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Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

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

#361

Post by noir_lord »

visarga wrote: post #290
arcticbull wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ideal system is to eliminate all private money from elections. You as a candidate are given a stipend by the FEC at the beginning of the campaign season, the same amount as any other candidate for the same office, and you are free to spend it. You ran out? Tough. See you next election cycle. Nobody is allowed to give you money or anything else of value (including free airtime) -- not individuals, not companies, ju…

If you really want money out of politics then you replace all of them with sortition (assemblies of the people). They are representative, being drawn at random, for the whole population and they are not elected, so they don't need to campaign. Similar to politicians, they need to be supported by experts and advisors in the specific topic they are working on. I'd rather trust a group of random people deliberating than…

My approach is different, two houses (assemblies) one elected and one via sortition.

Elected can propose and pass but sortition house can block.

Basically the commons/lords setup but with the lord's replaced with random people.

That way the politicians answer directly to the people (or a random sample) of them.

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

#363

Post by stubish »

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…

There was a time when recruiters would put on a sheepish and embarrassed-to-bring-it-up look when mentioning the higher paying jobs they had for tobacco companies. Paid more, but few wanted the social stigma, even if their personal ethics were OK with it.

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

#364

Post by djohnston »

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…

it's surprising because it's totally false. read the above comments.

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

#365

Post by infinite8s »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #293
arcticbull wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ideal system is to eliminate all private money from elections. You as a candidate are given a stipend by the FEC at the beginning of the campaign season, the same amount as any other candidate for the same office, and you are free to spend it. You ran out? Tough. See you next election cycle. Nobody is allowed to give you money or anything else of value (including free airtime) -- not individuals, not companies, ju…

Well you'd have to toss out the 1st Amendment to get that idea off the ground.

The courts have already supported certain restrictions to free speech, so it doesn't require a wholesale toss of the 1st.

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

#366

Post by smsm42 »

hanspeter wrote: post #331
smsm42 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would prefer corporations (especially ones with such depth of funds and breadth of influence) be kept entirely outside the electoral process. Do you mean corporations being banned from providing services to any electoral campaign? Probably not, because in that case election campaign would be impossible. If so, then Facebook would be free to provide promotion services to any political campaign too - they are servi…

> because in that case election campaign would be impossible Would that be a bad thing? I would love an election that was simply an announcement of the election date and a website to see the candidates and their politics. The only campaigning would then be the government campaigning to get people to vote.

> Would that be a bad thing?

If you want to have elections, yes. If you prefer hereditary monarchy, then you'd be fine.

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

#367

Post by dodobirdlord »

freetime2 wrote: post #359
adjkant wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of cool tech, Apple/Google absolutely are a cut above Facebook now in my experience. Microsoft used to be below, now they rose as they embraced more open source and modern tech, I'd probably put Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon even in the cool category these days while Facebook was stereotypically above Microsoft before. Amazon, depends who you ask for a definition of "cool" from more so.

I would wager that at all of these companies, how “cool” your job is depends heavily on your specific team and role. I’m sure there are thousands of people with very uncool jobs at Google, and thousands of people with very cool jobs at FB. Comparing two companies of that size and saying one is cooler than the other is probably an oversimplification. That being said, I share your perception that Google and Apple are c…

I think your wager is completely accurate. With Amazon as an example, depending on your team you could find yourself doing high-performance work in cutting edge languages on a globally distributed high-availability FaaS platform, or you could be using Perl 5.8 to make tweaks to a website that will only be displayed in certain parts of India.

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

#368

Post by mark_l_watson »

Great discussion here, both about FB and G! There are trade offs between getting valuable services in exchange for user data vs. not wanted to live in a dystopian future (or, are we already almost there?)

It seems like an almost impossible optimization problem (for me) to balance wanting my country to be competitive in developing useful future AI and other tech to solve health, climate, resource, etc. problems, and, protecting people’s private information.

I am positively biased in favor of FB and G for personal reasons: I have been working in the field of AI and ML since 1982 and my recent work has been spectacularly helped by frameworks and pre-trained models released by G and FB.

I want a future world of combined privacy and tech-fueled hyper productivity. I just don’t know how to get there. I act consistently for these two goals but I have no control over how other people act, nor do I want to dictate what other people do. I think the best we can all hope for is some large degree of personal sovereignty over our own individual lives.

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

#369

Post by tim333 »

seisvelas wrote: post #61
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.

Also given the power and information that they have I think they've been fairly well behaved. I'm not sure what other commercial management I'd rather have have all my search and email info than the google guys. I guess a non profit might have advantages but then who'd pay for all the servers and the like?

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

#370

Post by icxa »

repolfx wrote: post #347
icxa wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hasn’t all of this stuff been obvious forever to programmers? Yes, but it wasn't at the "oh crap elections were manipulated, democracies toppled, dissidents tracked down, and genocides enabled" level. The fact that Apple, the world's richest company in the world, now has a mainstream marketing campaign around privacy tells you it is now officially mainstream mainstream, not just programmer mainstream.

None of those things have happened though, have they? Which democracies has Facebook toppled? Which genocides did they "enable"? And as for "elections were manipulated", I'll give you that one, but the only actual evidence I've seen of Facebook manipulating elections is shutting down the pages and followers of actual conservative political parties. The whole Russia story turned out to be smoke and mirrors, and based…

> Which genocides did they "enable"?

Mynamar

> It doesn't seem to have helped

yet. Also Apple's goal with the iPhone isn't global dominance.

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