With all repeated issues the company is suffering with their product strategy, software quality, privacy issues, executive retention, etc., why are people still eager to join the company?
A lot of the issues are perceived to be overblown - and in more cases than HN would like to admit, they indeed are overblown.
Quite a few double standards are being applied to Facebook by the media-industrial complex and the uninformed. On the other hand, Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own and deserve a significant portion of the criticism they get. It's a nuanced topic and isn't as simple as "FB bad, pls delete".
Facebook also has an extremely talented employee base and they pay industry-high salaries while also doing cutting edge work.
Smart people want to work with other smart people on interesting large-scale problems.
Destroying a society, addicting people/kids, violating privacy, generating inequality consequences -- interesting large scale problems indeed -- FB is working on CAUSING them. REALLY smart people wouldn't do this.
But then, who cares if you make big money. For allowing this the US deserves everything it gets.
This is the kind of rhetoric that people shut out. It doesn't work.
Facebook is many things, and has many effects on society. Not all of them are good and in some cases cause active harm but not all of them are bad and in some cases do active good. I think most people agree with this assessment if they're being intellectually honest.
And from there, we can try to identify what aspects are extremely problematic and potential solutions to curb the downside risks.
But the point of your rhetoric seems to be because you want to drive a specific agenda or viewpoint. Everything you said could equally apply to Television, Hollywood, or even Radio and those same arguments were made during the advent of those media too. It's just not interesting rhetoric to engage with.
Or, alternatively: moderation at global scale with billions of pieces of content per day is an incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology.
If you can reduce abusive patterns of misinformation on Facebook by a few percent, that's a huge win for both the company and for the billions of people affected by the service - by extension, society.
Or, even more alternatively, these aren't problems that could, or should be solved with/by technology, as much as Facebook's techbros do not want to believe it.
And besides, this isn't about moderation. It's that it is far from obvious if "social networks" (FB), or "personalized search results" (Google), or whatever it is that Twitter peddles provide any benefit to humanity.
That these are "incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology" -- well, good for them. So was developing V-2 rockets. At least that got us into space.
> That these are "incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology" -- well, good for them. So was developing V-2 rockets. At least that got us into space.
I think entertainment has immense value.
I love sharing dumb memes and pictures with my friends on Twitter. I like to laugh at cute puppy videos on Instagram. I like seeing vacation photos from my family on Facebook.
I also love watching SpaceX launches, reading about NASA's latest projects, and learning about the latest advances in AI.
I'm certainly in no position to boldly proclaim that rocket launches are absolutely more important than the movies that my friends and I enjoy watching. Fundamentally if the world was _only_ dedicated to building rockets and going to Mars, that'd be quite a boring society in my opinion. Luckily there's more than enough of us to go around to work on different problems that interest us.
We take something like email for granted, but I think that's at least as impactful/important of an invention as rockets - if not more.
I am pretty sure people somehow managed to share silly jokes with friends long before there were FB or Twitter, and will manage long after they are gone. Some of the best books or music in existence were written before there even were computers, let alone FB.
You also seem to have missed the actual point -- that working on "incredibly difficult, challenging..." problems is rather orthogonal to doing something obviously evil (or good, for that matter). And in case of Facebook, or Twitter we can already see verifiable adverse effects of that work. While I have yet to see anyone manage to point out any positive effects apart from slight convenience for a few people.
You don't have to be male to be a techbro, in a way.
I am also reasonably sure that FB (as well Google and others) are engaged in some pretty public efforts to improve the gender balance in tech. Or at least pay lip service to doing so. Might they be doing so because there actually is a pretty well known gender disbalance in tech.
Of course if you were meaning to say that a lot of negative moves on FB's part come from quite female Sheryl Sandberg, well, yes, but I don't think she's involved with the tech side.
Yeah, it's very hard, all but impossible, when your primary constraint is maximizing profit while holding tons of market power in an unregulated environment. Poor facebook, they really try their best. It's just so hard.
I think once you start thinking about the scope and scale of the problem, you'll start to realize how difficult it is even without the question of money involved at all (but yes, money does often complicate things).
You have to remember that this is a global service cutting across all cultures, countries, governments, and circumstances.
At some level, it becomes trying to design a system of governance that cuts across all those things in a scalable way. This is a problem where there is very little precedent.
The original sin in my opinion was Facebook charging ahead with a historic rate of growth without building the rails (moderation systems, governance, etc) to support that growth.
However, that ship has long sailed. Facebook is already massive now. It's easy to say with hindsight that the problems were obvious and to be expected. But the pressing question for society now is what do we do about it?
Not just for Facebook but for all similar services - of which Facebook isn't the first and it won't be the last. And what software solutions will the industry invent to combat some of this stuff? Who is building it? How much is shared? How much is driven by regulation versus this stuff becoming a competitive moat? etc etc.
It's a very interesting question and I look forward to progress in the area from all levels, including our legislators (whom I have little confidence in, but I'm an optimist at heart).
Too many words for nothing. There is a simple solution:
Deregulate and cut corporate taxes. If they have access to more private user data and keep more of their money from atrocious behaviour they'll be less atrocious.
Nice way to appear to be even handed while minimizing responsibility:
"Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own" - stumbled as if it has no organizational will that pushed in a certain direction e.g. the growth hacks & engagement efforts that have caused a lot of these problems.
> Nice way to appear to be even handed while minimizing responsibility
You're free to nitpick my choice of words and assume bad faith/intentions on my part. Doesn't bother me. We don't know each other.
But to your point, sure let's replace the word "stumbled" with "fucked up" or whatever else you'd prefer. I don't think my larger point really changes all that much.
I know a lot of senior data people (read: high demand tech people) applying there right now. A few things:
1. People who work there are generally happy. Interesting problems to work on, a company where tech is respected, etc.
2. A lot of those issues you list are common in big tech, see Google. The people I know who are looking at Facebook may want to work at a bigger, more stable company.
3. As everyone else mentions, $$$. That said, Finance also pays similar rates but I don't see a lot of people fighting for those roles, so that doesn't fully explain it IMO.
Because money trumps ethics in our society, and Facebook still looks like a good career move.
But there will be a tipping point soon (next 12 months) when FB stock price begins to legit crash after another scandal finally breaks the camel's back. Hasn't happened yet with the FTC fine, but it will come. When their valuation is no longer up and to the right, the hiring situation will change dramatically.
Interesting technical work, great peers, good comp. If you are a user, it's good to work on something that you use. If you're in the front-end space in particular, its exciting to work on things that have significantly changed the ecosystem.
(Ex-Facebooker. When the Cambridge Analytica stuff went down I wasn't too thrilled, but above all I left because of lack of work-life balance.)
Because of money obviously. If someone is out of a job for a month, especially if they don't have "deep" savings, they'll take the first or highest offer they get.
Also, how do you know they aren't having a harder time hiring?
Interesting problems (not too many places you can do stuff at that kind of scale/impact), very pleasant environment within the company, and yes, money too. And there are a few who come precisely because of those troubles, to make things better instead of standing in a glass house throwing stones.
Honestly, for that money, I'd sell out. But I'd also make myself a huge thorn in the side after the first year anytime anything unethical was going on. If I got fired, I would ADD IT TO MY RESUME, that I left a job at FB making 150k because I took an ethical stand against nasty behavior. I'd have a big chunk of green in my pocket, come across as a coding saint to future employers, and they would KNOW that my last salary was 6 figures. It's really kinda awesome!