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FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

wsj.com

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Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#521

Post by MertsA »

dahart wrote: post #269
hnreader998 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, companies are actively and deliberately discriminating against race and gender in tech companies in the name of diversity and inclusion. It boggles my mind that none of them have been sued yet for these practices.

What are you referring to?

I think he's referring to the incident where Google decided to throw out all applications from caucasian and asian men back around the beginning of 2018. They were directed to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline". Non-diverse meaning caucasian or asian men. They had a diversity problem so they decided to "solve" it in the most racist way possible. They also had another program to assign interviewers based on race and gender to match the applicant. Rather than trying to increase their hiring pool to cover some of the implicit bias they just decided to double down on the racism.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#522

Post by benjohnson »

watwut wrote: post #445
benjohnson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our small company has a "No drama" policy. We have an astounding diverse team and we've learned to appreciate each other.

> we've learned to appreciate each other. How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfuncti…

We have an issue system - instead of "Bob always leaves his mess to clean up" if you have a problem your supposed to put it in generic terms like "kitchen is sometimes left a mess" and then put a counter measure: "kitchen cleaning trainig and checklist".

If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it.

We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was.

He put it in the issue tracking system and we now have a public skill system and renumeration scale.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#523

Post by adamsea »

stale2002 wrote: post #498
ghaff wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to parse all the double negatives. But, in general, businesses businesses should generally have a fairly wide latitude as to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. (Though I think we can imagine various slogans a business might deem objectionable.) At the same time, businesses can reasonably have a fairly narrow latitude as to what employees should wear, even barring an official dress code,…

> to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. But the point is that basically nobody would call it a "political" decision if a store allowed customers to wear "vote for Biden/Trump" shirts. Nobody would call that political, if a store allowed customers to wear those shirts in their store.

Actually I do call it a political decision, but one that is not so controversial in many places in the US - the political decision to value freedom of speech!

In China, for example, while I don’t know for sure I would bet you could not wear a t shirt with the face of say, a former communist party member who had opposed current clique in power (Ie the closest thing to an “opposition” politician that China has).

Or a democracy activist t shirt.

Point is, in the US, though we are lucky in that we often don’t have to think about it, our politicial principles of free speech allow for a lot of behavior.

Stores are demonstrating their political belief in freedom of speech if a store manager doesn’t kick up a fuss when someone walks in wearing a t shirt for a politician the manager dislikes.

Of course there are probably also laws or the manager is savvy enough to know they could get the store sued, but, you get what I’m saying I think / hope :).

You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

And thus, what often appears to be not making a choice, really is making a choice, albeit the default choice :).

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#524

Post by lmm »

kelnos wrote: post #457
lmm wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding that other people describe you a certain way is not "your existence".

In some cases perhaps it isn't, in others it is. Who are you to decide for them? Grow a little empathy and compassion, perhaps. No one is asking you to use particular pronouns in order to piss you off; they're doing it in order to feel comfortable in their own skin. It's petty, selfish, and inhuman to deny someone that.

What's next, if I'm not handing over $100/week then I'm damaging their existence? No. If you want me to do something to accommodate you then ask nicely. If you demand the right to put words in my mouth and control what I think, you can fuck off.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#525

Post by shakkhar »

benjohnson wrote: post #522
watwut wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've learned to appreciate each other. How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfuncti…

We have an issue system - instead of "Bob always leaves his mess to clean up" if you have a problem your supposed to put it in generic terms like "kitchen is sometimes left a mess" and then put a counter measure: "kitchen cleaning trainig and checklist". If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it. We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was. He put…

Not saying that this can't work in practice, but it sounds a bit passive-aggresive to me. I'd imagine if someone has some feedback for me, they'd talk to me directly instead of leaving a ticket in an issue tracker. You already mentioned that your company is small and this system has worked for you so far, but I doubt this will work at Facebook scale.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#526

Post by Ruthalas »

fareesh wrote: post #438
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would notice the size of the ETL job necessary to do this (and tbh, I don't think anyone understands the individual level outputs of any large ML model well enough to accomplish this).

I'm reading a leaked internal Facebook document published on theverge.com where it's suggested that they build a "troll classifier" based on the use of words like "reeee", "normie", "IRL", "Shadilay", "lulz". The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump". Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" w…

Would you provide a link to that Verge article? I cannot find it.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#527

Post by PaulStatezny »

thurn wrote: post #341
throwitawayfb wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your perspective, it helps.

I suggest you try and talk to some people who actually get positive value out of Facebook for an alternate perspective. The HN audience (mostly young, nerdy white men) have always been one of the worst demographics for social networking products, and they might give you the impression that it's strictly bad for society because they don't personally derive any benefit from it. But if you step outside of that group, yo…

> The HN audience (mostly young, nerdy white men) have always been one of the worst demographics for social networking products...

Wow, that's a very racist/sexist statement and you don't even leave a hint about why you think it's true. Worse, it reads like you expect it to be obvious. What about a person's gender or skin makes them "a bad demographic for social networking"?

Edit: Also presumptuous of you about the HN crowd. Where would you even get those statistics? HN doesn't collect that data.

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