What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?
quora.com
quora.com
The harassment stuff isn't a zero tolerance thing. They even told us to go ahead and ask out other employees if you're interested, but just don't press if you get a no.
It's pretty clear he accessed data he shouldn't have, and for that a zero-tolerance policy makes total sense.
If it was accessing user data, of course he should be fired.
At my last job, a company that sells houses, people looked up each other's data for fun. I was kind of annoyed that one of the college hires found how much I paid for my house but that was the norm.
Okay, I should probably specify that I didn't tell anyone my address. People don't even know my legal name. I worked at and bought my house through Redfin. Redfin gets my info from my Redfin account. A little different than looking up an address on Zillow.
In their defense, privacy policy is probably better now.
Right now I can't tell if people are excited to tell me there are way to uncover my home address or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
Why would looking up a public record be an invasion of your privacy? If you want to hide it, buy your primary residence through an LLC incorporated in a state that doesn't disclose its members.
Even without providing your address, many US county government websites (the Recorder's office, Clerk's office, etc) allow for online lookups by name.
This is precisely how RedFin, Zillow, Trulia, and the like are able to obtain that same data...
Given that Facebook HR trawls user data to send job spam I find this claim quite ironic.
How about a red light camera? Pretty commonplace to push a yellow light, and when you get the envelope in the mail from the city ticketing office you probably know what it's about.
If you break the first type, you are out the door, no questions asked.
If you break the second type, you might be out the door depending on why you did it, who you did it for, who you report to, if you're part of the "in group" or whatever. In some cases, they're forgotten until later when someone wants to demonstrate an "ongoing pattern."
I know he mentions that it's for "privacy reasons"... but any rational person is going to conclude that you are not disclosing the reason because it reflects poorly on you and undermines your gripe.
Now if you are comfortable disclosing the cause, then perhaps there is some value to be gained in raising the issue. But not disclosing is a no-win situation... right or wrong you will be perceived to be in the wrong.
EDIT:
Funny that I get downvoted, yet most comments are basically "Clearly this person did something worse than they realize..."
Confusing friends and colleagues, possibly having no life outside of work.
"She's never at her desk, and she routinely cancelled our regular 1:1 meetings because she has no other choice"
Stockholm syndrome
"My boss's voice was devoid of emotion, even though we had gone through a lot together (at least from my point of view)."
The first step is seeing you are delusional...
Am I alone thinking that for this person getting fired is extremely positive and the opportunity to start anew with a healthier work/life balance?
The "omnipresent alcohol" bit is really odd too. Now weed is legal in california, are you also allowed to roll a spliff at your desk and go and smoke it on your lunchbreak? 420 deploy code every day?
I mean, we have beer o clock on friday afternoon, but generally programming is pretty hard, and while it may be fun to do all-night coding sessions while intoxicated at the weekend, getting smashed at work is surely not conducive to actually getting stuff done, especially in a team? All the espresso is bad enough...
We have beer o'clock sometimes, and occasionally the team gets drinks together, but alcohol is not an omnipresent part of everyday office life. The constant drinking (a lot of which was high-stress-commiseration drinking) I saw at startups was so normalized that this was honestly a cultural shock to me.
Another thing I see a lot (and you can see it in another answer to this question, further down) is people (mostly SV) referring to jobs as adventures. And more generally putting work on a pedestal and conflating work with life.
I mean I suppose in theory whatever floats your boats, call it an adventure, but to me an adventure would be going canoeing in Belize with (outside-of-work) friends. Show me a job that encourages and enables employees to do that and I will show you a job actually worth putting on a pedestal. 97 additional facebook notifications per day is not a selling point.
Do we generally blame the individuals who get pulled into a cult, or do we criticize the cult?
What a terrible society we're developing for ourselves.
Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistakes.
Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224057 claims they have only one zero-tolerance policy, accessing user data. It seems at least as credible as an anonymous Quora post.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
I hope you realize that the Quora post linked here is NOT the second hand account of a journalist, but was instead a primary source from an involved party.
I don't think the Geller-Mann effect applies to this kind of situation and I find it more than a little strange that you're suggesting it would.
"I am CONCERNED that you are reacting emotionally due to your biases"
and then you go and cite some article about a psychological research effect to try and make your point, by quoting something from a fiction writer speaking about an entirely different scenario that seems to be at-best tangentially related (and that is a very generous interpretation) to this issue.
what is your actual point? I would suggest you check your own emotions and biases. maybe you are unduly supportive of FB even in situations where they ought to be scrutinized and deserve to be criticized.
edit: now that I've looked into it more, what is even IS the Gell-Man amnesia effect? I can't find any credible sources on this besides the essay Michael Crichton wrote, where he appears to have simply invented this for his own rhetorical purposes.
Every system will contain components that can be reductivly described to sound on-the-face silly (like complimenting someone's clothing getting reported as harassment). The soundness of such a system relies on how closely tied the correction for that silliness is the expression of the silliness.
For example, there was a post on reddit recently about a proposed anti-bestiality law that would outlaw animal husbandry. Of course the easy hand-wave acceptance of this is that cops and prosecutors would exercise their discretion in such a way that this wouldn't be a problem for farmers.
But that's still a broken system. And should be mitigated if not fixed as closely to the source of the problem as possible. It's hard to see how the animial husbandry example could backfire, but imagine it's the CFAA which is more murky and politically charged. Or there were a zero-tolerance policy in place.
Additionally, having clothing compliments in the class of things reported raises suspicion on an otherwise innocuous action. Basically EVERYTHING that happens at an office can be done in a way to harass someone, but treating one subset with more scrutiny like this raises the baseline apprehension around that activity.
Of course, someone who didn't have a solid grasp of what harassment is (or worse, wanted to convince themselves that their harassment didn't count) would portray it that way.
Consider the following paragraph:
"Facebook has 0 tolerance policy on many fronts. For instance, on security: using an account you're not authorized to use can be reported as a security incident, said the training video. And so, a lot of security auditing which, paradoxically, is strongly encouraged among employees, is a terminable offense."
And sometimes attention-seekers will convince themselves that something they hear, even if it isn't directed at or to them, is harassment, and try to use it to harm other people. Like the Adria Richards thing.
No worries though. Eventually these types will find themselves working solely with each other, in some sort of bureaucratic-HR-dystopia, which requires explicit permission before anyone can speak to anyone else.
I doubt this was official policy but was one of those unwritten rules.
Interesting link: https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/27043/why-some-male-member...
I'm not sure this is something we're developing, though; I'm pretty sure society has been this way for a while. If anything, it's good that it's being explicitly spelled out, because hopefully that means the improper behaviours will start to extinguish.
And sometimes people really do think you're wearing a nice shirt and want to tell you that.
"That's a nice shirt, I really like it!"
vs.
"Hey, that shirt looks good on you now, but I bet it would better on the floor of my bedroom!"
are two ways to say that you like somebody's shirt. One is a workplace appropriate compliment, one is obviously not.
A policy like "even complimenting your coworker's clothes can be reported as harassment" isn't some trap designed to catch you and punish you for the act of being friendly. It's a policy that's designed to defang institutionalized harassment that persists under the guise of being friendly; by couching sexual come-ons or derogatory remarks ("I always like the shirts you wear, they're by far the best part of having you work here" is a compliment for the shirt, and an insult to the person wearing it) in the form of a back-handed compliment, disgusting people can then claim that they're being punished when all they wanted to do is be nice.
If you still don't understand my point, please let me know and I'll try to explain it further (:
This, to my mind, mirrors the "jaywalking" metaphor. It was bad practice, but it was either "Fight the client and force them to improve their own security so that we can safely assist them," or, "Do something we know is unsafe in order to get the job done quickly so that the client will stop bitching at us while paradoxically making it more difficult for us to help them."
You mean that thing that happens all the time at every office?
I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me, specifically because he was sick of my asking whenever I needed to be granted access to new things. I can't think of a single job I've that involved computers where I wasn't given access to user accounts that were not mine for reasons of expediency in the face of inflexable permissions systems.
thus it means explicit (and in writing! - good for you :) approval by the boss, and the boss bears primary responsibility here. In case of the original article it is pretty clear that the author didn't bother to get at least even informal approval from the higher-ups (even just mentioning that he is going to perform the task in that specific way in a conversation with that VP would go a long way) - that is a basic skill(or even i'd say "instinct") of covering your own lower behind one has to apply while working at a BigCo, be it Facebook or IBM.
> If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room.
So I doubt it was something like "Looked at a users private information"
He's running a test, and he wants to make sure his new function retrieves data properly. He can search for his own name, but out of idle curiosity and boredom (he's seen his own data a million times, he wants something visually distinct on his screen), he searches for the name of a friend of his that he hung out with last week. It's only a few different keystrokes to type the alternate name, but now he's accessing private information and gets canned.
(It probably isn't either of those things since I'm sure their tooling prevents that sort of thing)
That's a good way to lose access to production forever.
Don't rely on your employer's devices as your personal primary devices. Things like this may happen, or they might want to claim ownership of everything done on those devices. Hell they could even be tracking what you're doing on them.
Same goes the other way, your devices are yours, if you need a computer/phone/tablet for your job, your work should provide one. I see too many people happy to use their own devices at work so they don't have to ask for things.
This is the problem with investing yourself and your identity in your work. When things change, you get crushed.
I hope OP's coffee tastes better the next morning, the air fresher, and the sky brighter.
>At Facebook, you see posters everywhere that ask you what would you to if you weren't afraid, that prompt you to proceed and be bold, and remind you that this is the hacker company.
Almost gagged reading this.
How is the answer not: "Largely like many other places of a similar size and structure"? In a place with a particularly interesting corporate structure or decision making process it might be unusual, but Facebook?
Zero tolerance policies must be justified much more strenuously than they are. Strictly speaking, there should be no zero tolerance policies. Things that are subject to zero tolerance should be strictly controlled to where those policies can't be violated. Depending on a memo being broadcast to "fix" it won't work.
At work, if there is a zero tolerance policy and someone asks me to do something that even causes me to look at a zero tolerance policy, I bring that up and negotiate the ... something down. "We can't do that because..."
I'm not here to debug your policy suite ( unless you ask nicely ) . If it's in writing, I won't violate it - period. If stuff doesn't get done, then that's been already decided to be less costly than violating the policy.
"Everyone does it routinely".
So... everyone who works at Facebook routinely does this bad thing they would be fired for if caught?
Scandalous! We simply must know what this bad thing is.
On the other hand, the post was self-indulgent, boring, empty crap. I'm putting my money on the author's lack of anything interesting to say, getting in the way of anything interesting to say.
I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. It doesn't help anyone else because we don't know what mistake you made that we should avoid. It ends up feeling like the post is very one sided and IMO discredits the presented "feelings".
My 2 cents for you. :-)
*edited: spelling
He wrote "I won't go into what it was to protect my identity and that of all involved." So the person thinks it would be easy for Facebook or his former coworkers to identify the case if he told us what specific policy violation (s)he was fired for.
Isn't this a first signal when one should start looking for a new job asap?
As a manager if you have an employee who you believe is basically a good fit but has a performance issue you would really rather they turn this around than have to hire again. Particularly with junior people this can often work well.
I realize that some organizations often use PIPs for legal converage reasons and in that case it may be a foregone conclusion.
Sounds like they took a code shortcut, possibly violating NDA/privacy agreements or using unapproved/a competitor's 3rd party tools. Does not sound like harassment.
The company we registered was unrelated to the business of selling PCs, but the end result was that I was escorted from the building along with another colleague who was also involved.
Two more of my other colleagues involved in the aforementioned side-enterprise got written warnings. It became apparent afterwards that we had been given an ethics workshop some months before that hinted that we should declare any outside company interests, and those interests would be judged as to whether they were conflicts of interest or not. Sadly, we neglected to mention it.
Two further colleagues who were not involved with us were also removed on the same day. I have no idea for what reason. Several months later half the team got made redundant.
The dismissal process itself is familiar to the Quora description, except I also had a guy from legal in the room. He looked exactly like Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, but wearing a $3000 Armani suit rather than a ball gag.
His opening gambit was to slam a huge pile of A4 on to the VP's conference room solid mahogany table. As he glared at me, he told me that this was every single email that I'd ever sent or received while working for said company.
It became clear that they had been monitoring all internet traffic in and out of the workplace. Whether that was legal at the time in my country is dubious, but it wasn't worth fighting at the time.
On my dismissal letter I had a strange reason given for the dismissal. It stated that I had been dismissed "for misusing company resources during work hours". It was related to the use of work email to organise the handful of times we got together as a group outside of work. "Hey shall we get together this evening for a few beers and program a bit?" kind of thing.
The others who got warnings had something different noted on their warning letters. It specified that they had not declared outside interests in an external company and that this was against company ethics rules.
After leaving the company I started up a web development company. I continued to use the company that we had registered and continued to use it for several years.
Several years later I tried to update my company director record because I had changed my home address. A letter came back, stating that I had never actually been registered as a company director. They enclosed the initial application form from three years previous. The form was completed, but I had neglected to sign it. Oh the irony.
It suddenly became clear that they had probably checked the company records and noted that I wasn't registered as director. They probably thought that on top of everything I was trying to be a wise guy. Sadly, it was just incompetence.
Lots of lessons learned, but the golden rules are:
- Never do anything on your work computer that is not
related to your work
- Always pay attention to ethics workshops and your
employment contracts.
- Always be aware that if a company wants to cut head
count then heads will roll. It is cheaper to fire
people than make them redundant.
- Marsellus Wallace has a new job slamming conference
tables with piles of A4.
- After completing a form, always remember to sign and
date it!!