This is another one of those "I got fired but I won't tell you why" posts. There was another post on here not too long ago about a guy, who for very vague reasons, got fired from Google.
I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. It doesn't help anyone else because we don't know what mistake you made that we should avoid. It ends up feeling like the post is very one sided and IMO discredits the presented "feelings".
> I don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired.
He wrote "I won't go into what it was to protect my identity and that of all involved." So the person thinks it would be easy for Facebook or his former coworkers to identify the case if he told us what specific policy violation (s)he was fired for.
I assume that FB calls "jaywalking" a specific kind of policy violation so I think his/her boss could still identify anon. I still think there is a lot of value to his post since the question was "What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?" not why. The reason why anon was fired is secondary.
I read it more as a log of the process rather than a call to judge. Human nature is to want to know "did he deserve it", but read as a tale of process that info isn't necessary.
To one extreme, this could be a case of "an unsolicited pat on the rear" being perceived by the offender as "a high five" and to the offended "a disturbing invasion or personal space."
On other extreme it could be he "chucked a tennis ball and it broke an office window." Everyone's perception these days of the extent/effect of any offense seems to broad that without details... what's the point of articles like these?
The hiring process is so onerous that I don't think it's believable when someone says they were fired over a single incident. Generally there's a pattern of counter-productive behaviour.
LOL! My comment is more on the perception disconnect that can take place. When I was a teenager I didn't yet have the experiences (being told what is or isn't appropriate and why) to know what was not ok like that.
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a one-off thing.
Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistakes.
The perspective of the post is from the person who was let go though. And I don't think that from their perspective they're lying or obfuscating, but perspective is a curious thing: it's different from person to person, and by necessity it favours the person who has it.
Firing employees for minor things is bad for morale & causes high turnover. Especially in software, a company wouldn't want to fire engineers arbitrarily, since it's hard to train new ones & transfer an engineer's knowledge of the codebase. That makes me really doubt his claim that this was "like jaywalking."
Especially if they're shown the door immediately and thus aren't available to train up their replacement. You lose domain knowledge and have to rely on a co-worker or manager to train up a new employee which isn't ideal.
did you read the linked Quora post? it pretty explicitly details that Facebook has a whole list of zero-tolerance "violations" that they will fire you for doing even once, without warning.
Legally they need to be "zero-tolerance" policies in order to restrict people's ability to contest firings. But in practice it's expensive to hire people, so while zero-tolerance policies are used to terminate people, it's typically not their first offence (unless another employee has an actionable case related to the employee's behaviour.)
In the Quora article, there is a reply by an existing Facebook senior manager, who confirms the zero tolerance policy, even stating that people get fired at Facebook for accidentally breaking a policy they were either not aware of, or had forgotten about. Facebook really do apply the policy that ignorance of the law (rules) is not an excuse.
It claims Facebook has a bunch of zero-tolerance violations, but in the same sentence it states that commenting on clothes might be reported (which is very different from a zero-tolerance policy, and quite possibly intended to indicate that "loving the slutty tank top" still counts as sexual harassment even if it doesn't involve touching).
Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224057 claims they have only one zero-tolerance policy, accessing user data. It seems at least as credible as an anonymous Quora post.
I suggest understanding Geller Mann amnesia effect. It's very true of Internet comments, especially about tech companies.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
are you meaning to imply that the author of the Quora post did not understand the reasons behind his/her own termination?
I hope you realize that the Quora post linked here is NOT the second hand account of a journalist, but was instead a primary source from an involved party.
I don't think the Geller-Mann effect applies to this kind of situation and I find it more than a little strange that you're suggesting it would.
I mean don't blindly believe everything you read on the internet, especially if it triggers your emotions or is about a popular company. HNers are susceptible to sensationalism too.
what you're doing now is basically a variation on concern trolling. what you just said to me is something like
"I am CONCERNED that you are reacting emotionally due to your biases"
and then you go and cite some article about a psychological research effect to try and make your point, by quoting something from a fiction writer speaking about an entirely different scenario that seems to be at-best tangentially related (and that is a very generous interpretation) to this issue.
what is your actual point? I would suggest you check your own emotions and biases. maybe you are unduly supportive of FB even in situations where they ought to be scrutinized and deserve to be criticized.
edit: now that I've looked into it more, what is even IS the Gell-Man amnesia effect? I can't find any credible sources on this besides the essay Michael Crichton wrote, where he appears to have simply invented this for his own rhetorical purposes.
Generally when there's a termination it's because there's a pattern, not a one-off thing.
Every system will contain components that can be reductivly described to sound on-the-face silly (like complimenting someone's clothing getting reported as harassment). The soundness of such a system relies on how closely tied the correction for that silliness is the expression of the silliness.
For example, there was a post on reddit recently about a proposed anti-bestiality law that would outlaw animal husbandry. Of course the easy hand-wave acceptance of this is that cops and prosecutors would exercise their discretion in such a way that this wouldn't be a problem for farmers.
But that's still a broken system. And should be mitigated if not fixed as closely to the source of the problem as possible. It's hard to see how the animial husbandry example could backfire, but imagine it's the CFAA which is more murky and politically charged. Or there were a zero-tolerance policy in place.
Additionally, having clothing compliments in the class of things reported raises suspicion on an otherwise innocuous action. Basically EVERYTHING that happens at an office can be done in a way to harass someone, but treating one subset with more scrutiny like this raises the baseline apprehension around that activity.
That seems like a deep (but possibly unintentional) misunderstanding. There are, of course, situations where you find someone who doesn't work with you nor are you friends with, and repeatedly tell them that you like their clothes, and they clearly aren't taking it as a compliment, and you persist, and that is unequivocally harassment. Technically, that consists of "telling a coworker that you like their clothes", but that's not what makes it harassment.
Of course, someone who didn't have a solid grasp of what harassment is (or worse, wanted to convince themselves that their harassment didn't count) would portray it that way.
Consider the following paragraph:
"Facebook has 0 tolerance policy on many fronts. For instance, on security: using an account you're not authorized to use can be reported as a security incident, said the training video. And so, a lot of security auditing which, paradoxically, is strongly encouraged among employees, is a terminable offense."
>someone who didn't have a solid grasp of what harassment is (or worse, wanted to convince themselves that their harassment didn't count) would portray it that way.
And sometimes attention-seekers will convince themselves that something they hear, even if it isn't directed at or to them, is harassment, and try to use it to harm other people. Like the Adria Richards thing.
No worries though. Eventually these types will find themselves working solely with each other, in some sort of bureaucratic-HR-dystopia, which requires explicit permission before anyone can speak to anyone else.
Have you talked to anyone of "those types" about their workplace? I can assure you that working in such an environment is not a dystopia, although it only works by making sure that people who do think it's a dystopia are kept far away (they're a bad culture fit).
I used to work at a multi-national bank, with very strict rules on sexual harassment. It was widely understood that a male should never be alone with a female with no potential witnesses around. This included getting into a lift (elevator) with a single female occupant.
I doubt this was official policy but was one of those unwritten rules.
Yeah, it really sucks that so many of their male colleagues sexually harasssed people so many times in the past (and continue to do so today) that it's an entirely believable accusation. Nice work Bankers and Congressmen.
I agree; it's absolutely a shame that people need to be explicitly told that harassment can take the form of compliments, and that saying something nice about somebody does not give you a free pass about the content of your statement.
I'm not sure this is something we're developing, though; I'm pretty sure society has been this way for a while. If anything, it's good that it's being explicitly spelled out, because hopefully that means the improper behaviours will start to extinguish.
"Hey, that shirt looks good on you now, but I bet it would better on the floor of my bedroom!"
are two ways to say that you like somebody's shirt. One is a workplace appropriate compliment, one is obviously not.
A policy like "even complimenting your coworker's clothes can be reported as harassment" isn't some trap designed to catch you and punish you for the act of being friendly. It's a policy that's designed to defang institutionalized harassment that persists under the guise of being friendly; by couching sexual come-ons or derogatory remarks ("I always like the shirts you wear, they're by far the best part of having you work here" is a compliment for the shirt, and an insult to the person wearing it) in the form of a back-handed compliment, disgusting people can then claim that they're being punished when all they wanted to do is be nice.
If you still don't understand my point, please let me know and I'll try to explain it further (:
Zero tolerance policies come into place when the fault for one person's action is placed on another entity. You see the same thing with the education system in the US. Something is done to one kid by another kid at school and the school district is sued. So the school district implement draconian policies to mitigate the risks. Same thing happened to places of employment.
There's a huge difference between 'I like your clothes' when it means "that's a good look for you" and 'I like your clothes' when it means "they'd look better on the floor next to my bed" and 'I like your clothes' when it means "I realize that you have asked me many times to stop this unwanted attention, but I also realize that you don't really mean it and don't you realize that I am really a Nice Guy".
At a previous job, I had a Sys Admin who once wrote a guy up because he used telnet instead of SSH to connect to a client's server. All I could think while reading the article was, "He must've used telnet..."
The client themselves would often leave the telnet service running because their employees would use it to connect to the server internally. Our clients were not the most tech-savy individuals, either, so if it was an issue where we needed to fix something and they hadn't bothered to turn the SSH service on, we could either call them and bounce around personnel until we found someone with root access whom we could convince to turn on the SSH daemon...or we could use telnet.
This, to my mind, mirrors the "jaywalking" metaphor. It was bad practice, but it was either "Fight the client and force them to improve their own security so that we can safely assist them," or, "Do something we know is unsafe in order to get the job done quickly so that the client will stop bitching at us while paradoxically making it more difficult for us to help them."
If you are considering writing a post like this ask yourself: "Am I comfortable telling people the cause". If the answer is no then you shouldn't write a post like this.
I know he mentions that it's for "privacy reasons"... but any rational person is going to conclude that you are not disclosing the reason because it reflects poorly on you and undermines your gripe.
Now if you are comfortable disclosing the cause, then perhaps there is some value to be gained in raising the issue. But not disclosing is a no-win situation... right or wrong you will be perceived to be in the wrong.
EDIT:
Funny that I get downvoted, yet most comments are basically "Clearly this person did something worse than they realize..."
It could just be that he didn't want to make a post with personally identifiable information. I know if I was in his position I wouldn't really want my former coworkers to immediately think I was the person who wrote that post.
It's unlikely Facebook would fire anyone without the complainant having enough of a case to be legally actionable. Thus, it's safe I think to assume that there was a pattern of unsolicited advances towards an individual. I admit this is conjecture, but it's a common story and as such makes a valid theory for what happened here.
Nowhere is it implied the reason for firing was related to harassment, but instead the rules relating to that were only used as an example to illustrate a point.
if (s)he broke a written rule or policy that's all they need, (s)he admitted to breaking a rule that (s)he thought was minor, like jaywalking, explicitly said it was not like harassment.
The only thing she was interested in was whether I had done the action that was held against me, and whether somebody had asked me to do it. Think again of what I did as jaywalking. Yes I did it, and nobody made me. I was working on a special project with a VP at that time, and he had nothing to do with it. She asked me why I did it, and I explained - jaywalking takes you from point A to point B faster, it's not a conspiracy to create a traffic jam. In other words, in what I did there was no damaged caused, no intention to harm anyone, and no way for me to profit from it. If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room.
Sounds like they took a code shortcut, possibly violating NDA/privacy agreements or using unapproved/a competitor's 3rd party tools. Does not sound like harassment.
It seems a little bizarre to me to think of being fired as being very meaningfully company specific.
How is the answer not: "Largely like many other places of a similar size and structure"? In a place with a particularly interesting corporate structure or decision making process it might be unusual, but Facebook?
I would be interested in what constitutes as "jaywalking" in a software company. Something everyone does but can be grounds to termination? Can anyone tell me about specific cases?
maybe login in with somebody else's credentials? or some other security-related or procedural stuff that he bypassed to make things easier? using non-authorized (personal) equipment or software? just speculating
One time when I was an intern, I got screamed at by an old-timer technician when he found out I connected a few computers in a lab room to the Internet. Because an Internet connection causes viruses.
Well one certain way to have security on a computer is to have an air gap, i.e. do not connect it to any other network. (And yes air gap made more sense when all networking was with cabled, not with wifi.)
Why does that make you think it's not looking at user's private information?
He's running a test, and he wants to make sure his new function retrieves data properly. He can search for his own name, but out of idle curiosity and boredom (he's seen his own data a million times, he wants something visually distinct on his screen), he searches for the name of a friend of his that he hung out with last week. It's only a few different keystrokes to type the alternate name, but now he's accessing private information and gets canned.
The first thing that came to mind was something like deploying something without going through the proper process or modifying something directly in production.
(It probably isn't either of those things since I'm sure their tooling prevents that sort of thing)
"Misuse of company resources" like "reading/commenting on hacker news from work." The ability to find something "everyone does" in order to get rid of people you don't like, for whatever reason.
When I first read this on Quora I couldn't help but think we don't actually know that what the fired employee did was actually as common and benign as they claim, since we don't know what it was. That might sort of change the story.
So having interned at Facebook, I find this post confusing. They made it very clear to us during HR onboarding that the only zero tolerance policy was on unauthorized access to user data.
The harassment stuff isn't a zero tolerance thing. They even told us to go ahead and ask out other employees if you're interested, but just don't press if you get a no.
It's pretty clear he accessed data he shouldn't have, and for that a zero-tolerance policy makes total sense.
It sounds like he violated a privacy issue. Probably looked up a friend or celebrity.
At my last job, a company that sells houses, people looked up each other's data for fun. I was kind of annoyed that one of the college hires found how much I paid for my house but that was the norm.
Okay, I should probably specify that I didn't tell anyone my address. People don't even know my legal name. I worked at and bought my house through Redfin. Redfin gets my info from my Redfin account. A little different than looking up an address on Zillow.
Right now I can't tell if people are excited to tell me there are way to uncover my home address or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
> or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
Why would looking up a public record be an invasion of your privacy? If you want to hide it, buy your primary residence through an LLC incorporated in a state that doesn't disclose its members.
What's scary (if the offense was indeed access to user data) is not that this one person did it, but that this person insists that it's as common at Facebook as jaywalking is in the real world.
And the information they used to decide to contact you wasn't available, ever, through any other means? Even a referral from a friend or former colleague?
I don't know anyone who works for Facebook. I'm thousands of miles away from Facebook HQ. I keep careful tabs on who has what info about me and use many different email addresses.
What about using someone else's credentials, like the VP's whose project he was working on? While we can be instantly vindictive if we found out he was accessing private user data, you have to remember this was described as "jay walking" and it's hard to believe such a large company could only have ONE zero-tolerance policy...
The person kept saying that what they did was "just like jaywalking," but as soon as they were called in by HR they knew they were in serious trouble. That doesn't add up.
Perhaps speeding would be a better analogy. Everyone does it, but when you see the blue lights(or get a meeting req with HR) you know you're in trouble.
It doesn't sound like the violation and the investigation were temporally linked though. When you're speeding and you see flashing lights, you know you're in trouble for the thing you're doing right then. If some minor violation is common practice (everyone is doing it all the time), how would you know immediately that you were in trouble for it when you get the meeting notice? The person even said that they had previously been called into HR as a witness in investigations of other people, yet this time they knew they were being investigated without being told.
How about a red light camera? Pretty commonplace to push a yellow light, and when you get the envelope in the mail from the city ticketing office you probably know what it's about.
In most larger companies, there "zero tolerance policies" and "wink wink nudge nudge zero tolerance policies."
If you break the first type, you are out the door, no questions asked.
If you break the second type, you might be out the door depending on why you did it, who you did it for, who you report to, if you're part of the "in group" or whatever. In some cases, they're forgotten until later when someone wants to demonstrate an "ongoing pattern."
This post is just a person's account of something they have experienced. Why is everyone so bent on getting them to identify the issue or saying it might be other reasons they got fired etc. Take it for what it is, just like any other story, article or blog post on the Internet. It might just be method to vent or something fictional. I still don't think it's a valid reason to start making accusations about what might or might not have happened
Hopefully this reminds people, especially if you are working in your first job at some all encompassing place like amazon, google, facebook, whatever, that they don't love you. Maybe they give you food, a phone, a ride to work, but you have to have your own life outside work. Keep your resume up to date. Even awesome google is not a place that everyone stays at forever.
That actually applies for any job at any company. Identifying yourself through your job is dangerous and unhealthy, although good for your career short-term.
As a manager if you have an employee who you believe is basically a good fit but has a performance issue you would really rather they turn this around than have to hire again. Particularly with junior people this can often work well.
I realize that some organizations often use PIPs for legal converage reasons and in that case it may be a foregone conclusion.
Yeah, the whole part about missing all the notificaions once they were no longer an employee, and about spending all day on facebook, had my skin crawling.
Nah, this post made working at facebook sound super weird, even without the disciplinary aspect.
The "omnipresent alcohol" bit is really odd too. Now weed is legal in california, are you also allowed to roll a spliff at your desk and go and smoke it on your lunchbreak? 420 deploy code every day?
I mean, we have beer o clock on friday afternoon, but generally programming is pretty hard, and while it may be fun to do all-night coding sessions while intoxicated at the weekend, getting smashed at work is surely not conducive to actually getting stuff done, especially in a team? All the espresso is bad enough...
Yes, one thing I believe is bad is to mix professional and private life, but he seems fine with it. Well I'm probably not a good fit for Facebook, which is fine.
I started a new job a few months ago after floating around startups for a few years. One thing I'm surprisingly happiest about is that the company doesn't stock alcohol in the kitchens.
We have beer o'clock sometimes, and occasionally the team gets drinks together, but alcohol is not an omnipresent part of everyday office life. The constant drinking (a lot of which was high-stress-commiseration drinking) I saw at startups was so normalized that this was honestly a cultural shock to me.
Another thing I see a lot (and you can see it in another answer to this question, further down) is people (mostly SV) referring to jobs as adventures. And more generally putting work on a pedestal and conflating work with life.
I mean I suppose in theory whatever floats your boats, call it an adventure, but to me an adventure would be going canoeing in Belize with (outside-of-work) friends. Show me a job that encourages and enables employees to do that and I will show you a job actually worth putting on a pedestal. 97 additional facebook notifications per day is not a selling point.
My opinion: This person used someone else's electronic credentials to perform a task without asking for permission. This person did not have the proper level of access on their own account to perform this action, so they used someone else's (likely the "VP" who they were working with on that project). This would/should get you fired at many places.
This person used someone else's electronic credentials to perform a task without asking for permission. [...] This would/should get you fired at many places.
You mean that thing that happens all the time at every office?
I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me, specifically because he was sick of my asking whenever I needed to be granted access to new things. I can't think of a single job I've that involved computers where I wasn't given access to user accounts that were not mine for reasons of expediency in the face of inflexable permissions systems.
I would imagine at a place the scale of Facebook, where logging and accountability trails are as important as they must be at Facebook, this kind of transgression is categorically different from the one you describe.
>I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me,
thus it means explicit (and in writing! - good for you :) approval by the boss, and the boss bears primary responsibility here. In case of the original article it is pretty clear that the author didn't bother to get at least even informal approval from the higher-ups (even just mentioning that he is going to perform the task in that specific way in a conversation with that VP would go a long way) - that is a basic skill(or even i'd say "instinct") of covering your own lower behind one has to apply while working at a BigCo, be it Facebook or IBM.
Not sure what the down voting is about. Things that lead me to this conclusion: "...and remind you that this is the hacker company. Of course this is all a lie: that's how you get fired." And "It was clear that the person who talked to me had no idea what she was talking about. She quickly confessed as much to me." The author is referring to the HR member who was conducting the investigation. It was probably a technical task that the author of the article performed with someone else's creds or by bypassing some security system (checking in code, deploying code to prod., etc.) which is why the HR member "had no idea what she was talking about [and] quickly confessed to [the author] as much." The HR team was highly interested in finding out "...whether somebody had asked me to do it" and "...if you were not sure of what you were doing, why didn't you ask your manager?" HR wanted to know if the anonymous author had permission to perform the task since the anonymous author's account did not have the appropriate permissions to do so. "If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room."
Also, I forgot this relevant quote: "Yes I did it, and nobody made me. I was working on a special project with a VP at that time, and he had nothing to do with it."
This person sounds like a complete doormat. Can't even tell the taxi driver he prefers silence. Also it sounds absolutely awful working at Facebook, but then again I am extremely adamant to mix business and personal life. Nobody at work really knows me at all.
This is the problem with investing yourself and your identity in your work. When things change, you get crushed.
I hope OP's coffee tastes better the next morning, the air fresher, and the sky brighter.
>At Facebook, you see posters everywhere that ask you what would you to if you weren't afraid, that prompt you to proceed and be bold, and remind you that this is the hacker company.
> I felt stupid for not planning that I would have to give up my devices, which were my primary devices and hadn't been backed up in a while. I had a lot of personal things there that I never got back.
Don't rely on your employer's devices as your personal primary devices. Things like this may happen, or they might want to claim ownership of everything done on those devices. Hell they could even be tracking what you're doing on them.
Same goes the other way, your devices are yours, if you need a computer/phone/tablet for your job, your work should provide one. I see too many people happy to use their own devices at work so they don't have to ask for things.
I'm glad to see that unauthorized access to user data has a zero tolerance policy. I've met a lot of extremely skilled, hauntingly sociopathic programmers who will hack themselves free purchases and then cold call the companies they've stolen from expecting a bounty. One guy who did this also hacked the university ID / meal plan card to add fake money to his card and considered it a public service. There was a major extended power outage here and many emergency service generators were stolen and this guy opined loudly and unabashedly that this was "beautiful". He was by far the most talented programmer in my class year and it makes me afraid to connect to the internet.
I had a similar situation whilst working at a PC manufacturer. The underlying reason was due to a number of colleagues starting a company on the side. More specifically, we had registered a company to do some web development for a "Mom & Pop" type company. However, the project never got off the ground and we didn't actually do anything productive with the company.
The company we registered was unrelated to the business of selling PCs, but the end result was that I was escorted from the building along with another colleague who was also involved.
Two more of my other colleagues involved in the aforementioned side-enterprise got written warnings. It became apparent afterwards that we had been given an ethics workshop some months before that hinted that we should declare any outside company interests, and those interests would be judged as to whether they were conflicts of interest or not. Sadly, we neglected to mention it.
Two further colleagues who were not involved with us were also removed on the same day. I have no idea for what reason. Several months later half the team got made redundant.
The dismissal process itself is familiar to the Quora description, except I also had a guy from legal in the room. He looked exactly like Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, but wearing a $3000 Armani suit rather than a ball gag.
His opening gambit was to slam a huge pile of A4 on to the VP's conference room solid mahogany table. As he glared at me, he told me that this was every single email that I'd ever sent or received while working for said company.
It became clear that they had been monitoring all internet traffic in and out of the workplace. Whether that was legal at the time in my country is dubious, but it wasn't worth fighting at the time.
On my dismissal letter I had a strange reason given for the dismissal. It stated that I had been dismissed "for misusing company resources during work hours". It was related to the use of work email to organise the handful of times we got together as a group outside of work. "Hey shall we get together this evening for a few beers and program a bit?" kind of thing.
The others who got warnings had something different noted on their warning letters. It specified that they had not declared outside interests in an external company and that this was against company ethics rules.
After leaving the company I started up a web development company. I continued to use the company that we had registered and continued to use it for several years.
Several years later I tried to update my company director record because I had changed my home address. A letter came back, stating that I had never actually been registered as a company director. They enclosed the initial application form from three years previous. The form was completed, but I had neglected to sign it. Oh the irony.
It suddenly became clear that they had probably checked the company records and noted that I wasn't registered as director. They probably thought that on top of everything I was trying to be a wise guy. Sadly, it was just incompetence.
Lots of lessons learned, but the golden rules are:
- Never do anything on your work computer that is not
related to your work
- Always pay attention to ethics workshops and your
employment contracts.
- Always be aware that if a company wants to cut head
count then heads will roll. It is cheaper to fire
people than make them redundant.
- Marsellus Wallace has a new job slamming conference
tables with piles of A4.
- After completing a form, always remember to sign and
date it!!
So... everyone who works at Facebook routinely does this bad thing they would be fired for if caught?
Scandalous! We simply must know what this bad thing is.
On the other hand, the post was self-indulgent, boring, empty crap. I'm putting my money on the author's lack of anything interesting to say, getting in the way of anything interesting to say.
137 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI don't understand why you wouldn't disclose why you got fired if you are going to write a post about how you feel after getting fired. It doesn't help anyone else because we don't know what mistake you made that we should avoid. It ends up feeling like the post is very one sided and IMO discredits the presented "feelings".
My 2 cents for you. :-)
*edited: spelling
He wrote "I won't go into what it was to protect my identity and that of all involved." So the person thinks it would be easy for Facebook or his former coworkers to identify the case if he told us what specific policy violation (s)he was fired for.
On other extreme it could be he "chucked a tennis ball and it broke an office window." Everyone's perception these days of the extent/effect of any offense seems to broad that without details... what's the point of articles like these?
What a terrible society we're developing for ourselves.
Edit: People who get fired want to believe that they did one "stupid" thing and it was "unfair" they were fired. Hiring a new person and training them up isn't exactly cheap, easy or straightforward. I realise there are exceptions but logic would tend to suggest that in most cases businesses don't fire people for one-off mistakes.
Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224057 claims they have only one zero-tolerance policy, accessing user data. It seems at least as credible as an anonymous Quora post.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
I hope you realize that the Quora post linked here is NOT the second hand account of a journalist, but was instead a primary source from an involved party.
I don't think the Geller-Mann effect applies to this kind of situation and I find it more than a little strange that you're suggesting it would.
"I am CONCERNED that you are reacting emotionally due to your biases"
and then you go and cite some article about a psychological research effect to try and make your point, by quoting something from a fiction writer speaking about an entirely different scenario that seems to be at-best tangentially related (and that is a very generous interpretation) to this issue.
what is your actual point? I would suggest you check your own emotions and biases. maybe you are unduly supportive of FB even in situations where they ought to be scrutinized and deserve to be criticized.
edit: now that I've looked into it more, what is even IS the Gell-Man amnesia effect? I can't find any credible sources on this besides the essay Michael Crichton wrote, where he appears to have simply invented this for his own rhetorical purposes.
Every system will contain components that can be reductivly described to sound on-the-face silly (like complimenting someone's clothing getting reported as harassment). The soundness of such a system relies on how closely tied the correction for that silliness is the expression of the silliness.
For example, there was a post on reddit recently about a proposed anti-bestiality law that would outlaw animal husbandry. Of course the easy hand-wave acceptance of this is that cops and prosecutors would exercise their discretion in such a way that this wouldn't be a problem for farmers.
But that's still a broken system. And should be mitigated if not fixed as closely to the source of the problem as possible. It's hard to see how the animial husbandry example could backfire, but imagine it's the CFAA which is more murky and politically charged. Or there were a zero-tolerance policy in place.
Additionally, having clothing compliments in the class of things reported raises suspicion on an otherwise innocuous action. Basically EVERYTHING that happens at an office can be done in a way to harass someone, but treating one subset with more scrutiny like this raises the baseline apprehension around that activity.
Of course, someone who didn't have a solid grasp of what harassment is (or worse, wanted to convince themselves that their harassment didn't count) would portray it that way.
Consider the following paragraph:
"Facebook has 0 tolerance policy on many fronts. For instance, on security: using an account you're not authorized to use can be reported as a security incident, said the training video. And so, a lot of security auditing which, paradoxically, is strongly encouraged among employees, is a terminable offense."
And sometimes attention-seekers will convince themselves that something they hear, even if it isn't directed at or to them, is harassment, and try to use it to harm other people. Like the Adria Richards thing.
No worries though. Eventually these types will find themselves working solely with each other, in some sort of bureaucratic-HR-dystopia, which requires explicit permission before anyone can speak to anyone else.
I doubt this was official policy but was one of those unwritten rules.
Interesting link: https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/27043/why-some-male-member...
I'm not sure this is something we're developing, though; I'm pretty sure society has been this way for a while. If anything, it's good that it's being explicitly spelled out, because hopefully that means the improper behaviours will start to extinguish.
And sometimes people really do think you're wearing a nice shirt and want to tell you that.
"That's a nice shirt, I really like it!"
vs.
"Hey, that shirt looks good on you now, but I bet it would better on the floor of my bedroom!"
are two ways to say that you like somebody's shirt. One is a workplace appropriate compliment, one is obviously not.
A policy like "even complimenting your coworker's clothes can be reported as harassment" isn't some trap designed to catch you and punish you for the act of being friendly. It's a policy that's designed to defang institutionalized harassment that persists under the guise of being friendly; by couching sexual come-ons or derogatory remarks ("I always like the shirts you wear, they're by far the best part of having you work here" is a compliment for the shirt, and an insult to the person wearing it) in the form of a back-handed compliment, disgusting people can then claim that they're being punished when all they wanted to do is be nice.
If you still don't understand my point, please let me know and I'll try to explain it further (:
This, to my mind, mirrors the "jaywalking" metaphor. It was bad practice, but it was either "Fight the client and force them to improve their own security so that we can safely assist them," or, "Do something we know is unsafe in order to get the job done quickly so that the client will stop bitching at us while paradoxically making it more difficult for us to help them."
I know he mentions that it's for "privacy reasons"... but any rational person is going to conclude that you are not disclosing the reason because it reflects poorly on you and undermines your gripe.
Now if you are comfortable disclosing the cause, then perhaps there is some value to be gained in raising the issue. But not disclosing is a no-win situation... right or wrong you will be perceived to be in the wrong.
EDIT:
Funny that I get downvoted, yet most comments are basically "Clearly this person did something worse than they realize..."
Sounds like they took a code shortcut, possibly violating NDA/privacy agreements or using unapproved/a competitor's 3rd party tools. Does not sound like harassment.
How is the answer not: "Largely like many other places of a similar size and structure"? In a place with a particularly interesting corporate structure or decision making process it might be unusual, but Facebook?
> If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room.
So I doubt it was something like "Looked at a users private information"
He's running a test, and he wants to make sure his new function retrieves data properly. He can search for his own name, but out of idle curiosity and boredom (he's seen his own data a million times, he wants something visually distinct on his screen), he searches for the name of a friend of his that he hung out with last week. It's only a few different keystrokes to type the alternate name, but now he's accessing private information and gets canned.
(It probably isn't either of those things since I'm sure their tooling prevents that sort of thing)
That's a good way to lose access to production forever.
The harassment stuff isn't a zero tolerance thing. They even told us to go ahead and ask out other employees if you're interested, but just don't press if you get a no.
It's pretty clear he accessed data he shouldn't have, and for that a zero-tolerance policy makes total sense.
If it was accessing user data, of course he should be fired.
At my last job, a company that sells houses, people looked up each other's data for fun. I was kind of annoyed that one of the college hires found how much I paid for my house but that was the norm.
Okay, I should probably specify that I didn't tell anyone my address. People don't even know my legal name. I worked at and bought my house through Redfin. Redfin gets my info from my Redfin account. A little different than looking up an address on Zillow.
In their defense, privacy policy is probably better now.
Right now I can't tell if people are excited to tell me there are way to uncover my home address or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
Why would looking up a public record be an invasion of your privacy? If you want to hide it, buy your primary residence through an LLC incorporated in a state that doesn't disclose its members.
Even without providing your address, many US county government websites (the Recorder's office, Clerk's office, etc) allow for online lookups by name.
This is precisely how RedFin, Zillow, Trulia, and the like are able to obtain that same data...
Given that Facebook HR trawls user data to send job spam I find this claim quite ironic.
How about a red light camera? Pretty commonplace to push a yellow light, and when you get the envelope in the mail from the city ticketing office you probably know what it's about.
If you break the first type, you are out the door, no questions asked.
If you break the second type, you might be out the door depending on why you did it, who you did it for, who you report to, if you're part of the "in group" or whatever. In some cases, they're forgotten until later when someone wants to demonstrate an "ongoing pattern."
Isn't this a first signal when one should start looking for a new job asap?
As a manager if you have an employee who you believe is basically a good fit but has a performance issue you would really rather they turn this around than have to hire again. Particularly with junior people this can often work well.
I realize that some organizations often use PIPs for legal converage reasons and in that case it may be a foregone conclusion.
Confusing friends and colleagues, possibly having no life outside of work.
"She's never at her desk, and she routinely cancelled our regular 1:1 meetings because she has no other choice"
Stockholm syndrome
"My boss's voice was devoid of emotion, even though we had gone through a lot together (at least from my point of view)."
The first step is seeing you are delusional...
Am I alone thinking that for this person getting fired is extremely positive and the opportunity to start anew with a healthier work/life balance?
The "omnipresent alcohol" bit is really odd too. Now weed is legal in california, are you also allowed to roll a spliff at your desk and go and smoke it on your lunchbreak? 420 deploy code every day?
I mean, we have beer o clock on friday afternoon, but generally programming is pretty hard, and while it may be fun to do all-night coding sessions while intoxicated at the weekend, getting smashed at work is surely not conducive to actually getting stuff done, especially in a team? All the espresso is bad enough...
We have beer o'clock sometimes, and occasionally the team gets drinks together, but alcohol is not an omnipresent part of everyday office life. The constant drinking (a lot of which was high-stress-commiseration drinking) I saw at startups was so normalized that this was honestly a cultural shock to me.
Another thing I see a lot (and you can see it in another answer to this question, further down) is people (mostly SV) referring to jobs as adventures. And more generally putting work on a pedestal and conflating work with life.
I mean I suppose in theory whatever floats your boats, call it an adventure, but to me an adventure would be going canoeing in Belize with (outside-of-work) friends. Show me a job that encourages and enables employees to do that and I will show you a job actually worth putting on a pedestal. 97 additional facebook notifications per day is not a selling point.
Do we generally blame the individuals who get pulled into a cult, or do we criticize the cult?
You mean that thing that happens all the time at every office?
I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me, specifically because he was sick of my asking whenever I needed to be granted access to new things. I can't think of a single job I've that involved computers where I wasn't given access to user accounts that were not mine for reasons of expediency in the face of inflexable permissions systems.
thus it means explicit (and in writing! - good for you :) approval by the boss, and the boss bears primary responsibility here. In case of the original article it is pretty clear that the author didn't bother to get at least even informal approval from the higher-ups (even just mentioning that he is going to perform the task in that specific way in a conversation with that VP would go a long way) - that is a basic skill(or even i'd say "instinct") of covering your own lower behind one has to apply while working at a BigCo, be it Facebook or IBM.
This is the problem with investing yourself and your identity in your work. When things change, you get crushed.
I hope OP's coffee tastes better the next morning, the air fresher, and the sky brighter.
>At Facebook, you see posters everywhere that ask you what would you to if you weren't afraid, that prompt you to proceed and be bold, and remind you that this is the hacker company.
Almost gagged reading this.
Don't rely on your employer's devices as your personal primary devices. Things like this may happen, or they might want to claim ownership of everything done on those devices. Hell they could even be tracking what you're doing on them.
Same goes the other way, your devices are yours, if you need a computer/phone/tablet for your job, your work should provide one. I see too many people happy to use their own devices at work so they don't have to ask for things.
The company we registered was unrelated to the business of selling PCs, but the end result was that I was escorted from the building along with another colleague who was also involved.
Two more of my other colleagues involved in the aforementioned side-enterprise got written warnings. It became apparent afterwards that we had been given an ethics workshop some months before that hinted that we should declare any outside company interests, and those interests would be judged as to whether they were conflicts of interest or not. Sadly, we neglected to mention it.
Two further colleagues who were not involved with us were also removed on the same day. I have no idea for what reason. Several months later half the team got made redundant.
The dismissal process itself is familiar to the Quora description, except I also had a guy from legal in the room. He looked exactly like Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, but wearing a $3000 Armani suit rather than a ball gag.
His opening gambit was to slam a huge pile of A4 on to the VP's conference room solid mahogany table. As he glared at me, he told me that this was every single email that I'd ever sent or received while working for said company.
It became clear that they had been monitoring all internet traffic in and out of the workplace. Whether that was legal at the time in my country is dubious, but it wasn't worth fighting at the time.
On my dismissal letter I had a strange reason given for the dismissal. It stated that I had been dismissed "for misusing company resources during work hours". It was related to the use of work email to organise the handful of times we got together as a group outside of work. "Hey shall we get together this evening for a few beers and program a bit?" kind of thing.
The others who got warnings had something different noted on their warning letters. It specified that they had not declared outside interests in an external company and that this was against company ethics rules.
After leaving the company I started up a web development company. I continued to use the company that we had registered and continued to use it for several years.
Several years later I tried to update my company director record because I had changed my home address. A letter came back, stating that I had never actually been registered as a company director. They enclosed the initial application form from three years previous. The form was completed, but I had neglected to sign it. Oh the irony.
It suddenly became clear that they had probably checked the company records and noted that I wasn't registered as director. They probably thought that on top of everything I was trying to be a wise guy. Sadly, it was just incompetence.
Lots of lessons learned, but the golden rules are:
"Everyone does it routinely".
So... everyone who works at Facebook routinely does this bad thing they would be fired for if caught?
Scandalous! We simply must know what this bad thing is.
On the other hand, the post was self-indulgent, boring, empty crap. I'm putting my money on the author's lack of anything interesting to say, getting in the way of anything interesting to say.