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

Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

thedailybeast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 377 posts

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#291

Post by engineerworks »

leCapitalist wrote: post #82
kyle-rb wrote: post #67

I just don't understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying "hey, wait, isn't this an insane thing to do?". I would guess it's some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn't they trust us, we're Facebook!".

Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.…

Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem.

It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions.

Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess.

I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management.

Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders.

It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see.

Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems!

Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure.

There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical.

If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that.

I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#292

Post by zitterbewegung »

Jgrubb wrote: post #243
u801e wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rivals of Costco are angry with them for paying their employees more to get better motivated ones and less shrinkage - when if they think it is a waste of money be happy about it Do you have a citation for this claim?

I don't have a citation, but I have read repeatedly that stock analysts cite "overpaying" their workers as a place where they could cut costs and boost short term profits.

Amazon is know for a large capital investment and their stock has gone up even though they could cut costs and increase their margins.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#293

Post by i_am_proteus »

matwood wrote: post #240
CalRobert wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great when you have the ability to forego potential salary. It's also why manufactured scarcity (especially in housing) enables people who wish to apply engineering effort in unethical ways. If 10 engineers are bidding on 5 houses, the 5 highest-paid ones will get it. Any pay raise they get will get dumped in to their house - give them all 100k raises and the house will go up by whatever another 100k a year in…

First, no one is talking about getting paid incredibly less (especially if you factor in COLA). It's more generally about not maximizing for only salary. Second, unless you want to work in one of the big companies, why work where it is only engineers bidding on houses? Engineers have the luxury right now of taking less pay and still making much more than a large majority of the population.

He's describing, hyperbolically but not wholly inaccurately, the Bay Area housing market.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#294

Post by circular_logic »

_jal wrote: post #269
nstart wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It's a rough world out there and it's better to get in line than lose your pot of gold. Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.

It is kinda funny when you tell their headhunters you will never work for them because they don't meet your ethical standards. I highly recommend the experience.

We're they confused, angry or both?

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#295

Post by mic47 »

leCapitalist wrote: post #82
kyle-rb wrote: post #67

I just don't understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying "hey, wait, isn't this an insane thing to do?". I would guess it's some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn't they trust us, we're Facebook!".

Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.…

true, apart from I would expect this to go from growth team (making signup as friction less as possible), not from anti-fraud team.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#297

Post by hackinthebochs »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #141
kyle-rb wrote: post #67

I just don't understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying "hey, wait, isn't this an insane thing to do?". I would guess it's some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking "well we're doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn't they trust us, we're Facebook!".

LinkedIn has been doing this for years. It's the reason why I don't use it (and the spam they send is the reason why everybody hates them).

Yeah, I'm not seeing where all this moral indignation is suddenly coming from. Asking for email passwords has been a staple for social networks since the beginning.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#298

Post by aczerepinski »

_jal wrote: post #269
nstart wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It's a rough world out there and it's better to get in line than lose your pot of gold. Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.

It is kinda funny when you tell their headhunters you will never work for them because they don't meet your ethical standards. I highly recommend the experience.

I told them a couple days ago that my belief in privacy as a fundamental right would make me a bad culture fit. They didn't reply.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#299

Post by petre »

engineerworks wrote: post #291
leCapitalist wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.…

Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem. It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions. Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I pos…

In my country there was a joke running about the communist establishment. It went like this:

You can't? We'll help you!

You don't know how to? We'll teach you!

You don't want to? We'll force you!

I guess these companies work pretty much like totalitarian regimes but at least you can quit without being shot.

Re: Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords

#300

Post by baron_harkonnen »

Traster wrote: post #103
leCapitalist wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements. The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.…

I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there's no reason facebook needs to be make these active mora…

I think you misunderstand the real purpose of these major companies fighting to hire as much talent as possible. Anyone in the Bay Area that cannot afford FAANG total comp knows how hard it is to hire top engineering talent. This is the end goal of these companies hiring policies: to remove talent from the market.

Before these companies where FAANG most of them were small, crazy startups that were able to easily acquire talent because tech was pretty boring at the time. You could pay market rates, but give someone an exciting project and they'd join you. That allowed all of these companies to completely disrupt the market. Having disrupted the market they are no longer interested in this happening again.

The current hiring practices are to basically drain talent from the startup pool. Paying an engineer 500k is much cheaper than acquiring the new darling startup they ended up creating (DeepMind), which is much cheaper than acquiring the now large company that is threatening you (instagram), which is still much cheaper than allowing existential threats to you to eventually IPO.

There's the added benefit that you now have a bunch of great engineers on your team, but this isn't the real purpose. The tech giants of the past, IBM, Oracle etc all failed to realize how important it was not only to have good engineers, but to also remove great engineers from the market.

Post reply on HN