fbemployee1234

You make a principled point that I respect. I’m generally trying to get shit done. They aren’t always at odds with each other, but often are.

Personally, I hate web design and layout, so I want to do as little of it as possible. But I know I need a good looking site to be taken seriously. Templates have helped me out and generally last long enough that I can afford to hire a “real” designer.

Also, templates are $50 for a beautiful one. There are 2-3 OOM difference in cost.

How many successful businesses have you launched doing things “the right way”?

The point is there are many paths to success. Maybe candy japan didn’t do things the way you think they should be done (it’s frankly rude to refer to template hacking as cargo cult programming; we’re talking design here, not programming). But despite their “primitive approach”, they’ve been successful in multiple ways.

OP has taught me quite a bit with their experience, whereas your negative tone has taught me nothing except you believe you know how things should be done.

Honestly, you sound like a know it all.

In some of my previous employers, this type of work was all any employee actually did. Calling it fraud is probably not accurate.

Has anyone ever gotten prosecuted for brown nosing by shifting email times?

The skills you described are those of a data scientist/engineer hybrid. Have you tried clearly branding yourself as a data engineer? There’s a lot fewer of those, and the job is overlapping to the nearest understanding of a hiring manager or non tech person.

This sums up the advertising industry as a whole.

I think you could also identify similar negative consequences from any entity the size of Facebook. I think it’s a side effect of being big, and fb is no different than any of the F1000 or just about any government on the planet.

What I do see internally — executives down through rank and file acknowledge the problems and work really hard to address them. I haven’t seen the same level in introspection elsewhere, even when I worked for the DoD.

How are you measuring this utility function? What is the evidence that facebooks objective is to hack endorphins?

All the conversations I’ve heard discuss how to make products better for users. Even if it hurts standard metrics.

For example, the goal of the feed team hasn’t been to increase engagement for a couple of years now. The metric of choice is meaningful interactions.

The outsiders perspective of FB seems to be a couple of years out of date, compared to what I’ve seen.

I don’t think the product is bad, nor do I think it’s evil. The people who decide to use the service every day get value.

I think the negative fb news of late has really enabled people to strengthen their confirmation bias against fb.

For every super negative story that HN latches onto, there are a dozen internal projects that help the world in some way.

I guess I just see the intentions and a broader Perspective in some ways. When I saw how the sausage was made, I was actually impressed with the earnestness of peoples intentions.

Put simply, I don’t think anyone on HN has enough facts and measurements of outcomes to judge FB.

This. Poor countries use Facebook for really valuable actions like talking to loved ones. In the states we have alternatives and can afford a few bucks a month for a service. But in poor countries, Facebook is often a lifeline (sometimes literally, in the case of crises)

Throwaway for obvious reasons. Opinions are my own.

I joined in the last year. I had major issues with FB before, reflecting typical HN user stance. I joined because I was curious and their promises sounded like an amazing place to work.

And it is. They treat us better than any other company in terms of autonomy and input. Everyone has a tea seat at the table.

And what I’ve seen, the external perceptions don’t match the internal objectives. I hear real change from leadership, and most of the major issues are years old.

Fb has invested hugely in protecting elections, possibly more than any single government. They have doubled that on integrity, etc.

And realistically, I don’t think we know how to balance harm and good in the real world. I just don’t see tracking online activity as more harmful than the benefit that people get from the service. (Not so much US users, but the benefits to people in very poor countries are very real, and wouldn’t exist if the service didn’t monetize so well)

In short I don’t see them as an evil entity. They’re just a large one that is easy pickings for negative press. I used to work for the US government in a health research role; this feels similar.

When something is so massive and decentralized, the “bad press” events are gonna happen. I think FB, and especially Zuckerberg, have done a great job responding to these issues to try and solve them.

Remember, what Facebook is doing has never been done before. There are going to be mistakes.