<story><title>Facebook Asking for Some New Users&apos; Email Passwords</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demanding-some-new-users-email-passwords</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s no reason facebook &lt;i&gt;needs&lt;/i&gt; to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.</text></item><item><author>leCapitalist</author><text>Easy.&lt;p&gt;The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they&amp;#x27;re trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it&amp;#x27;s all said and done, over $1M is wasted.&lt;p&gt;Welcome to life at a big tech company.</text></item><item><author>kyle-rb</author><text>I just don&amp;#x27;t understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying &amp;quot;hey, wait, isn&amp;#x27;t this an insane thing to do?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I would guess it&amp;#x27;s some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking &amp;quot;well we&amp;#x27;re doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn&amp;#x27;t they trust us, we&amp;#x27;re Facebook!&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baron_harkonnen</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s the added benefit that you now have a bunch of great engineers on your team, but this isn&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook Asking for Some New Users&apos; Email Passwords</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demanding-some-new-users-email-passwords</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s no reason facebook &lt;i&gt;needs&lt;/i&gt; to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.</text></item><item><author>leCapitalist</author><text>Easy.&lt;p&gt;The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they&amp;#x27;re trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it&amp;#x27;s all said and done, over $1M is wasted.&lt;p&gt;Welcome to life at a big tech company.</text></item><item><author>kyle-rb</author><text>I just don&amp;#x27;t understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying &amp;quot;hey, wait, isn&amp;#x27;t this an insane thing to do?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I would guess it&amp;#x27;s some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking &amp;quot;well we&amp;#x27;re doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn&amp;#x27;t they trust us, we&amp;#x27;re Facebook!&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nstart</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It&amp;#x27;s a rough world out there and it&amp;#x27;s better to get in line than lose your pot of gold.&lt;p&gt;Doesn&amp;#x27;t make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it&amp;#x27;s easier to say to yourself that you&amp;#x27;ll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.</text></comment>