I think you are exaggerating the amount of internal security there is at facebook. Up until a couple years ago, many of the internal tools didn't have any privacy restrictions to stop employees from looking at private user data. I looked at user data all the time as part of my job and was never questioned about it. Of course I never looked at anything I shouldn't have out of fear of getting caught. But no one checked to see why I was always looking at user data.
Even after common tools were changed to add warnings about accessing private data, there were still many ways to go around them. All engineers have access to user databases as well as the thousands of other data sets that contained user data.
The reason why most employees wouldn't abuse their power is the fear of getting caught (not due to any actual internal security). From this article, it's not clear how the fired employee accessed private data. So I can't say if they did something too obvious or if they put any effort in making sure they had plausible deniability if caught. This article doesn't indicate whether internal security actually caught the data access violation. It sounds like they only found out after the accusations appeared on twitter.
What makes you assume this happens rarely? As far as you know, this could be widespread but simply doesn't end up in the news.
Even if the employee gets caught, most companies (or fired employees) wouldn't announce it publicly. The only reason we know about this case is because this person bragged about it to someone else who made it public.
I used to work at facebook and I disagree. Even prior to the recent scandals, there are plenty of employees who have decided to leave facebook due to ethical concerns (myself included). However, most keep this to themselves as Facebook fosters an environment where dissent is not tolerated.
Of course, it's unclear from this article whether negative sentiments have increased substantially this year compared to previous years.
And to clarify, I'm not saying that I am innocent or that I have taken some sort of ethical high-road. I gladly spent many years cashing out my pre-IPO stock grants while turning a blind eye to numerous immoral business practices. But soon after going public, there wasn't much benefit working at Facebook compared to any other large silicon valley tech companies. Without the financial motivation, the ethical concerns made it hard to be excited about remaining.
This sort of discrimination happens at many big companies these days. Having worked at facebook, I have witnessed these policies first hand.
Facebook has explicit policies against hiring (non-latino) white and asian men. Management would occasionally decide that they hired too many people of certain races/ethnicities and tell employees that they are only hiring from other groups until the end of the year.
I'm not sure how they determined race/ethnicity. I'm assuming recruiters had to make guesses based on candidates names and facebook photos. It's weird to imagine recruiters trying to estimate candidates' skin color to determine whether to toss their resume in the trash.
Facebook tried to hide their affirmative action programs and chastised any employee who questioned them. But occasionally, someone from recruiting or management would reveal the existence of their racial profiling. So I'm assuming the discrimination went much further than what was occasionally revealed.
Mark Zuckerburg spent last year touring the country to make photo-ops with "real americans". I'm curious what his new friends would have thought of him if they knew about his support for discriminating against them.
As far as my thoughts on Facebook engineering go, your experience will depend heavily on what group you join. It's very difficult to give a single description of life at facebook as it varies so much throughout the company. You'll find differences in work hours, independence, project difficulty, prestige, opportunities for advancement, and the kinds of people in those teams. For me personally, there were plenty of groups with projects that interest me. But there are also many more groups that I wouldn't enjoy.
Some groups are much more structured/organized than others. In some heavily organized groups, you can easily get bored by being a small cog in a large company. Or you may be happy to be able to coast by working less than 40 hours a week while cashing a fat paycheck. In less structured groups, you may love the opportunity to create your own projects and jump from group to group. Or you may get stuck without any interesting project and have difficulty switching to a better role.
Depending on what excites you, some groups have some really interesting work, while others are more mundane. The best way to get a feel for Facebook is to figure out what kind of groups would be interesting to you and talk to people in those groups. Before interviewing, I would recommend you find out which groups you like and try to get the recruiter to schedule your interviews with engineers on those groups (but there is no guarantee the recruiter will be able to do so).
Some top candidates are able to pick their group before joining. However, most new employees will not be allowed to choose until after they've started at facebook and go through the 6 week on-boarding process. When facebook was smaller, it was easier to pick your group. But in the past couple years, new employees have complained that they didn't have too many choices and felt like they had to re-interview again after joining. Some people felt they were falsely promised being able to choose between many interesting projects, but ended up getting herded into a very small number of groups that most needed engineers. So you should definitely try to negotiate your role in more detail when interviewing and accepting an offer.
Of course, many new college hires frequently don't know what kind of work interests them. Blindly joining facebook without a group in mind could still be a good way to get experience for a couple years. Once you have a better idea of what you want to do, you could either try to change groups or companies.
I'm a former facebook employee (just created a new HN account so I can speak freely).
While there are some good answers given, people also need to keep in mind that many of the facebook employees who post online are part of an organized public relations campaign. Facebook has an internal group where employees share links to posts like these and encourage employees to respond positively. This group is called 'Humanize' because it wants to give the impression that these responses are coming directly from real employees while hiding the fact that they aren't exactly casual responses.
I don't know whether any of the particular responses in this thread are part of this PR campaign and am not calling out anyone directly. You can usually assume that popular and controversial posts are being actively managed by the Humanize group. But it's not clear if this post has enough traction to being on their radar.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with Facebook asking employees to share their experiences publicly. However, like most online reviews, it's not ideal that people do not disclose when their posts are part of an organized astro-turfing effort. It's not clear to readers that some of these responses have been composed or edited by PR before they are posted.
Even after common tools were changed to add warnings about accessing private data, there were still many ways to go around them. All engineers have access to user databases as well as the thousands of other data sets that contained user data.
The reason why most employees wouldn't abuse their power is the fear of getting caught (not due to any actual internal security). From this article, it's not clear how the fired employee accessed private data. So I can't say if they did something too obvious or if they put any effort in making sure they had plausible deniability if caught. This article doesn't indicate whether internal security actually caught the data access violation. It sounds like they only found out after the accusations appeared on twitter.