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.
