“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.

Same, I have a friend who works there, often tells me about how good his stock prices are etc, never ever heard him talk about ethics, it's just not even on his radar. The other day I installed messenger (in the hope I never have to login to FB web again) and received a message about 15 seconds later saying, "Good boy, that's good for my stock prices" ha.

I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something?

>I know what you mean though, it's like they're trained not to discuss topics with outsiders or something?

Pretty standard amongst companies to discourage employees from talking politics about the product.

It's hard to work for any software bigco that doesn't have an ethics violation somewhere. Same as living in a country without an ethics violation attributable to it's govt. Google is probably the scariest one out there out of all of the bigcos because of how much data they have on the world, yet they cover themselves with a cutesy image.

Such an odd impulse. I've known guys who sold heroin and meth on the small to medium scale, they don't defend the drug or their actions except to perhaps say "I'm trying to take care of my little girl". It might be a socioeconomic thing coming from a poor background nobody is really proud of what they do to make ends meet so nobody has to pretend to be.

There is no personal gain or advantage to dwelling on the bad things your company could be doing. So if you work at company X and company X does some bad things but you're working on something you consider not bad, you focus on what you're working on. Sure you'd do things differently if you ran the company but you don't, so you just ignore that stuff. Mental self defense at its finest.

You also don't want to rock the boat and bite the hand that feeds you (and your wife, children, etc.).

I heard the urinals at Facebook have a sheet at eye-level where the week's "metric-to-hit" is posted.

Methods like this seem to be effective, but creepy and invasive.

That can become common at many larger tech cos. Usually its about some random technical fact, like how to write a better test or whatever else. It's community driven at about the sophistication level of a community newsletter.

The urinals at the rest stops among the highways here have sheets at eye-level telling people not to drive when they're too tired or drunk. Is that creepy and invasive?

I've been in the Facebook office and it's true that they have information posted above the urinals. Didn't really read it though.

Ideally, who speaks for your wants and desires? Realistically, who do you allow to speak for you on a regular basis? Your mom? Your boss? Perhaps an unhealthy narcissistic friend? Facebook?

Speaking for others is formulating emotional responses for someone else and then constructing a dialog that elicits those feelings in that person. Today, that can be done with software as has been shown time and time again with Facebook. In the past it's been the tool of choice for those who control others. Narcissistic parents or greedy corporations, the end result is the same: loss of choice for all.