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Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

economist.com

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Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#591

Post by jjk166 »

parafactual wrote: post #529
jjk166 wrote: post #113

If someone knew how to make not-shitty facebook, they'ed very quickly make tens of billions of dollars, achieve fame in the public sphere, respect in the technical sphere, and influence in the political sphere. Facebook would go the way of myspace and we would all rejoice. The fact that, despite the immense incentive and numerous attempts, no one has ever succeeded at making not-shitty facebook strongly suggests it i…

network effect

The network effect isn't an obstacle since you can be on multiple social networks. Tons of social networks have been successful since facebook. But all of them suffer from the same problems that facebook has.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#592

Post by dumbfoundded »

oska wrote: post #569
dumbfoundded wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement uses pretty charged language and I don't think you're considering all of the potential scenarios. The first is that giant companies like Facebook are so vastly giant and you have no idea what he does for them. If he was on the React team at Facebook, would that be acceptable to you? Just like governments, giant companies have good and bad parts. The second is that you don't know anyone's situation. Thi…

I appreciate your considered and nuanced reply to my fairly stark comment. My position on Facebook is that it is so awful an entity that it is not moral to work in any position in the company. And I don't buy the excuse of working for an immoral company (if you recognise it as such) because you need the money. But I recognise this is a fairly absolutist position.

"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." You can choose where to draw the line you want. Those who point fingers at other's moral purity only draw attention to their own.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#593

Post by notacoward »

dusklight wrote: post #530
throwaway00010 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Facebook and I agree with this. Some anecdotal notes on motivation headwinds: - Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and with offers to join— few people want to join product, and those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors behind this. - I know plenty o…

Can you talk a bit about how facebook measures impact from their employees? How is it defined? How closely do you think it tracks real impact. How often do people figure out how to game it, and how is it usually gamed? Do you think it is possible to modify the definition of impact such that an ethical component can be added to it?

I'm not GP, but I did work at Facebook until just over a year ago (two teams over ~3.5 years). For practical purposes, impact means measurable change of some metric(s). That can be latency, reliability, number of interviews done (really), efficiency, whatever. In theory non-measurable impacts are valued too, but in practice only if your boss and their peers org-wide who participate in "calibrations" are sympathetic. It's an uphill battle TBH, and not unrelated to why I left.

And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.

I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#594

Post by chandra381 »

ditonal wrote: post #290
dont__panic wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess that they mean 10% or more total compensation versus comparable positions elsewhere. But I could also see this meaning $10k a year or more because 10% TC is such an insane number. In my experience, Facebook's offers do tend to beat Google's by $10k or so. But it's all so random and all over the place that it's tough to know if that's a consistent number.

Yeah it's not even true that FB is paying a premium. A thread full of people complaining about misinformation happily posting inaccurate information about Facebook. Go look at levels.fyi. Facebook pays close to market for senior engineers (~450k), more or less in line with companies like Uber, Robinhood, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. In fact, Facebook doesn't even crack the top 5 on levels for senior SWE comp so…

> Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size

That is a wilful and bad faith misrepresentation of the Susan Fowler situation to such a degree that I am skeptical of everything else you've just written.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#595

Post by chandra381 »

zenithd wrote: post #467
deltree7 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourcing option pre-coursera/edx/YouTube/slack/remote-infrastructure is vastly different from post-x An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool. Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it

> Outsourcing option pre-coursera/edx/YouTube The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise. > slack/remote-infrastructure Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing…

> I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace.

Same here - it's an easy agenda to outrage about that's destroying the quality of discourse here on HN

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#596

Post by chandra381 »

deltree7 wrote: post #172
dogman144 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right. Two crowds are critical though: - this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident. - this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have t…

HN delusion about their own self-importance is strong on this one. There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work for Facebook, Google, Netflix. Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million. Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unin…

Please define what "woke" and "SJW" means. Whenever I see it being used on HN especially in contexts like this, it's a strawman for "anybody with a political opinion different from mine"

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#597

Post by Breza »

biztos wrote: post #349
revel wrote: post #328

Not sure if any of you folks have tried asking your friends which companies they wouldn't work for, irrespective of the pay, but it's interesting. Facebook and Palantir are the 2 recurring names whenever I've asked around. That was before the latest 3 or 4 rounds of scandal. FB has been in this area for years.

And yet, the one person I know who actually works there is the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck. Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate from there. Probably lots of people “wouldn’t” work for FB except that they a…

This kind of reputational damage can force companies to pay more to get to talent. Back when I was in advocacy for big tech, I attended a TPP briefing led by Commerce. I sat next to a lobbyist from big tobacco. I guarantee that guy earned a lot more than me. Yet there's no way I would have switched places with him.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#598

Post by sgregnt »

unethical_ban wrote: post #451
hunterb123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are banning dissenting information that looks bad for them. Similar to how CCP bans political dissent, Dems ban any stories on Hunter Biden for example. The Dems also ban things that look bad on China, like the lab leak, I suppose because they share some of the same goals. Also the election is perfectly reasonable to question. It's fine to question why the bell weathers and many other record indicators were brok…

No one has called for bans of discussions of the lab leak theory (or no one mainstream). It was simply obvious that early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless distraction in the early time of the pandemic, when the rest of the world was focusing on how to respond to the pandemic instead of beating the shit out of Asians and calling Coronavirus "Wuhan flu" to enrage the libs. No one has "banned" discussi…

> The main point is "It was simply obvious that early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless distraction in the early time of the pandemic, "

"Simply obvious" - who is to draw the line?

Where do you find the impartial parties to do this job?

Do you trust facebook or other actors to have the power to decide that something is "simply obvious"?

IMHI, the society has worked out the rules: If there is a legitimate concern for imminante violavce safety etc, go to court. If that's not enough to persecute then perhaps free speech outweighs the concerns, as in practice, "simply obvious" is too vague of a definition.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#599

Post by sgregnt »

voakbasda wrote: post #581
freebuju wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they manage to pull off Instagram for Kids

I can’t understand how Instagram for Kids can succeed. Any parent that knows half of the bad stuff Facebook allegedly does (and how other “for Kids” efforts have utterly failed to protect the children) would never let their kids on such a platform. I would sooner buy a product labeled Crack Cocaine for Kids; it would be safer for them.

So the assumption is that currently, without instagram for kids, kids are not using social media at all and are not exposed to adult content on the internet? Are we living on the same planet?

I dont understand this, instagram for kids is supposed to give parents more control over what kids do on the internet. How could this make things worse?

To me it looks like, blind oposition to insta kids is largely due to irrational hatred towards facebook (partialy because it is cool to hate facebook now, and partially due to political conformism. As both D and R have found reasons why Facebook is bad to them)

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#600

Post by AzzieElbab »

JohnBooty wrote: post #514
MiddleEndian wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. On Facebook, I talk to and organize events with my friends and family. My conversations are continuous across devices, and they are not mobile-first like texting or whatsapp or snapchat or some of the new…

To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. I enjoy Twitter a lot and my feed is 0% randos and celebrities. It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders…

I don’t even use the feed. Just private lists, and I avoid adding journalists.
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