I had been meaning to write this for more than a month now, but I got caught up with business and other weirdness. So Ive definitely posted a lot of eye-rolling articles about the newest horrible thing I think facebook does or might be doing. Things like how their messenger might listen to you with NSA technology. I stayed out of the whole mood-altering experiment fiasco because I happen to know the guy who did it and I dont believe him to be an ill intentioned person. But the general picture was that I was distrustful and believed a lot of things about facebook that painted it in the worst possible light. You might imagine my reaction when facebook took a look at my linkedin profile and decided Id be a great person to work for them. Originally I was hesitant but my desire to know the full truth outweighed everything I had heard. Its one thing to read an article about a company, its another to work there or be close with someone who does. I learned that one from my family. They decided to give me an exploratory meeting. Its a fancy word for ask us all your questions since we know youve heard lots of stuff. When the recruiter first walked me through I made a point of looking at their posters and public screens, since that can tell you a lot about the company culture. Sure, the people they talk to could be carefully chosen to persuade me, but theres no way that they change all of their decorations every time a new candidate waltzes through the front door. To my surprise, a lot of the posters emphasized empathy and talked about how in Africa, the facebook experience is the loading screen. I chatted with two people, one who swore shed never work for facebook before she did because she also thought they were evil. I asked her some of the harder questions, like why the messenger is a separate app and why it asks for microphone permissions. As it turns out, thats all about video chatting, and theres only one permission to ask for which also includes when the app is closed. So I asked about the mood altering experiment. They had heard people got depressed by looking at other peoples achievements on facebook so they tried to confirm via an experiment. Turns out the opposite is true. The empathy on the posters wasnt just some shiny poster either. Their induction process is also designed to make you work with code outside your repertoire for the sole purpose of making you empathize with people who do regularly work with that code. It was rather natural to jump from that topic to diversity in hiring practices. It turns out facebook bucks the trend of silicon valley and hires people of all ages. A trend I never really understood to begin with, but its good that they dont put old people out to pasture with a fashion industry idea of what old means, sadly untrue of many companies in silicon valley. Naturally, I was aware that this experience I was having was also one facebook meant for me to have. After all, what kind of recruitment process would it be if they showed me the ugliest truths they could show me before I even interviewed? Fortunately I have a friend who works at facebook who is bluntly honest to an endearing fault who I immediately shot a message to to basically ask if all this stuff is for real and not just some propaganda designed to trick me into working for them. He said no, working for facebook was the best decision he ever made and every day he believes in what he does. I understand having misgivings about facebook, but the reason I attached this essay to this article is that I think the misgivings you think are about facebook are *actually* about any social network that does what facebook does. That the problems are intrinsic to the platform and facebook does a damn good job of coming up with good solutions for them. Not to say theyre perfect and there arent improvements they could make (otherwise why would they bother hiring me?), but they do alright given the service theyre providing.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:33:57 +0000
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