The pattern of hiring young, passionate, ambitious workers, then telling them their job is of critical importance to the company (and, in this case, society at large) while simultaneously underfunding their team and providing them with completely inadequate leadership is REALLY common in Silicon Valley companies. These same companies will actively stigmatize saying "it's not my job," and so you have very green employees who end up doing work that's wildly outside their zones of competence and comfort, internalizing all the stress that builds up along with being put in that position and not even understanding that speaking up is an option.
Many of these people lack the experience required to see the forest for the trees and they draw similar conclusions to the ones in this memo. "There's no bad intent, we're just overworked and underresourced" (paraphrased) is something I've heard time and time again from people working on supposedly important problems at companies making money hand over fist.
Companies do this a lot with college grads, they sell them on a vision that they will have high impact and an important role in order to get them into their hiring funnel. It's not necessarily an operational failure more than it is a sleazy marketing tactic to prey on the lack of information by young ambitious people. Though it also results in an operational failure and a terrible waste of young talent.
It goes beyond the hiring funnel. These narratives are pushed and often believed internally. The people who actually do the work, who understand that things are not how they should be but don't understand why, who are passionate and ambitious enough to assume personal responsibility for the outcomes of their efforts nonetheless (as if a junior-to-mid-level data scientist receiving radio silence from their management chain can reasonably be expected to protect democracy in places like Ukraine and Azerbaijan), often don't understand that they've simply been put in a fundamentally dysfunctional situation - and it's rare that anyone will actually sit them down and explain that to them.
It seems strange to call it sleazy and say they're "preying" on young people when Facebook and other big tech companies end up paying some of the best money for new grads outside of pro sports.
They do a year a Facebook, get disillusioned, and then spend 2 minutes finding another job. Not exactly heartbreaking.
Once someone has been anointed a "whistleblower," it is a bad look for you to try to play devil's advocate to whatever she's saying.
Stepping back, without a media circus, how really do you expect to change anything at organizations this large and powerful? Facebook transcends governments dude, Mark Zuckerberg has an unfathomable amount of money and power. At least give her some credit for putting out a non-conformist opinion.
Also, with regards to your specific points, everyone is qualified to determine political bots are bad. I can't believe you're going with the, "Well she is missing the nuance oh and she gets paid a lot of money so there!" take here.
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate, I think you misinterpreted my post.
> Also, with regards to your specific points, everyone is qualified to determine political bots are bad. I can't believe you're going with the, "Well she is missing the nuance oh and she gets paid a lot of money so there!" take here.
The point I was making in that second paragraph is:
- Company A is wildly profitable.
- Company A says publicly and internally that solving Problem Z is very important to them.
- The team tasked with solving Problem Z at Company A is understaffed, underfunded, and lacks support from leadership.
The "forest" being missed by the people working on Problem Z is the unfortunate reality that Company A does not actually care whether Problem Z is solved or not. In fact, to the extent that solving Problem Z might hurt the bottom line they probably prefer that it remain unsolved.
I use placeholder terms because while this particular story is about Facebook, this same thing plays out all the time at darling companies in Silicon Valley (and presumably outside, but I've less experience there).
I respect the memo author immensely. In similar situations I've just left quietly. The author probably should've done just that, now their name is directly linked to this story.
Based on the substance of the decisions the author of this memo claims to have been making, I suspect they were drastically under-compensated and received insufficient perks.
Many of these people lack the experience required to see the forest for the trees and they draw similar conclusions to the ones in this memo. "There's no bad intent, we're just overworked and underresourced" (paraphrased) is something I've heard time and time again from people working on supposedly important problems at companies making money hand over fist.