> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more.
This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
I can't give you exact numbers, but this is line with what I'm hearing through the grapevine. Lots of senior managers being converted back to ICs as well.
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
Have you heard about the various startups that specialize in expert data labeling, like Mercor? They can pay $100-$200/hr for highly specialized work, who knows how much they charge their clients. Translated to an annual wage, that's definitely in the SF/SV engineer range
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
My partner works there as an engineer. The org they work in had loads of people transferred to the "AAI" org doing data labelling. I find it almost unbelievable as well, but it is true.
Those percentages seem in line with what I have heard. Not company-wide, MSL was exempted, of course, and probably a few other golden geese here and there.
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time
>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”
Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.
Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
> Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages.
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
I am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand.
That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.
edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options.
I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
As someone who quit their corporate tech job to focus on community building work, I don't think finding better job is that simple.
Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.
One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts.
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.
If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.
Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google).
WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.
IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).
I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.
Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).
Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.
Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).
Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.
I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.
The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.
At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.
There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.
Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, <...
Thank you for the insight this actually answer a lot of questions or suspicious I had with Google. Surprised about Android and now Fuchsia makes sense.
I wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.
Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.
In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.
A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.
One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.
This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs.
Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
This must be you being in a different bubble from me, with perhaps a hint of Normalization of Deviance[0]. Those all sound like terrible ideas to me (are you implying looking at porn on a company laptop!?). You absolutely should not cross pollinate work with personal stuff. Use your personal phone or tablet or whatever for anything non work related.
Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.
I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.
Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
You can call Zuck evil or greedy. But being bad at running a business surely isn't one of his traits. Meta's net earning grew so much in the past decade that it, ironically, has the sanest P/E ratio trend out of all big US techs.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] threadThis really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
Although it goes without saying that good software engineers won't enjoy doing this very much
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
They won't be doing it for long.
Is work such as changing the styling of a button on the Instagram app any more useful than that?
Mining work was unglamorous and dangerous but was needed. Labeling work is the mining of the AI era.
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
Like the feeds not showing any posts, like a login wall on everything, like... god. Any Zuckerberg products
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
I am ashamed I worked there.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.
edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
Agreed, what a damage to the world.
Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.
One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.
IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).
I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.
Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).
Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.
Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).
Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.
I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.
The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.
At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.
There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.
Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, <...
I wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance