[xdkyx]

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?

If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?

[Arainach]

Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.

Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.

My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.

[rozap]

The Koolaid is stronger at Facebook, because it has to be.

It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.

[busterarm]

I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."

That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.

[apical_dendrite]

I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.

Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.

[moolcool]

I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.

[aprilthird2021]

It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.

Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals

[rsynnott]

Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.

[myroon5]

'absolute power corrupts absolutely'

[optymizer]

I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.

Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.

I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.

It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.

[dogleash]

You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.

Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.

[pseudalopex]

Who was Jane?

Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.

[jkestner]

What was the app feature you worked on?

[dunsany]

Have you heard the stories about Uber?

[ozornin]

I haven't. What stories?

[hermitcrab]

Because Zuckerberg is a worse human being than the senior people in the other FAANG companies.

[charles_f]

Their product is somewhat different though, Amazon sells stuff and cloud. Microsoft sells business tools and cloud. Google sells Gmail, a declining search engine and cloud. Apple sells iphones and macs. Facebook sells people's data, advertising and opinion.

Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.