Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn’t anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it’s because we can’t draw these kinds of lines that we’re stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
FWIW, I’ve done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn’t work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn’t special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn’t the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn’t need your activism to be capitalism.
When you go to work with them, even as an employee of a subcontractor, they ask for your Facebook profile. This has to be your REAL Facebook profile, not a fake one. They will know and it will cause delays. They have AIs checking this so sometimes there’s not much human beings can do. I’ve seen people try to make fake accounts for this that get flagged for being fraudulent and locked and then you can’t do your work and things get slowed waaaaaay down.
Reason being, their work infrastructure is Facebook… and you use your own Facebook for this. Instead of Slack or Teams, they use… Facebook chat. Each of your projects has it’s own Facebook group, with it’s meetings scheduled on Facebook calendar.
I’m sure most people are like “That’s creepy, fuck that!” Just thinking about their employer not only having their Facebook profile but actually sort of being in control of it.
But an affect of it you probably don’t think of right away is… there’s no separation of your personal life and work life… for you. That is, when you look at Facebook to check messages from friends, you also get a whole shit ton of work notifications. When you check invites to see if you’ve been invited to parties or social events, you ALSO see all your meeting invites and project invites… and YES your boss and coworkers can see that you saw their shit.
#2:
They have a management culture of shaming and bullying.
Of course, Meta is a HUGE organization. One of the projects I worked on involved a recently acquired startup who was creating Metaverse content and they were fine, but their project manager was anxious about the pressure her new managers were putting on her. I can’t imagine she lasted long.
My direct contact was also great. BUT she was also always stressed out and talked quite candidly about “pressure”.
However, I also had direct contact with a number of internal project managers who habitually used such management techniques as
Belittling your work / results (“I expect better than this”) for perfectly reasonable work and progress.
Making threats (“There are LOTS of other people that would like to do this work”).
Calling blockers “excuses”.
I’ve worked with all kinds of different organizations, and I’ve seen plenty of toxic bullshit. I won’t say this was the worst ever, but it was a special blend of toxic professional culture. Where everyone’s so nice to you until they’re not and then they’re back to being nice and you know it’s fake nice. Everyone is all smiles… like some fucking Disneyland employees.
#3:
I got to watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about how “important” privacy is to them at Facebook. It’s part of their culture. He unironically said “It’s in our DNA.” It was so cringey. That was a mandatory meeting.
Now, they DO have policies that like… you can’t go look at people’s private information, read their DMs, etc. And they have fairly draconian policies for employees that violate them. BUT when this happened last year I was not remotely shocked. I had access to those tools, they’re right there and I’m sure employees abuse them all the time in ways that aren’t flagged. There are two things that keep employees from doing that:
It’s just wrong! (It really is… this worked on me and probably most people that work there, at least most of the time).
If you get caught it will be VERY bad for you.
BUT that’s it. So if you do it and don’t get caught…
But that’s part of it. When you work at Meta, you don’t know what your coworkers might have looked at and then not told you. You don’t know what their AI sees and flags and maybe brings to HR (or not). They don’t disclose that to you. You don’t know what upper management gives themselves permission to look at (or not). When I went to work there I went through my DMs and was like… “Oh shit, here’s this time I was drunk. Oh, and here’s this time I had a VERY personal conversation with a close friend about their sexual fetishes…” Like… it was really uncomfortable. They tell you “We don’t look at your personal information” and I think that’s MOSTLY true. But they do have bots look through it for various reasons and, like I said, if you come to the attention of upper management, you don’t know what they give themselves permission to see or not. They’ll just corporate speak at you about ethics in the phony corporate way.
There’s more specific details I’m not going to share. But yeah, after that little professional nightmare I was just done. I posted
“Hey friends! I’ve been doing some work for Facebook and I’m DONE using Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, please text me. Please invite me to stuff.” I didn’t delete my account and I sometimes log in and check my DMs (which I still am getting X years later) and respond to each one with “I did some work for Facebook, it really creeped me out and now I don’t use it. Please text me.”
And yes, not a single person I’ve related this to has stopped using it. This is why we’re doomed.
Second, I think you finally convinced me to delete my FB. I will link to this comment wherever possible to show people what a terrible company Meta is.
I was in this boat.
Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn’t anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it’s because we can’t draw these kinds of lines that we’re stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
FWIW, I’ve done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn’t work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn’t special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn’t the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn’t need your activism to be capitalism.
Can you tell us more about what they are like?
Some things.
#1:
When you go to work with them, even as an employee of a subcontractor, they ask for your Facebook profile. This has to be your REAL Facebook profile, not a fake one. They will know and it will cause delays. They have AIs checking this so sometimes there’s not much human beings can do. I’ve seen people try to make fake accounts for this that get flagged for being fraudulent and locked and then you can’t do your work and things get slowed waaaaaay down.
Reason being, their work infrastructure is Facebook… and you use your own Facebook for this. Instead of Slack or Teams, they use… Facebook chat. Each of your projects has it’s own Facebook group, with it’s meetings scheduled on Facebook calendar.
I’m sure most people are like “That’s creepy, fuck that!” Just thinking about their employer not only having their Facebook profile but actually sort of being in control of it.
But an affect of it you probably don’t think of right away is… there’s no separation of your personal life and work life… for you. That is, when you look at Facebook to check messages from friends, you also get a whole shit ton of work notifications. When you check invites to see if you’ve been invited to parties or social events, you ALSO see all your meeting invites and project invites… and YES your boss and coworkers can see that you saw their shit.
#2:
They have a management culture of shaming and bullying.
Of course, Meta is a HUGE organization. One of the projects I worked on involved a recently acquired startup who was creating Metaverse content and they were fine, but their project manager was anxious about the pressure her new managers were putting on her. I can’t imagine she lasted long.
My direct contact was also great. BUT she was also always stressed out and talked quite candidly about “pressure”.
However, I also had direct contact with a number of internal project managers who habitually used such management techniques as
Belittling your work / results (“I expect better than this”) for perfectly reasonable work and progress.
Making threats (“There are LOTS of other people that would like to do this work”).
Calling blockers “excuses”.
I’ve worked with all kinds of different organizations, and I’ve seen plenty of toxic bullshit. I won’t say this was the worst ever, but it was a special blend of toxic professional culture. Where everyone’s so nice to you until they’re not and then they’re back to being nice and you know it’s fake nice. Everyone is all smiles… like some fucking Disneyland employees.
#3:
I got to watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about how “important” privacy is to them at Facebook. It’s part of their culture. He unironically said “It’s in our DNA.” It was so cringey. That was a mandatory meeting.
Now, they DO have policies that like… you can’t go look at people’s private information, read their DMs, etc. And they have fairly draconian policies for employees that violate them. BUT when this happened last year I was not remotely shocked. I had access to those tools, they’re right there and I’m sure employees abuse them all the time in ways that aren’t flagged. There are two things that keep employees from doing that:
It’s just wrong! (It really is… this worked on me and probably most people that work there, at least most of the time).
If you get caught it will be VERY bad for you.
BUT that’s it. So if you do it and don’t get caught…
But that’s part of it. When you work at Meta, you don’t know what your coworkers might have looked at and then not told you. You don’t know what their AI sees and flags and maybe brings to HR (or not). They don’t disclose that to you. You don’t know what upper management gives themselves permission to look at (or not). When I went to work there I went through my DMs and was like… “Oh shit, here’s this time I was drunk. Oh, and here’s this time I had a VERY personal conversation with a close friend about their sexual fetishes…” Like… it was really uncomfortable. They tell you “We don’t look at your personal information” and I think that’s MOSTLY true. But they do have bots look through it for various reasons and, like I said, if you come to the attention of upper management, you don’t know what they give themselves permission to see or not. They’ll just corporate speak at you about ethics in the phony corporate way.
There’s more specific details I’m not going to share. But yeah, after that little professional nightmare I was just done. I posted
“Hey friends! I’ve been doing some work for Facebook and I’m DONE using Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, please text me. Please invite me to stuff.” I didn’t delete my account and I sometimes log in and check my DMs (which I still am getting X years later) and respond to each one with “I did some work for Facebook, it really creeped me out and now I don’t use it. Please text me.”
And yes, not a single person I’ve related this to has stopped using it. This is why we’re doomed.
First, thank you for the detailed response.
Second, I think you finally convinced me to delete my FB. I will link to this comment wherever possible to show people what a terrible company Meta is.