Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 444 posts

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#61

Post by seisvelas »

allthecybers wrote: post #9

This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB. There’s a litany o…

I have no money and a very shitty laptop, and thanks to Google Colab's free, hosted Jupyter Notebooks I'm having a blast learning Keras.

I'm not saying they're saints, but they've given me something free that's improved my life. Maybe it's ultimately greedy in the sense that later if I need a cloud platform I'll definitely use GCP. But I think that kind of mutualism is actually better in practice than altruism.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#62

Post by silversconfused »

asciident wrote: post #34
jjuhl wrote: post #26

The sooner FB just dries up and dies, the better (IMHO). What do we need that junk for?

I get a lot of value from Facebook, and it greatly improves my life, even just this past week. I found out about some career opportunities through friends' posts. I saw photos of old friends that made me happy. I got answers to questions I had about a specific uncommon musical instrument I had via a Facebook group. I searched for people who would be in a city I was visiting, to message them to meet up while I was the…

Literally none of those things depend on facebook though. Mastodon, reddit, IRC, or just sitting in your aunt's kitchen for an afternoon could substitute nicely. They have no niche.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#63

Post by Balgair »

nostrademons wrote: post #24
allthecybers wrote: post #9

This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB. There’s a litany o…

> I don't think there is any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise I feel like Google started that way, and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012. Projects like Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Summer of Code, Google Reader, Google Open Source, Google.org, and pulling out of China didn't really have much of a business justification, but were simply something good that they could do. Unfortu…

> and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012.

Tahrir Square was the high water mark of the old school techies. The failure of tech to effect real and lasting change really hasn't been understood by the techies, even still. That optimism about the future and tech's role in it, is gone.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#64

Post by mrtksn »

clairity wrote: post #51
jfasi wrote: post #38

I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook…

> "It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook." intersting anecdote. google is a bigger concern for privacy and personal liberty, yet jobseekers are shunning facebook because of the more wide-ranging negative press.

>google is a bigger concern for privacy and personal liberty

Big claim. Any proofs?

With Facebook, what annoyed me was that they set up internal teams to help with political candidates social media campaigns - no matter who the candidates are.

Extremely worrisome if you prefer to have people elected through a democratic process that is based on the discussion. This is not like understanding what people want or how do they think through big data analysis but manufacturing it.

Sure - provocations and lies are not new, it was always the case for politics but with a social media everything is at scale and everything is happening violently.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#65

Post by HarryHirsch »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #40
bloopernova wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for the Facebook employees below middle management level, but I also really would like some harsh penalties directed at Zuckerberg et al. I hate that huge corporations can just kind of shrug and say "oops" to egregious crimes, without any meaningful consequences. Same with corporations not paying tax while still benefiting from the stable society created by those taxes.

There are real signs of a moral change in this upcoming generation. I suspect a lot of people are going to be very surprised when that wave comes in and breaks.

The only thing that I see is a complete loss of faith in the rule of the law. Hence the Twitter lynchmobs.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#66

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

heurist wrote: post #36
astazangasta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB Come on. According to FB the IRA had 80000 posts over a two year period. In the same period there were 33 trillion FB posts. What moron still believes this garbage? FB…

I don't think you can discount that a concerted effort to create viral content will spread much farther than arbitrary wall posts by individuals. There are statistical methods Facebook could use to figure out how much of an impact that they had and I have not seen any such analysis yet.

Its also worth noting that when something goes viral, its often not contained on one social network, and it becomes impossible for the platform to measure its reach and impact.

How could twitter, for example, really measure the impact of something like that video of the Covington High School kids, which was amplified on twitter (shared by a fake account, IIRC), picked up by the media, and then talked about incessantly for weeks, all over the place?

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#67

Post by seisvelas »

gambler wrote: post #44

>Facebook candidates are asking much tougher questions about the company’s approach to privacy, according to multiple former recruiters. This narrative is highly suspicious. Zukerberg openly and repeatedly said that he doesn't care about anyone's privacy for well over a decade [1]. The whole company is built around collecting and selling private information. Why would people who care about privacy interview with Face…

Perhaps developers now value privacy more on average than they did back then.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#68

Post by akhilcacharya »

uerobert wrote: post #50

Correction: Facebook has struggled to hire talent [from top universities] since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Everyone knows if you didn’t go to a top school you don’t matter /s.

Anecdotally nobody who went to my undergrad got a new grad offer and then declined it at FB. Because most of them just can’t get offers there, and if they do they can’t get equivalent ones.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#69

Post by bhtru »

clairity wrote: post #51
jfasi wrote: post #38

I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook…

> "It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook." intersting anecdote. google is a bigger concern for privacy and personal liberty, yet jobseekers are shunning facebook because of the more wide-ranging negative press.

If you have time, can you elaborate why you believe Google is a larger threat to personal liberty and privacy?

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#70

Post by silversconfused »

Kinnard wrote: post #3
algaeontoast wrote: post #2

I actively turned down a facebook offer out of college, however, boy does facebook throw money at people who seem to turn a blind eye to online ethics... $$$

Is it possible that ppl who work at facebook have ethics that merely differ from yours?

Obviously that's exactly why they are NOT at facebook, though I chuckle at your attempt to reducing it to something as inconsequential as personal preference.
Post reply on HN