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 expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.
From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.
I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your ~piece~peace with that.
EDIT: s/piece/peace/
This is a minor typo whose real intent was still understandable, you fixed it right away, and no one had replied yet. Adding the fake strike through and edit note makes your post a bit harder and more inconvenient to read with no advantage. You can just edit it in place, there would be no harm to it.
It sounds like one of the issues was that the C-Suite flirted with her
>Wynn-Williams also writes that Kaplan, as her boss, made inappropriate comments to her, including repeatedly asking where she was bleeding from after childbirth. She writes that, shortly after he called her sultry in front of other co-workers, Kaplan ground into her on a dance floor. She triggered an investigation into Kaplan and writes that she was “almost immediately” retaliated against with a cut in duties before eventually being fired. Wynn-Williams describes the investigation as a “farce.”
Honestly, they need to grow a pair
This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries
You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them
She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.
Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.
Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.
Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".
Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.
Controversial, but shouldn't be: men are on average better at standing up for themselves and saying "no".
Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.
If you’re checking your work email and replying to it during labour, I somehow doubt you feel like you were being “asked” and respected as a human being.
But I don’t know the full story from all parties, and I get the feeling you don’t either. I wasn’t judging this particular case in my previous reply, merely pointing out that violence can take many forms and we shouldn’t narrow our thinking of what it means to do harm.
Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.
This doesn't excuse Sandberg at all, I'm sure she would be a horrifically bad person to work for. But when I read that section I immediately thought of highly ambitious people I've worked with who I could see on either side of that encounter. Such people often are highly materially successful, although most of them don't seem very happy about it.
Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.
I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.
His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)
> Most people don't give two fraks
"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s
Thank you for never learning what communism means, for staying embattled and internalising the narrative, for your anecdotes about your rich friend who doesn't realize that communists are lurking out there, waiting to kill him and everyone with wealth, once they get in power.
I'd ask you to never change, but I know that you won't, you'll paint your future thoughts through the same stencil that I've heard and seen so many times. When you express this it feels like I get a taste of the real America, a trailer park with the metheads, the uncle that just got back from jail, educating his young nephew about how the world works.
"You see son, there are rich people and they are good. And there are bad folks called communists that are jealous and want to kill the good rich folks. Be sure to carry your gun with you and if you see any of them communists, shoot them up. Because we will be rich one day. God bless America."
>His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'.
Yes they are. Communism is obviously wrong. Are you joking?
Do we need that person to keep having the product though?
> Most people don't give two fraks...
They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.
But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?
The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?
Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?
I'm first to argue that, past certain size, social media platforms become de-facto town squares / utilities, and should be treated as such. But, until they are...
> Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
... until they are, it's kind of the core axiom behind capitalism and market economy and social order in most places around the world, that this is his money, and if he wants to be "squandering the resulting cash on" (according to you) "asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse", it's his prerogative.
We should really open the cage though. Can you imagine being able to call people only on your mobile network, or being able to send e-mail only to people using the same e-mail provider?
Yet we accept only being able to connect with, share photos and posts, message, subscribe to people on the same social platform as you.
If we can define a technical specification for exchanging social data, and enforce that the platforms above certain size implement it, Zuck won't even have the cash to dump on Metaverse. Every platform can then have their own algorithmic feed so you can chose your own echo chamber.
The moat is only good the Zucks of the world. It absolutely sucks for everyone else.
And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.
Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.
You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace hosts file, add firewall on your Android and block ad broker, doubleclick, adjust, mopub, google analytics, etc. etc (loooooong list).
Surveillance capitalism is not going anywhere. Where money can be made, money will be made.
Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.
One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.
Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.
I don't think the stakes are that low.
I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.
The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.
FB has become AI slop no man's land.
I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.
Twitter is not the place where the masses are being influenced. Especially outside the US, as in most other countries Twitter barely found adoption outside of tech and journalist circles.
The majority of voting people (= old people) are still on Facebook. And besides Facebook, Meta also own Instagram. Meta is definitely the single company with the most encompassing political influence tool, should it choose to use it.
They operate internationally. FB is still big in some of the South Pacific/Asia nations like the Philippines and India (iirc).
What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?
Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".
Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.
But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.
Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.
What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.
> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)
This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.
> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.
Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.
In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.
I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...
What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.
And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).
Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.
Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.
Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?
I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".
On that note, trust-busting is also worth discussing as a counter to the modern concentration of wealth.
Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.
'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.
> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.
> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?
Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.
Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.
Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.
I'll have "Everything I don't like is communism" for 500, Alex.
Ever heard of this little-known thing called taxes?
Particularly, progressive taxation and wealth taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
>What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Wealth isn't power.
Obscene accumulation of wealth is abuse of power in and of itself.
The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.
Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.
There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term. I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.
Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.
There is no solution.
You (and I) have no idea whether there is a solution. We've only explored the tiniest fraction of the societal solution space. The idea that we've exhaustively searched it by trying both "communism" AND "capitalism" is idiocy.
Choose to believe that we can build a better world. It might not be true, but it's certainly false if none of us believe it.
Still, I've never seen a poor human becoming an oligarch.
The problem is not that those billionaires are not perfect, rather that they have too much power.
In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.
In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.
In this hypothetical perfectly fair democracy, the ones with power would be the ones best able to sway the populace. Popularity, rhetoric, and control over media would skew the true distribution of power away from the perfectly flat one you might be hoping for.
Instead of aiming for perfection, we should oppose the systems that result in power becoming more concentrated over time. Our goal is an equilibrium where power is spread broadly and the most powerful are the most deserving (e.g, a scientist's voice has power because their expertise is respected).
One person, one vote is a good place to start. But it isn't the whole solution.
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.
Billionaires are bad for society.
Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?
Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.
Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.
Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."
People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!
It is a very small country.
There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.
Do you want your job still?
sure you can take "holiday", but if you don't please your capricious master, you'll not have a job to come back to.
I can well believe that Sandberg is someone who lacks empathy of her immediate underlings, the mission comes first after all.
The fact she felt she could not turn her phone off without there being consequences is the core point here.
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, spiritually toxic shit:
> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.
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?!