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Comment by leCapitalist | Hacker News Reader

Easy.

The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.

The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.

The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation.

Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they're trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it's all said and done, over $1M is wasted.

Welcome to life at a big tech company.

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I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there's no reason facebook needs to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.

That's exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It's a rough world out there and it's better to get in line than lose your pot of gold.

Doesn't make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it's easier to say to yourself that you'll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.

There's a book about the process by which this happens: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds

> Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference.

The book Moral Mazes also deals with this topic.

Companies are not democracies. Is it a contradiction that we both praise democracy and spend our working time in dictatorships? Probably but we usually don't even notice it.

I think large corporations are a threat to both democracy and to capitalism. Excessive concentrations of wealth and power are dangerous. Clearly they can be leveraged for money and power, which is why they exist, but we might be better off with smaller scale enterprises and more equal co-operations.

I feel like you may share the same interest I have in this crazy giant federation of worker cooperatives (mondragon). I'm curious of many things in regards to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

This is such an astute observation, yet remarkably simple.

I'd never stopped to think about it, but I think the world would be a much better place if more people did.

It's not revolutionary to say that asking for user passwords is stupid and dangerous. Nothing good will come from giving your email account password to Facebook (or any company). It's also a basic human rights violation. We all have a right to our passwords. We do not have to share them with organizations seeking to exploit us and our information. It's just basic common sense, not revolutionary.

It's "revolutionary" to try and defy your bosses who tell you what code to write. Get back to your keyboard, serf.

When someone still works for such a company after an announcement this, they are part of the problem!

> Nothing good will come from giving your email account password to Facebook (or any company).

To clarify: nothing good for you. Ignoring ethical issues, Facebook certainly benefits.

It is kinda funny when you tell their headhunters you will never work for them because they don't meet your ethical standards. I highly recommend the experience.

We're they confused, angry or both?

Confused at first, and then eager to get off the phone.

I told them a couple days ago that my belief in privacy as a fundamental right would make me a bad culture fit. They didn't reply.

Now you got me curious. Was the response ... a bit unethical ?

Top tech talent generally have no idea how businesses make money. So of course you’d ignore them.

This.

I studied Electrical Engineering and in my experience, the only thing my classmates cared about was the technical aspects of the field, and often they couldn't see the big picture. Great talents of course, but more like robots, not even capable of understanding the humanitarian aspects of life. Such a waste.

Disclaimer: It's just my experience, not necessarily true for all engineers and engineering schools.

That's one part of it, I'm sure. Another part is that if you pipe up, you risk getting shunned: loss of income, loss of status, loss of being "part of the cool kids". Sure, you can get another job (that pays less) but you'll probably not work at the same cutting edge technology, and when you tell relatives or friends who you work for, their eyes don't light up.

If somebody offered me five to eight times as much as I make today with a huge boost in status and other positive side effects, and all they ask is to quiet down those silly principles, I'm not so sure I'd say no. "You can still do good in 5 years when you've made enough money to be set for life", I'd probably tell myself.

<quote>If somebody offered me five to eight times as much as I make today with a huge boost in status and other positive side effects, and all they ask is to quiet down those silly principles, I'm not so sure I'd say no. "You can still do good in 5 years when you've made enough money to be set for life", I'd probably tell myself. </quote>

The worst thing is, sticking to those principles just means someone else will take the job.

Coming out of university, I had one job offer (it was a bad down market at the time). My principles made me say no. I didn't want to work on guidance systems for military applications, thank you very much. That choice has cost me a great deal in earning potential. Even so, I would find it hard to blame someone for compromising their principles.

Did they not pay any attention during the humanities portion of their education? That's part of why it's there.

Disclaimers: I'm not an engineer, but my CS degree is ABET accredited. I also took a few more Archaeology, Cog Sci, and Philosophy classes than strictly necessary.

Personal data point:

Did a Bachelor's + Master's degree in CS in Europe. Only around 5% of my coursework had (and could!) be outside CS. And you could fill that with things like Game Theory 102 or Copyright Law 101 or something without issue.

This makes sense, as you get your broad education before university. School focusses on a well-rounded education, whereas universities let you specialise. I realise this is a bit of a contrast to the US education system, with majors and minors, etc.

That's more like the typical engineering school format. I went to a Liberal Arts university, nearly half my classes were general humanities and sciences. The rest were in my major (also required an additional 18-21 credits for the ABET accredited degree option).

Another personal data point.

When I was in college I did have to take philosophy 101. It and all of the other core classes such as biology and English were nothing more than annoying hurdles. I do enjoy learning about philosophy and such, but that is not at all what happened while I was trying to get my degree.

Though to be totally honest, to a large extent I considered the entire degree earning process to be little more than an about hurdle to entering the job market. I spent practically zero time reflecting in any of it during the process.

Where's the greater RoI in this case, what shady shit were they doing once they gained access to users email passwords??

Realistically, probably just logging into the email account once to prove ownership. Not dissimilar to how LDAP authentication works.

Is it a worst practice in our industry right now? Yep. Is it nefariously evil, probably not.

The industry standard appears to be "click on a link in an email", I think that's what FB did for me. So the question still remains what the RoI is that makes getting users passwords better. The only answers I can give are very bad, I can't see a legitimate reason to change to do it that way.

I'm not even sure if that is even true about mediocre tech talent, most people have some inkling of how their company makes money or at least how it intends to (some startups may obfuscate this information however, or not actually know).

Tech talent of all sorts generally don't know how the business manages money and what rules might apply to that management however.

on edit: added even, removed extra letter at end.

> enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent

Still less than what they spend on management.

It is an authoritarian mentality fundamentally of "social order" - that they are beneath them so it is the "proper order" to obey. Above profitability even. You can see that bit of outright sadism with retail in particular but the pathology exists elsewhere. Rivals of Costco are angry with them for paying their employees more to get better motivated ones and less shrinkage - when if they think it is a waste of money be happy about it. Instead irrational rage because they transgress their precious social order.

It is part of the norm but the norm is horrifying and stupid yet you are the crazy one for suggesting something different like actually listening to the people you pay to think.

> Rivals of Costco are angry with them for paying their employees more to get better motivated ones and less shrinkage - when if they think it is a waste of money be happy about it

Do you have a citation for this claim?

I don't have a citation, but I have read repeatedly that stock analysts cite "overpaying" their workers as a place where they could cut costs and boost short term profits.

Stock analysts is not the same thing as rivals, though. If people think it's needlessly costly, competitors would cheer because their competitor is pricing themselves out of the market. As for stock analysts, if it turns out Costco gets more efficiency out of their better-paid employees because they're better, more motivated and less likely to leave, then that will eventually reflect in profits and stock price.

Amazon is know for a large capital investment and their stock has gone up even though they could cut costs and increase their margins.

Capital investment != labor costs

Steve Jobs understood the problem.

https://youtu.be/fuZ6ypueK8M

I was looking for the Steve Jobs quote in this thread, thought this was going to be "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

Much more succinct message. Thanks.

Yeah, if there's one thing Steve Jobs is known for, it's listening to other opinions.

Ain't that the truth, but he said so at least the once, and now I guess that's how we remember him!

Part of getting all the top talent is that you can deny it to potential competitors.

I think you misunderstand the real purpose of these major companies fighting to hire as much talent as possible. Anyone in the Bay Area that cannot afford FAANG total comp knows how hard it is to hire top engineering talent. This is the end goal of these companies hiring policies: to remove talent from the market.

Before these companies where FAANG most of them were small, crazy startups that were able to easily acquire talent because tech was pretty boring at the time. You could pay market rates, but give someone an exciting project and they'd join you. That allowed all of these companies to completely disrupt the market. Having disrupted the market they are no longer interested in this happening again.

The current hiring practices are to basically drain talent from the startup pool. Paying an engineer 500k is much cheaper than acquiring the new darling startup they ended up creating (DeepMind), which is much cheaper than acquiring the now large company that is threatening you (instagram), which is still much cheaper than allowing existential threats to you to eventually IPO.

There's the added benefit that you now have a bunch of great engineers on your team, but this isn't the real purpose. The tech giants of the past, IBM, Oracle etc all failed to realize how important it was not only to have good engineers, but to also remove great engineers from the market.

I partially agree with you. When I used to work at one of the big five, PMs for my team would regularly disregard the engineers' output on most matters (apart from occasionally letting us make purely technical decisions). This, of course, ultimately led to almost the entire team leaving, including me, and the rest transferring internally. It's not all the engineers' fault. One can push back as much as one wants, but it rarely changes anything at all. However the PMs' success is measured based on delivered features and projects. In most big enterprises the engineers are just worker bees, for the queen PM bee and if they don't perform or don't want to do something, they can be somewhat easily replaced with someone who will. And don't forget that a lot of the engineers might be on a working visa, for example. And why would they jeopardize their job and their way of life on moral grounds, instead of keeping their head down and just going through the motions. I'm not saying that I agree with them, but putting all engineers in the same basket seems unfair. Now that's why realistically it is much rarer for a group of engineers to take a stance than you'd think. This is why cases like the Google engineers who refused to work on military contracts got so much attention. As inspiring and empowering as it might seem, in reality it (almost) never happens.

Your summary hits the nail on the head.

But you forgot the most important thing: What happens once upper management reads an article like this and realizes they f*cked up badly again?

Yes, more of the same hierarchy, compensation, promotions, and "culture".

Welcome to "efficient" big corporate hierarchies.

I mostly agree but don’t underestimate the effect that drinking the kool-aid can have on your ability to tell if something is wrong or not.

I’ve worked in these megacorps and I understand how easy is to believe everything they do is awesome.

“We’re just doing it to make it easier for our users” or “we’re Facebook, we know how to securely handle their passwords”

It’s very easy to _believe_ these things when you’re in the inside being showered with money and being told how amazing you are all the time.

But frankly, when you think about it, the only amazing thing about FB is how it got popular, that's all. As for the user experience it's very far from amazing, in spite of all the tech used. It's slow, and on mobile not only slow but also resource hungry, it has several glitches, plus there is a ton of things that annoy users.

Now, I can understands that someone working for SpaceX can think they're all amazing, but if you work for FB? It's like working for MS in late 90s - maybe good for you cash-wise, and that's pretty much it.

React and other JS projects gave them a largely positive reputation as tech employer in that field.

It's sad, because Facebook wasn't like that when it started out.

It was clean and light and fast, unlike MySpace which was often described as a messy, bloated pig.

Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem.

It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and externalities of our actions.

Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess.

I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management.

Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders.

It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see.

Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems!

Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure.

There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical.

If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that.

I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.

In my country there was a joke running about the communist establishment. It went like this:

You can't? We'll help you!

You don't know how to? We'll teach you!

You don't want to? We'll force you!

I guess these companies work pretty much like totalitarian regimes but at least you can quit without being shot.

This is why control > salary for me. I would much rather (and do) work at a smaller company making less money, but where I have real input in the company itself.

We routinely have clients ask for more tracking data on users and we explain/teach why it is a bad idea. In some way these FB stories help me, because I can point to these articles and ask 'do you want to end up associated with this?'

That's great when you have the ability to forego potential salary.

It's also why manufactured scarcity (especially in housing) enables people who wish to apply engineering effort in unethical ways.

If 10 engineers are bidding on 5 houses, the 5 highest-paid ones will get it. Any pay raise they get will get dumped in to their house - give them all 100k raises and the house will go up by whatever another 100k a year in mortgage payments gets you (I simplify, but not that much)

Not only that, those 5 highly-paid engineers who got the houses have every incentive to make it illegal to build more.

It's hard to stick to your principles when it means getting kicked out of your home, pulling your kids out of school, your spouse having to move away from their job, etc.

It's not just housing, of course, it's a huge part of it. The engineer with a $750 a month mortgage will have a MUCH easier time saying "fuck off this is evil" than one with a $7500 a month mortgage.

First, no one is talking about getting paid incredibly less (especially if you factor in COLA). It's more generally about not maximizing for only salary. Second, unless you want to work in one of the big companies, why work where it is only engineers bidding on houses? Engineers have the luxury right now of taking less pay and still making much more than a large majority of the population.

He's describing, hyperbolically but not wholly inaccurately, the Bay Area housing market.

> Welcome to life at a big tech company.

Most of this is, as you've correctly spelled out, just due to perverse incentives, and there's not really any intentional malfeasance. The REAL problems start when you get a neurotic psychopath with a modicum of power, and an agenda to climb the ladder, who pushes through ideas they KNOW are bad for the company, as a whole, in the long run, but do so anyway because they know it will help their career in the short run. I've been powerless to try to stop this from happening at two Fortune 250's.

> there's not really any intentional malfeasance

I would argue that the people at the top making these decisions are not ignorant about what is going on.

The finance industry gets (often rightfully) vilified for having flexible morals and reckless profit seeking, but this is not something unique to finance. Finance was traditionally the environment that enabled this sort of behavior, but the root cause is that fundamental human behavior is still fairly reptilian in nature.

As technologists we like to think that we are above this behavior, but we are not. All it takes is someone to wave enough dollar bills in front of our eyes and we'll mostly justify our actions with a mixture of whataboutism and by saying "I'm just a lowly cog in the machine".

I'm seeing a great many parallels in the short term predatory and risky behavior in the financial machinations of the past and the behavior of tech firms including FAANG today. Even with the best intentions, the system eventually evolves to a point where the show is being run by fundamentally the same sort of people in both industries. Perhaps it is because it is these sort of people who strive in a cut-throat corporate environment that is itself in a cut-throat capitalist environment.

I'm not saying this as some sort of hard line leftist either - hell, I work in systematic trading so I'm as much part of the system as one can be. Yeah sure, I should hold true to my morals, but what about all the others who are willing to replace me at a moments notice? I'm just a cog in the machine, my action will not make an ounce of difference and only cause hardship for myself.

Oh the irony!

I agree partially. First of, I don't think the finance industry gets vilified for having flexible morals, they attract hate for having no morals at all.

Certainly, you're right that we depend on each one to say "no, I won't do that", but I feel like there's a difference in quality: evil intent vs willful ignorance/negligence. There might be borderline illegal tax-dodging with large tech companies, there might be irresponsible data security, but there's not a lot that is comparable to the cum-ex-trades that large banks engaged in: no active defrauding of the government and/or citizens. Granted, it may happen once tech corporations have as strong a grip on governments as banks do, and feel secure enough that they won't have to face repercussions if it blows up.

Plenty of banks, and not just the large, global ones have actively engaged in tricking their customers by selling them junk and hiding and/or downplaying important details to get their sales provision, and it wasn't something that was "only known at the top". I've yet to hear of scandals of a similar magnitude in tech. Chrome doesn't contain any hidden crypto-miner, and if it ever will, I doubt that an investigation would reveal everybody on the team knew about it - it would likely just reveal a security breach or a small amount of people subverting the processes.

I do completely agree that tech isn't all sunshine, however. Behind pretty much every large scale data leak is an engineer that said "well okay if you want me to put this database server on the public internet and remove the password, I'm happy to do it" instead of refusing, and behind every horrible overreach in surveillance is an engineer that just blocks out the impact his work has on real people. There are people working on killer drones after all, and I don't think any of them are naive enough to believe that "they only target the bad guys".

> Certainly, you're right that we depend on each one to say "no, I won't do that", but I feel like there's a difference in quality: evil intent vs willful ignorance/negligence.

Oh so you are saying that the willful and deliberate exploitation of people's private data, the willful and deliberate ignorance of laws by companies like Uber, the willful and deliberate "research" done by tech companies to determine the most addictive products to entice people to buy in and stay on particular platforms, the willful and deliberate exploitation of minors by tech companies to get them to spend their parent's money on whatever stupid game or product is the fad of the week, or the fact that there are tech companies running targeted campaigns to influence voter opinion based on stolen private data is all just ignorance/negligence?

I strongly disagree. There is just as much rotten in tech as is in finance, the only difference is that many of the shenanigans enabled by tech have not been outlawed yet. Borderline illegal tax-dodging by large tech companies is business as usual compared to the other crap that they do, but being disruptive and breaking things is hip and cool, and it's Us doing it, and not Them, so we let it slide.

You say that banks are willfully selling junk to customers, and this is true. But this is exactly the whataboutism I was talking about. Tech companies mining people's most private data to get them to buy stuff they don't need is just as insidious, if not more in my book.

I don't see Facebook openly admitting to their users that every single bit of their and their loved one's lives will be exploited to the max to allow thirds parties to influence their opinions based on the wishes of the highest bidder.

I don't see them warning their users that right now they are (maybe) not being profiled by governments for thought crimes, but the data is all there, so if in 10, 20 or 50 years time the government changes, this is a definite and very real risk.

No, I'm not saying that at all. There are _some_ companies that run targeted campaigns to influence elections, sure, but they are a tiny minority in the world of tech. I don't like Uber's business tactics either, but I don't see them as the face of the tech industry - in fact, I don't really see them as a tech company. Count everybody who's main source of income is driving for Uber as an employee and the percentage of employees working tech roles is pretty small. Many large companies (including banks) have more and more complicated tech than Uber.

Again, let me make that clear: I'm not arguing that every company in the tech industry is staffed by angels, but that intentional bad actors in tech are the exception, not the norm.

> Borderline illegal tax-dodging by large tech companies is business as usual

And I haven't said it wasn't, I've merely compared it with what the largest banks have been involved recently. I don't know if it got worldwide coverage - this is what I was referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files

> I don't see them warning their users that right now they are (maybe) not being profiled by governments for thought crimes, but the data is all there, so if in 10, 20 or 50 years time the government changes, this is a definite and very real risk.

And I'd love for them to be legally required to explain privacy considerations to their users in such a way that informed consent can be given. Again: I'm not "pro big tech", I'm saying that big tech still has some room if they want to rub shoulders with big finance when it comes to amoral business practices. Big tech operates in a grey area, big finance hasn't seen anything but #000 in decades.

> Again, let me make that clear: I'm not arguing that every company in the tech industry is staffed by angels, but that intentional bad actors in tech are the exception, not the norm.

Just to be completely clear, are you arguing that the opposite is true in finance - i.e., that the norm is to be intentionally malicious?

I'm much closer to that position than the opposite.

This doesn't go for day to day interactions between you and a bank clerk, but rather for product development, sales etc. Fortunately, the industry is much more heavily regulated that the tech industry.

And in finance, they've developed entire management wings called "compliance" to watch over things and make sure that laws are not broken/the firm is not put at risk. I wonder if that will happen here (there is a distinctly smaller set of laws that can be broken, but Zuck apparently is asking for that now...)

Is it possible the private sector (free market) is not as infallible as I was lead to believe?

This story you wrote seems like something that happened a couple of years ago at Lenovo.

Facebook's would most probably not call it off. Or just resurface the same thing at another time with another name or excuse.

true, apart from I would expect this to go from growth team (making signup as friction less as possible), not from anti-fraud team.

This. You nailed it

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