<story><title>Ask HN: Current and former FB employees, what&apos;s the other side to the story?</title><text>Another day, another story of Facebook&amp;#x27;s reach overextending, breaching privacy unnecessarily, and generally acting in some form of bad faith.&lt;p&gt;But business is clearly still good and it seems like they&amp;#x27;re still able to recruit plenty of talent. So what&amp;#x27;s the other side here? Internally, are there feelings of consternation about all the negative press or is there a bigger piece that is missed by it?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really curious what the other side is here, especially given FB hasn&amp;#x27;t slowed down at all despite all the press.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fbemployee1234</author><text>Throwaway for obvious reasons. Opinions are my own.&lt;p&gt;I joined in the last year. I had major issues with FB before, reflecting typical HN user stance. I joined because I was curious and their promises sounded like an amazing place to work.&lt;p&gt;And it is. They treat us better than any other company in terms of autonomy and input. Everyone has a tea seat at the table.&lt;p&gt;And what I’ve seen, the external perceptions don’t match the internal objectives. I hear real change from leadership, and most of the major issues are years old.&lt;p&gt;Fb has invested hugely in protecting elections, possibly more than any single government. They have doubled that on integrity, etc.&lt;p&gt;And realistically, I don’t think we know how to balance harm and good in the real world. I just don’t see tracking online activity as more harmful than the benefit that people get from the service. (Not so much US users, but the benefits to people in very poor countries are very real, and wouldn’t exist if the service didn’t monetize so well)&lt;p&gt;In short I don’t see them as an evil entity. They’re just a large one that is easy pickings for negative press. I used to work for the US government in a health research role; this feels similar.&lt;p&gt;When something is so massive and decentralized, the “bad press” events are gonna happen. I think FB, and especially Zuckerberg, have done a great job responding to these issues to try and solve them.&lt;p&gt;Remember, what Facebook is doing has never been done before. There are going to be mistakes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Current and former FB employees, what&apos;s the other side to the story?</title><text>Another day, another story of Facebook&amp;#x27;s reach overextending, breaching privacy unnecessarily, and generally acting in some form of bad faith.&lt;p&gt;But business is clearly still good and it seems like they&amp;#x27;re still able to recruit plenty of talent. So what&amp;#x27;s the other side here? Internally, are there feelings of consternation about all the negative press or is there a bigger piece that is missed by it?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really curious what the other side is here, especially given FB hasn&amp;#x27;t slowed down at all despite all the press.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>badfrog</author><text>I worked at FB for three years as a software engineer. The people I worked with basically believed:&lt;p&gt;1) The core product is good and useful to people&amp;#x2F;society&lt;p&gt;2) Most of the negative articles about Facebook are based on some piece of truth but go out of their way to make things seem worse and more sinister than they really are&lt;p&gt;3) Zuck generally wants to do the right thing, but of course makes mistakes&lt;p&gt;4) Yes the company does bad things sometimes, but not significantly worse than Google or Amazon (which are the main places many FB employees would consider working if they left)</text></comment>