Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers
> And she saw Meta intentionally target emotionally vulnerable young women to generate additional revenue by, for example, tracking when teenage girls deleted selfies, identify- ing those girls as feeling worthless, and using that event as a trigger to immediately show them advertisements for beauty products.
…and a lot more
Meta made executing this Severance Agreement a condition to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s ability to submit for reimbursement over $300,000 in pre-approved business expenses she had paid using her personal funds, including luxury hotel rooms and other travel expenses for Mr. Zuckerberg and fellow Meta executives.
Yeah, that's duress in my book.
I get that leaves money on the table, but it also eliminates the possibility of employer not paying me back for whatever reason.
I'd support the Careless People effect.
The money they piss away on the vanity projects should probably have always been going to risk management.
I would have liked to learn about specific allegations of "cruel and otherwise disturbing" from the article, instead of leaving this completely ambiguous.
If you know, you know.
I read the book. Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.
There is a lot of corporate private jet related drama in the book.
Good lord the Wikipedia article about her has more absolutely dogshit behavor [1]:
> According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Personal_life
The one place they are practical is some traveling shows where a private jet becomes a mobile hotel room/office, a much more expensive tour bus. But even then, you sleep in them on the ground. Not going to a hotel means less drives through the city, which is a pain if you are only in town for one night. Sleep/eat at the airport and you have saved many hours.
Everyone makes mistakes sometimes; and if you cannot be told you have made a mistake even in a low-stakes situation like a board game, it seems unlikely you will behave appropriately when it is something more expensive and/or damaging.
Or the times when he proposed using lower level FB staff as canaries in the coal mine over governments who threatened to arrest FB employees because the company was breaking their laws... and in one case, an employee was. And Zuck wanted to sit on getting him legal help and out of jail because he felt it would get FB positive PR. And when he was gotten out of jail and brought to a company event where he would meet company execs, Zuck was introduced to him, didn't look up from his phone, and in fact asked, while led away, "who was that, again?"
Hopefully? Buy it, or borrow it, and read it.
Remove doubt
Eventually the guy gets released and is invited to California to meet Zuck. Except by that time Zuck had forgotten all about it and ignored the guy.
"It's a really important feature to me and the exec team."
"..."
"..."
Actually, the whole Burma trip was a fiasco.
Sarah doesn't come off great, either, more someone who was happy riding the wave until she realized just how many people were getting thrown under the bus for the sake of Zuck and Sandberg, including her and her own relationship - but was also someone with not enough "clout" to push back meaningfully (though it could be argued that there wasn't anyone with enough clout to push back against either of them, let alone both).
That's what it ultimately came down to, those two, like so many other people at that level, do not give one single shit about anyone except themselves, and anything beyond their bank accounts and/or egos.
That sort of makes sense. I would question what the value of meta's "reputation" is to begin with, especially in the context of fortune's "journalism".
>Her memoir claims that former COO Sheryl Sandberg spent $13,000 on lingerie for herself and a young female assistant during a corporate trip to Europe, and later asked that assistant to join her in "the only bed on the plane" during a private jet flight home.
Sounds about right. If only you knew how bad things are.
If there are any executives reading this who have, been allowed to, notice chunks of their memory missing recently: there's a chance we made you do worse. And that's okay.
This is a strange thing to emphasize, but I guess expected for law-trash.
What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.
Not for me to cater to the needs of some adult-babies who don't want to hear my actual baby on a "late night work call". Zero of the dollars are for that.
This is minutia, that is only being brought up because this is law-trash.
I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well? (to be further met with a lack of surprise when you report it, because "half the department" had already reported that they'd shared a bed with Sandberg...)
I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?
We use to rave about Japanese cars or German's work ethic. Same thing here. And service people is an okay term to discribe people who work in the service industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_the_Philippin...
but it came off to me as more snarky than productive, so I did not.
If you've ever needed to buy drugs in the bay area, I'd recommend paying somebody to find you the nearest hondo for the best product at the lowest prices.
>I suppose it's okay for Sandberg to also ask you to "come to bed" in the Meta private jet as well?
I think everybody involved should be fucking adults.
>I guess the sexual harassment is, as you say, "what the pay is for"?
Depends on the job.
I'm sure this will be unpopular, but imagine the liability some employees are? Some person that shook you down comes back ten years later and writes a book about how everyone there is awful. Here's an excerpt from another article:
> Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
> These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.
Be careful who you hire.
What part of that last paragraph seems like acceptable human behaviour for a handful of the most powerful people in the world?
To be fair, this happens all over the scale. Back when I was an EMT making not much more than minimum wage, I had to call out of a shift (and eventually get taken to the ER by my partner for what turned out to be large - 13mm - kidney stone). And when that hospital didn't have available urology, they had me transferred by one of our ambulances to another, for surgery that night, which was aborted because of long-standing infection found. So I was catheterized, admitted on IV antibiotics, sometime after 1am.
Around 7am my room phone rings. It's my supervisor, because I'm meant to be on shift today. "Oh, hey, I saw we transferred you last night." Chit chat. "So, am I to assume then that you're not going to be able to make it to shift today?" Me, waiting for a hint of humor, none. "You should make sure to call out. Were you able to find coverage? Oh, well, I guess we'll make it work".
Brother, you called me at 7am on a hospital room phone asking if I was planning to make it to my shift at 7.30am and after hearing about me being loaded to the gills on painkillers, taken to another hospital where they called a urologist in near midnight on the 4th of July to operate that night, have me on an IV antibiotic drip and you're chastising me for not being able to find coverage?
Never fucking do this. It's the manager's job. Like it's their actual job. If you just want to last-minute swap a shift for fun? Sure. If you're in the hospital or otherwise have an actual crisis to deal with? Nope. [Incidentally: also not your goddamn job if it's actual policy-granted leave planned in advance, "oh you can have those days next month, just find coverage" NOPE that's why you make the "big" bucks, jackass]
An enormous proportion of low-level managers of poorly-paid employees are (I'm choosing these words deliberately, not just to throw insults) really stupid assholes, so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science) and also think that's somehow your problem (that's the "asshole" part) but it is not.
So private EMS supervisors know they have a steady supply of younger kids who'll eat shit for a few years to get their patient contacts. I did it later in life, and had a full time IT job, and it was always a source of consternation from this supervisor that he couldn't pull his usual shit, threatening to (try to) "blacklist" employees, or pull borderline illegal scheduling shenanigans.
> so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science)
Oh, you'd think that. But most private EMS shift bidding is glorified "write your name on a whiteboard"/GCal type stuff that a dispatcher or supervisor then tries to lay out. I'll admit that it's a thankless job at best - do an optimal layout and no-one appreciates it, but anything suboptimal and there's accusations of favoritism, etc. And then, at certain places, like this one, there -is- -actual- favoritism, where dispatchers will "joke" about giving you a crappy shift or partner if you upset or argue with them, or will double-book you and then complain you didn't notice, or, if not enough people would sign up for a certain day, would "phantom" sign you up. Get a call at 7.30am - "Where you at?" "Home, sleeping" "You're on duty today" "I didn't sign up." "Says here you did". Leading to people taking photos of the shift sign up sheets right before the end of bidding...
I can already tell it has to be one of the most boring books ever written, because there is nothing new there.
It is basically like writing a book that says: the sky is blue and water is wet.
For example, I’m currently reading 'Why We Sleep'. Obviously we all know that sleep is good for health, but reading the book gave me better ways to understand how good it is, analyze my own sleep quality and what I can do to improve it, and very importnat: show me how I can use ti to leverage other parts of life, like learning or emotional regulation. It’s not just “sleep 8 hours a day.”
So I imagine something similar might happen with her book, even if you already know some companies use questionable tactics, it can still be useful to understand those tactics, how companies avoid getting caught, how similar patterns might appear elsewhere, etc. It can also make you reflect on which limits are acceptable or unacceptable, depending on your political views.