Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by bwasti » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

niceonedude wrote: post #375

bwasti wrote: post #259

I'm not sure how the journalist fact checked this, but in 2016 CMU sent 12 people to Facebook[1]. In 2018 CMU sent 27 people to Facebook[2]. [1] https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2016_one_pagers/scs/scs... [2] https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/scs/1-P...

Those are just SCS numbers. The CNBC article cites all of CMU. Facebook recruits from the math, engineering (EE), and info systems programs as well.

fair point,

2016 - 1 total from math and engineering

https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2016_one_pagers/cit/ece...

https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2016_one_pagers/mcs/mat...

2018 - 4 total from math and engineering

https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/cit/ECE...

https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/mcs/1-P...

If you're curious to do some more research, here's the link https://www.cmu.edu/career/about-us/salaries_and_destination...

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

#412

Post by finnthehuman » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #410

finnthehuman wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For a detailed nuanced piece [...] I don't see any nuance, I see invented complexity masquerading as something sophisticated. This article is written as if they're trying to suss out the perfect boundaries along which to apply censorship. That frame of thinking is a con. They will never have a perfect censorship implementation because there is no win state. Let me back up: As you read this, facebook has a censorship…

They're not a government and it's reasonable for them to have some editorial control over what's posted to their platform (in the interest of keeping it a place their users want to be). A lot of this is detailed in the article, it's helpful to read it.

> They're not a government

I'm not saying they are.

>it's reasonable for them to have some editorial control over what's posted to their platform

I'm not saying it's not.

I'm saying that their editorial policy is (in part) driven by fashion instead of principle. And complexity is used to obscure that rather than reveal it. My attempt to use Occam's razor to explain the obfuscation leads me to conclude there must be some utility that caused the system to evolve in such a way that it's possible to avoid seeing/acknowledging that.

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

#413

Post by niceonedude » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

bwasti wrote: post #411

niceonedude wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just SCS numbers. The CNBC article cites all of CMU. Facebook recruits from the math, engineering (EE), and info systems programs as well.

fair point, 2016 - 1 total from math and engineering https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2016_one_pagers/cit/ece... https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2016_one_pagers/mcs/mat... 2018 - 4 total from math and engineering https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/cit/ECE... https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/mcs/1-P... If you're curious to do some more research, here's the link https://ww…

Huh, those numbers are lower than I expected. Perhaps CNBC counted grad students as well, which is half the CMU population I think.

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

#414

Post by sizzle » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #388

sizzle wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Facebook used to be a cool thing to be on when you were documenting college party shenanigans and sharing pictures with friends, before it reached mass adoption to the point that your parents/grandparents were trying to add you as a friend. This was a time when organizing/sharing pictures with friends digitally was not a straightforward process. I've come to terms with a simple fact of life that aft…

> a simple fact of life that after graduating, it gets harder to make friends as you get older This is not really a simple fact of life, in my opinion. It only gets harder because people make less of an effort. If you put as much time and energy into being social later in life as you do in college, then it isn't any harder to make new friends. The main difference is that in school, you're automatically surrounded by…

That's my point exactly, relatively speaking you'll never be surrounded by ~30,000 university students who are forced to cohabit the same location in their most formative years.

The situation is much different when you have to find a babysitter for your kids to free up what little time you might have each day that is then split between you and your life partner to afford to socialize regularly.

I've just internalized this phenomenon as a fact of life after entering mid adulthood and settling down.

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

#415

Post by drugme » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #209

drugme wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one disputes that Google has its tentacles in many pots -- and definitely needs to be kept on a leash. But the claim was that Google was not just a matter of concern -- somehow a clearly bigger threat than FB. Can anyone provide substantiation for that claim?

That seems obvious. If you don't use Facebook you're pretty much outside of the Facebook tracking network with a few exceptions wrt Facebook cookie tracking which you can kill with a browser plugin like Facebook Disconnect. With Google, the tracking surface area is orders of magnitude more ubiquitous - everything from Search to YouTube to Chrome to Email to Android and on and on. Facebook is almost (but not quite) ne…

"Orders or magnitude" (plural) means something on the order of 100x.

Which suggest to me that either you're either exaggerating quite a bit - or you were using the term without quite knowing what it means. (Which something more specific than simply "a lot").

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

#416

Post by heyyyouu » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

djhaskin987 wrote: post #197

heyyyouu wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My teenagers have pretty much moved on from those.

> My teenagers have pretty much moved on from those. Out of curiosity what have they moved on to?

Honestly they don't want to tell me :-) They really, really don't want their parents on their apps.

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

#417

Post by webspiderus » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

Panini_Jones wrote: post #271

zippzom wrote: post #268

Personal anecdote: I had a job offer from Facebook and a couple other big tech companies. The Facebook offer was substantially better fiscally than the other ones and it was clear to me that they were having trouble hiring. Their initial equity grant has no cliff and the signing bonus was massive for somebody two years out of school: $75,000 cash in first paycheck. However I ultimately turned it down because of ethic…

> Their initial equity grant has no cliff and the signing bonus was massive for somebody two years out of school: $75,000 cash in first paycheck. * Google got rid of the cliff too. * The $75K sign-on bonus is nothing new. These are not signals that we're having trouble hiring now. > However I ultimately turned it down because of ethical concerns about working there combined with a sense that people would not approve…

how do you feel about still having to use outlook because of concerns about a competitor that's not even doing social anymore? I've read FB SWEs be aghast about people uploading whiteboard photos to Google Photos to be searchable later, paranoid about Larry and Sergey poring over all the data while twirling their evil mustache.

Also, if impressing other people is not what you're optimizing for then you might not have a great trajectory at a company that's obsessed with i m p a c t and hallucinating metrics to measure it.

Some parts of working at FB as a SWE are awesome, some aren't, everyone's mileage certainly varies.

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

#418

Post by EForEndeavour » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #388

sizzle wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Facebook used to be a cool thing to be on when you were documenting college party shenanigans and sharing pictures with friends, before it reached mass adoption to the point that your parents/grandparents were trying to add you as a friend. This was a time when organizing/sharing pictures with friends digitally was not a straightforward process. I've come to terms with a simple fact of life that aft…

> a simple fact of life that after graduating, it gets harder to make friends as you get older This is not really a simple fact of life, in my opinion. It only gets harder because people make less of an effort. If you put as much time and energy into being social later in life as you do in college, then it isn't any harder to make new friends. The main difference is that in school, you're automatically surrounded by…

> in school, you're automatically surrounded by a lot of varied people. Out of school, that's not automatic

That's exactly OP's point. Not automatic implies not as easy.

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

#419

Post by heurist » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #215

heurist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only one reason this whole thing is bullshit. The other is that the alleged content is just random gibberish with no obvious intent or means to subvert anything. It's only by assuming that every post had its maximum theoretical pernicious effect (and that a pernicious effect was the intent in the first place, which is just supposition) that this whole thing becomes meaningful. It is the desire to make this ass…

Viral gibberish can still influence subconsciously. But I think FB gets more blame than they should out of all this, and agree the collective is trying to pin the blame for complex social trends on a singular actor. Domestically, the fault is on FB, internationally on Russia, clean and tidy right? Makes it seem like regulation will solve the perceived issues next time around, while the bulk of the real issues are overlooked or ignored. I like Martin Gurri's take on this right now.

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

#420

Post by JohnFen » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #349

underwater wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? If Google uses your search history to target you with ads is that somehow better than them leaking the data and a third party service targetting you the same way? The end result is the same.

How are they same? Single source you trust versus multiple unknown parties having your data.

> Single source you trust

Assuming that the single source is trustworthy, sure. But we're talking about the likes of Facebook and Google here.

The two use cases for data aren't identical, and actually shipping the raw data out is worse. But, in my opinion, the two things are similar and the shipping out of data is not that much worse.