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

Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 368 posts

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#81

Post by pastage »

spoonjim wrote: post #61
kelnos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.

What the leadership does will be mirrored down to the grunt. I have never lead a multi billion dollars corporation but from my view if your team can discard someone easily, they can also bear not having that person around for two weeks. Or a year.

Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#82

Post by MarceliusK »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #73
MarceliusK wrote: post #67

The fact that Meta is aggressively trying to suppress the book just reinforces the point. If it were all "misleading and unfounded," they wouldn't need to fight this hard to bury it.

That’s not true. Just look at the current climate. If I repeat lies often enough, people will repeat the same lies and start to believe.

That's a fair point, repetition can make falsehoods stick. But if the book were full of outright lies, Meta could challenge it with clear evidence rather than legal pressure

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#83

Post by frereubu »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.

This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%...

The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#84

Post by rajman187 »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess)

Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#85

Post by frereubu »

isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

These kinds of amoral corporate hierarchies will by their nature promote people who give themselves over entirely to the business. It's not that everyone who works there turns into that kind of corporate drone, it just weeds out the people who value more of a work/life balance. If someone is willing to send talking point while they're in labour, a company with the corporate culture of Facebook isn't going to stop them, they're going to be rewarded.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#86

Post by __loam »

rajman187 wrote: post #84
wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#87

Post by poincaredisk »

blitzar wrote: post #36
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

It's Facebook though - I can not think of a lower stakes workplace. Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.

It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries.

I don't think the stakes are that low.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#88

Post by __loam »

MarceliusK wrote: post #82
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. Just look at the current climate. If I repeat lies often enough, people will repeat the same lies and start to believe.

That's a fair point, repetition can make falsehoods stick. But if the book were full of outright lies, Meta could challenge it with clear evidence rather than legal pressure

Or actually sue.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#89

Post by mschuster91 »

rajman187 wrote: post #84
wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.

And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#90

Post by mola »

max_ wrote: post #12
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... What should be the maximum of how big someone should be? Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

You probably don't have an issue with limiting government power. Why is limiting an individual reaching power of governments so difficult to fathom?

The problem is power accumulation, "small" people have a harder time limiting my freedoms by abusing their power.

I don't want a king, whether they got to be king by swords or money.

Post reply on HN