11–20 of 65 posts
More than 50 employees and one master password. Awesome. Most companies start silo-ing waaaaay too early, everybody breaking up into little "that's not my job" cliques. It's just much less painful that way. Sounds like FB actively resisted, whether through design or chance.
Not sure that's the word for it. Seems more like engineering naivete.
The thing is, I have a similar functionality at my company and the solution I came up with is conceptually simple but also a lot more secure.
There's an is_staff flag on every user account. If you have it set to True, you can log in as one of our customers for debugging purposes.
If you leave the company, you lose the flag. Simple as that really.
All the same power necessary to really get down and dirty with whatever problems our customers encounter, but with less potential issues.
I don't consider the above to be the end-all be-all as eventually it'll have to become more elaborate and locked down. For now, however, it seems to work well for a company of roughly seven people. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
god. jesus. NO. you've already set the course for the "here comes another HN thread where people act/get pissy" thread, so we might as well. Here goes: You probably can't imagine what it's like - for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a sexual act, nor can you fathom - the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this behavior and, worse, - knowing that they can't d…
Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point of swearing so much. If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.
god. jesus. NO. you've already set the course for the "here comes another HN thread where people act/get pissy" thread, so we might as well. Here goes: You probably can't imagine what it's like - for a female employee to be aggressively pursued by a supervisor for a sexual act, nor can you fathom - the powerlessness of being one of those women who have all noticed this behavior and, worse, - knowing that they can't d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point of swearing so much. If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
"Professional" comes across as dispassionate on the internet (and often face-to-face as well). Swearing is one way to express emotion in text.
You can be assertive and "professional" without sounding like a shriek.
I'm hearing a tiny, sad violin.
Seems like a pretty straightforward account. Neither condemning not lauding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm. I'm willing to bet your response would have been taken more seriously than his (hint: it wasn't) if you hadn't taken his tone and reduced it to the point of swearing so much. If it is such an important issue, perhaps treat it a bit more professionally.
"Professional" comes across as dispassionate on the internet (and often face-to-face as well). Swearing is one way to express emotion in text.
The only acceptable response is to forcefully smack it down. I thought pnmahoney's reply was exactly the right tone.
1. In the author's eyes, the majority of early Facebook employees acted in a juvenile masculine manner[1].
2. Some of those early Facebook employees weren't nice people.
Am I missing something more subtle?
[1] I.e., the manner young males are stereotyped[2].
[2] I'm not accusing the author of stereotyping.There is nothing wrong with something "unrepentantly boyish", anything more than there is something wrong with women's only schools. Working class men don't go around apologizing for doing difficult construction jobs, white collar men need to stop apologizing for doing the difficult programming jobs.
This woman was in customer service. She was lucky to be put on the Facebook rocket ship. So too was Sheryl Sandberg, a nontechnical and obviously ultrapolitical operator, placed on third base as COO yet thinks she hit a triple. Both Losse and Sandberg consider themselves "women in tech". They're not. They're "women on tech", women carried on the backs of real technologists, male and female alike.
[1] i.e., someone mature, responsible, sober-minded.