems like a goal of IQ is to assign a single, unchanging score to
someone's cognitive ability, but it is a severely flawed concept. The test
should not be called "intelligence quotient" but something like "cognitive
battery" instead.

You don't _have_ an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful
information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is
too ambiguous to use without careful definition) can't be reduced to a single
number.

~~~
Natsu
There's a difference as it were between, roughly speaking, stored knowledge
and being able to figure things out on the fly, but multi-factor analysis says
there's only one factor for being good at IQ tests, oddly enough. And every
test of doing mental tasks we know how to create correlates strongly with any
other test. There's a good explanation about how the tests work here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfg0hfrQMFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfg0hfrQMFM)

~~~
JoshMnem
I'm not saying that the tests are useless, just that they should be renamed,
and culture should look at them a little differently.

~~~
Natsu
I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of
human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though.

If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should
we label it?

~~~
JoshMnem
"Intelligence" is poorly defined in most conversations. The nature of the word
and concepts around it lead to problems, even for people who can score high on
IQ tests.

It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to
do it at some point.

~~~
Natsu
Mostly it seems to be quick and adaptable thinking, if I understand the test
results right. The colloquial usage is all over the place, as usual, but the
tests strongly correlate with things like being able to attain advanced
education and ability to be successful. Some of it appears to be inherent,
whether it's clock speed/RAM equivalent for our brains or what, because it
survives twins raised in completely different homes (including large economic
differences). That said, there are certainly environmental effects, too,
especially in the negative direction (e.g. lead exposure).

------
saagarjha
> Facebook engineers are quitting or trying to transfer to Instagram or
> WhatsApp

I find trying to transfer into another product hilarious: it seems to me that
they just don't want to have the stigma of working for "Facebook, the
product", without really solving the issues working for "Facebook, the
company".

~~~
ryanSrich
Yes.

Silicon Valley is turning on Facebook. Employees are realizing this and do not
want a tarnished resume. If you actually believe this is for ethical reasons
then you're not equipped for the world.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
Working for FB itself during this controversy won't tarnish your resume
anyway.

~~~
saagarjha
How sure are you about that?

~~~
FLUX-YOU
As sure as it's still a developer's market and FB controversy doesn't erase
technological accomplishments of individuals. Those accomplishments are easily
untied from the politics of the situation.

You may lose a small amount of jobs that would come your way, but you'd still
likely have dozens of offers to choose from from companies that don't view you
as 'tainted'.

Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and
motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense
to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.

~~~
saagarjha
> FB controversy doesn't erase technological accomplishments of individuals

It doesn't, but it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a
negative impact on society. Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel
algorithm to track people" on your resume?

> Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and
> motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much
> sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-
> fact.

I'll have to disagree with you there. Software engineers _should_ have to deal
with the ethical consequences of the work they've done. And these ethical
standards are hardly "after-the-fact": the idea of a right to privacy has been
around for a _long_ time.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on
your resume?

The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.

>Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the
work they've done.

Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report
unethical behavior by companies then. You're arguing correctly on a moral
ground, but you don't have good industry ethics without good legal precedents.

Otherwise the best chance you've got is to get media attention and now you're
fighting the company's PR.

When you can point to "Defendant can no longer work in software development
because of an ethical failure" cases, you will have a much stronger argument
to get engineers to follow ethical guidelines (we're assuming those have been
written down on something other than a Github-feelgood repo for that case).

~~~
saagarjha
> The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.

Sure, but then you're diminishing the value of what you did. If someone asks
you want you did at Facebook, it would be odd if you said "I'd rather not
say", as would it if you had five years of blank in your resume.

> Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report
> unethical behavior by companies then.

I do agree that this is an issue that should be addressed.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>Sure, but then you're diminishing the value of what you did. If someone asks
you want you did at Facebook, it would be odd if you said "I'd rather not
say", as would it if you had five years of blank in your resume.

I guess if you only worked on creepy and unsavory things, you'd be in a tough
spot. Assuming you can't weasel-word your way out of the creepiness and make
it more palatable.

If someone ultimately thinks that, you're back to "move on to the next
company". And the consequences are paid then and there. But again, you can
lean on the market's health to make those consequences really small.

------
taurath
I wonder how many new hires pass up Facebook because of ethical concerns.
Whats scary is if even internally people are moving departments because of
ethics, that basically filters so that the least ethical people are on the
teams with the most ethical concerns.

If there's a real net effect on their hiring, they'll have to increase
salaries to lure people in, which will take in even more unethical people (of
course, not everyone that works for or wants to work for Facebook is
unethical).

~~~
ThemalSpan
I find this issue much more pressing in the defense industry. I (thankfully)
have the freedom to choose where I work. I will never willingly work on weapon
systems. There are those that do though. Engineers who design things to kill
other people. What the actual fuck.

~~~
eric_b
That's great that you've got a set of principles that you live by, and are
able to stick to them. However, your principles are not everyone's principles,
and what you consider moral and ethical is not universal. Grellas had a great
comment on working for the military industrial complex a few days ago, that I
think is worth a read:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759324)

~~~
andyjohnson0
Lots of words in the linked comment, but it still amounts to making machines
that mechanise the process of killing people.

~~~
dsacco
"Lots of words"?!

You just reduced the linked comment - a nuanced, neutrally presented argument
that there are significant practical and philosophical difficulties inherent
to refusing to develop technology for military application - to _" lots of
words"_, followed by what is effectively a rhetorical sneer.

You don't have to agree with every comment asserting an opposing view, but at
least give them a modicum of respect if they put in as much intellectual
effort as that one. Why even bother commenting if you're just going to issue a
middle-brow dismissal without a substantive critique?

------
kcorbitt
I left YouTube about a year ago, in part due to cognitive dissonance between
my values and the company's objectives. If you're a current employee of a
similar company and you're considering your options, I understand the struggle
and am happy to talk about it! Everyone's circumstances are different, but for
me personally the TL;DR is that I'm much happier working somewhere where I can
get 100% behind the mission. Anyway, email's in my profile.

~~~
fred_is_fred
As a parent, thank you. YT is like crack for kids and they take everything on
there at face value. The sheer amount of fake or conspiracy videos that show
up in the suggestions makes it beyond unusable. I've found myself in the
seemingly backwards position of telling my kids to just go watch some normal
TV if they want to watch something.

------
collingreene
I work at Facebook and have personally seen no evidence of this.

The article cites one designer who left (out of ~25,000+ total Facebook
employees).

~~~
cierra
I used to work at facebook and I disagree. Even prior to the recent scandals,
there are plenty of employees who have decided to leave facebook due to
ethical concerns (myself included). However, most keep this to themselves as
Facebook fosters an environment where dissent is not tolerated.

Of course, it's unclear from this article whether negative sentiments have
increased substantially this year compared to previous years.

And to clarify, I'm not saying that I am innocent or that I have taken some
sort of ethical high-road. I gladly spent many years cashing out my pre-IPO
stock grants while turning a blind eye to numerous immoral business practices.
But soon after going public, there wasn't much benefit working at Facebook
compared to any other large silicon valley tech companies. Without the
financial motivation, the ethical concerns made it hard to be excited about
remaining.

~~~
cierra
Also, I definitely can relate to today's onion video:

[https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-
st...](https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-struggle-of-
trying-to-1825147978)

I think this (parody) video does a better job of capturing employee sentiment
than any Business Insider article.

------
ChuckMcM
I have a lot of respect for someone who chooses to not work at a place because
that place is doing bad things.

There are so many things that go into that decision, how "important" is it to
be employed, how "bad" is the business behavior, how "costly" to a reputation
is it to leave or to stay. It is the kind of question that puts a persons
character and self image on trial, and in my experience few people emerge on
the other side unchanged.

Faulkner said, "... the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the
problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good
writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the
sweat." I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. This
was one of my High School English teacher's favorite quotes. But in the late
90's I met people who were being ripped apart by working at a dot.com company,
knowing it was all smoke and mirrors, but staying to that they could vest
their stock and sell it before the rest of the world figured it out. Being in
a position where your personal wealth will benefit because you are
participating in, although not directly responsible for, a fraud that is being
perpetuated on the investors. How tainted is that silver?

A couple of years ago I was having lunch with an ex-Googler who was coming to
grips with their loss of innocence. They had worked in AdWords and were part
of a group that was increasing the average 'spend' of an AdWords customer with
targeted messaging that was designed to appeal to their use of the system.
This person had recognized that the goal of the program was to essentially
"trick" the customer into spending more money when all the statistics said
that doing so would not give them a commensurate growth in business or
traffic. And as bad as they felt about participating, they continued to do so
as the program manager stressed that nobody was "forcing" them to spend more
money, just offering them a way to think about where they would "want" to
spend more. This person was dealing with the realization that a younger
version of themselves would be disgusted with the older version of themselves
for "giving in."

It seems that people will talk about honor, character, and integrity in the
abstract with one set of views and then find their real character (or lack
thereof) when confronted with a test of their values.

~~~
yuhong
How often does this kind of thing gets escalated to Larry/Sergey in general,
BTW?

~~~
ChuckMcM
I expect everywhere is different. When I worked at Google I brought things up
during open microphone time at the Friday meetings (usually hosted by one of
Larry, Sergei, or Eric)

------
mFixman
Original nytimes article: "Facebook’s rank-and-file employees, who have begun
to question the company’s leadership".

Business Insider derivative: "Facebook employees are quitting".

This article is just shitty clickbait.

~~~
davidcbc
Typical Business Insider

------
ILikeConemowk
Too little, too late. Well, perhaps not, it's never too late, but still.

You built this behemoth, we told you so, you insisted because it was too hard
to resist, deal with it.

For the record, the situations in which some people find themselves are
complex and not everyone has the freedom a high salary or stocks or other
perks grant some of us.

Nevertheless, for those of us who choose to make the world, our world, a
nastier, less friendly, more neurotic place, I have zero sympathy. Reap what
you sow, in my case it's disdain.

I apologize for the hard tone but I'm not exactly known for accepting "sorry
not sorry" kind of apologies.

------
matt_wulfeck
I was recently testing the water with some Facebook engineers about switching
companies because of privacy related concerns. There was some sympathy wrt the
company going in a bad direction, but by and large they were staying put
because they enjoyed the technical challenges presented to them and pay. I
think stories like this are mostly fluff. Most engineers simply don’t care.

------
starpilot
"Some... Many believe..."

We don't know if this is a cluster of concerned people, or a broad trend
across the company. Given the vagueness, it's probably the former, because
exaggerating the number lends to a more interesting narrative. Not much to see
here, just a few people leaving FB.

------
hcnews
That was one employee? Articles like these have brought journalism over time,
step-by-step.

------
thinkcomp
It's never too late to quit Facebook as a user, as a contractor, or an
employee.

Better yet, become a whistleblower and leak to the press.

~~~
verandaguy_alt
Leaking corporate data or trade secrets to the general public is not the
solution for a couple of reasons.

\- Depending on the actual contents of the leak, people might panic; this is
basically never useful.

\- Depending on the outlet, the contents may get distorted before being
published in order to fit some narrative -- potentially causing a panic. See
above.

\- You or the original leaker may be traced back using even editorialized
data, or without the corporation seeing the data. This would land you and/or
the original leaker in a lot of legal hot water.

\- A side-effect of that is that you'd become unemployable in many cases, and
you might find yourself running from the law in other cases.

So, yeah -- quitting facebook probably isn't a bad idea as a user. Refusing
work as a contractor or an employee may be difficult, but because absolute
morality doesn't exist, it's really up to the person in that position to make
the call about quitting.

~~~
stale2002
Whistle blowing laws also exist, though.

So if they are doing something illegal, and therefore one is protected from
prosecution, they should absolutely "leak" it to the authorities.

Doesnt matter if you are unemployable if you recieve millions in a whistle
blowing reward from the government.

~~~
verandaguy_alt
Not all countries have whistleblowing protections, and even fewer will offer
fiscal rewards for the act.

~~~
stale2002
But the US has them. And anyone who is working for a major tech company is
"probably" working in the US and therefore covered by them.

And yes, the US offers rewards as well. Specifically, it is something like 10%
of the monetary judgment against the company, in many cases.

------
fredliu
Facebook is indeed in a crisis, but I just got the feeling that the media is
exaggerating anything that has the slightest negative bend to pour more fuel
to the fire.

------
sjg007
The US is funny. We once had privacy laws that protected your video rental
history. And yet very little has been done about protecting privacy except for
COPA.

------
newscracker
I have wondered for a long time why Facebook employees were even around. It's
not like the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the first time an ethically
problematic issue had happened because of the way Facebook was designed to
work. The people working on the platform created all these issues in some way
or another (due to not understanding the implications or management
direction).

My guess is that employees of Facebook mostly stay for the money, with a
second reason being for some kind of exposure on working on things on "planet
scale". I find it difficult to understand anyone being fine with Facebook's
ethics all these years and then changing their minds now. It is quite weird.

Facebook is a soulless company. If you're a Facebook employee and haven't
understood that yet, I cannot even sympathize with you (while being frustrated
and worried about the implications for billions of humans).

------
meri_dian
While data security is an issue Facebook must reckon with, it is not the major
issue Facebook's existence poses to democracies around the world.

The real issue in my mind is that the platform can be used by bad actors to
spread misinformation. It's as if during WWII the Nazi's had the ability to
publish editorials in leading newspapers throughout the US.

While this is a feature/bug of the internet in general, the vast scale of
Facebook and its near ubiquitous use amongst the general voting public in the
US and other democratic nations make it the most potent vector through which a
bad actor like Russia could spread propaganda and misinformation.

I'm not sure the recent move to label political advertisements as such will do
much to safeguard us from misinformation.

------
some_account
If it's anything like the rest of humanity, it's a handful of engineers who
cares enough to switch. The rest of them will sit on their asses.

------
zdragnar
How many times have there been privacy settings changes which undermined user
intent or resulted in surprising defaults? How many snafus have we witnessed
since its inception? I am astounded that employees are just _now_ deciding
they've had enough.

~~~
ygaf
It feels like a decade ago now, that FB and Google had data deletion buttons
that were protected by how bad the interface was to find them.

------
stolson
"Over Ethical Concerns"

Maybe over concerns that their department is in limbo due to the general
public's concern, but I can't imagine they have been working on their projects
and only _now_ found ethical issues with them.

~~~
JKCalhoun
IDK, they may have ethical misgivings before but now find they have to
rationalize these with their friends/family outside of the tech bubble. I'll
cut them some slack until I know otherwise.

------
neves
It is always important to consider the impact of your job in society.

Sorry for the following link. Sure, it is not the same, but this is the great
debate of "following orders":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem)

I'd also like references about the ethical debate about the Manhattan Project
where the greatest minds of humanity gathered to develop WMD.

------
spinlock
Is there any kind of organization for engineers that supports these types of
ethical issues? I recently resigned from a job because because of similar
privacy concerns and I found it really hard to talk to anyone. My situation
was a very clear violation of California law but everyone I talked to said the
same thing, "if you blow the whistle, you'll never work again."

~~~
Rafuino
There are some professors/researchers at Stanford and other CS-heavy schools
building curricula around ethical CS/engineering. Perhaps it could be worth
reaching out to some of these professors since you're in California. I'm not
aware of any sort of organization for this topic, but I imagine you could talk
with researchers in a private capacity.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/business/computer-
science...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/business/computer-science-
ethics-courses.html)

These are the Stanford profs mentioned in the article:

[https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/rob-
reich](https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/rob-reich)

[https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jeremy_m_weinstein](https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jeremy_m_weinstein)

~~~
spinlock
Thanks! This is a really helpful list of resources.

------
hw
So now, FB employees all of a sudden have 'ethical concerns' over their job
and what they were building. Let's be real - Facebook (the product) has always
had the goal of collecting as much data from users as possible, and displaying
as many relevant ads to users as possible from data that users provide. The
product, throughout all these years have been tailored and designed to do just
that.

Facebook isn't a billion dollar business like it is today because they take
steps in protecting your data and ensuring transparency and not selling out to
advertisers. Transferring to Instagram or Whatsapp isn't going to absolve you
of ethical issues if the leadership is the same. It'll be a matter of time
before FB finds a way to monetize all the messages you send via Whatsapp

------
Freestyler_3
Ethics are only important to the workforce when the company is shows to have
bad ethics, thus just having the company on your C.V. makes it look bad.

I saw the same things at school, studying for forensic IT. Whole classes of
people who think they learned to be an ethical person. The thing is, sure they
makke ethical decisions at times. But in a pinch they might not consider
ethics as much. Like when they really need a job. I myself don't consider
myself to be the most ethical, but my morals are strong... don't do evil!

Knowing what is evil and not evil, is a big part of doing the right thing,
can't expect the whole workforce to know where the line is or that there is a
line.

------
chis
This article is arguably fake news. To support their claim they cite a few
tweets and one line from a NYTimes article which is barely related. I love
Hacker News but lately this place has had a bit of a singular focus... It
seems to me that the ban on politics should perhaps be extended to a softban
on Facebook news.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-facebooks-employees-
crisis-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-facebooks-employees-crisis-is-no-
big-deal-1523314648?mod=e2fb) has actual sources, and comes to the opposite
conclusion.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The real way to tell if there is a substantial number of employees and
potential employees who feel this way is looking at Facebook compensation vs
similar companies. If they have to offer more money for similar work then that
means that there are a substantial number of people who don't want to work for
them. If they are offering similar money, then that means that the people who
don't want to work for Facebook are not a significant number of people.

The compensation will tell the real story apart from all the publicity and
attempts at spin.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are other reasons to compensate highly. Adam Smith gives five factors in
his discussion of wages in _Wealth of Nations_.

Price is a very thin signal, and deriving inferrences from it fraught.

------
fipple
This is probably FB people sitting on a few million bucks who have stayed due
to inertia. Now being at FB looks icky to their friends and they have enough $
to say fuck it.

------
Simulacra
This is surprising given the recent articles on leaking inside of Facebook,
and the response from other employees that such behavior lacks "integrity".

------
socrates666
As a problem solver, Facebook looks very attractive to me right now. Imagine
the shit they're going through right now. Not just damage mitigation but they
probably need to revamp their business strategy which will turn in to serious
engineering work.

------
nontechdude1
when they started working on "engagement" they never called it "addiction"

that alone is a sign of a deeply unethical company

------
arez
c'mon wasn't it super obvious that they are doing that stuff already for
years, the whole Cambridge Analytica isn't that suprising imho it's like
starting at Uber now and think they're just a "normal" company...

------
yuhong
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-
schmidt-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-
google-new-america.html) I wonder if this contributed to Eric Schmidt leaving.

------
sridca
> As it became evident that Facebook's core product might be to blame,
> engineers working on it reportedly found it increasingly difficult to stand
> by what it built.

What are they referring to here? That the code base has gotten unwieldy and
has become hard to change?

------
Kiro
Maybe this will increase my chances of getting a job at Facebook.

------
jacksmith21006
Depends on how many. Hard to believe material.

------
quest88
Can we stop feeding these accounts? The submitter is a new account whose
submissions are mainly facebook articles. It's not contributing anything
useful to HN. Why is this account posting so many FB related articles? Do they
have some other motive that HN is falling for?

At this point I feel like HN has turned into a FB news dump since it makes the
people who "quit facebook and never looked back" feel good. Where are the
quality submissions?

~~~
zemo
> At this point I feel like HN has turned into a FB news dump

Zuckerberg is testifying to congress right now. That's the news. You're not
mad at HN, you're mad at the present.

------
megaman22
What an incredibly first-world problem to have... Actually, it's worse than
that. It's a top 1% of the first world problem. Most companies, in the broader
world, are unethical, and do shady shit on a regular basis, but most rank-and-
file people aren't lucky enough to have been making the kind of salary
Facebookers can, nor do they have in-demand skills that let them hit the
ground running if they decide they don't like it for merely ethical, rather
than existential, reasons.

~~~
paulie_a
I am not sure what you mean by that, because other jobs suck you shouldn't
have any entegrity?

