Working at Facebook Made Me a Worse Person
Yesterday, I saw an old friend from college, which was like opening a time capsule because we hadn’t spoken in years. It reminded me of my college self — honest, excited, and friendly — and I realized the person I am now is a hollow shell of who I used to be. Because of Facebook.
How did this happen? When I was a kid, it was my dream to work at Facebook. I loved computers, I was on Facebook all the time, and of course, I had heard the tales about the fun culture. The endless snacks! Wearing a hoodie! Nap rooms!
Facebook sold itself as an utopia, and I bought it. I really believed that, as an employee, I would be making the world a better place. I wanted to solve interesting technical problems, and have fun coding with smart and caring people who would be my friends.
Friendship. That was my first mistake. Facebook is set up so all of your friends also work at Facebook. You’re encouraged to be friends with people on your team, through team lunches and offsites. The FB office has fun events like company-wide concerts and picnics, which is a new person’s main way to meet people. Of course, all these perks are for employees only, so the only people you interact with are FBers. Even your daily routine is imbued by the company — taking the Facebook shuttle, eating your meals at Facebook, working out at the Facebook gym.
Isn’t friendship supposed to be good? On the surface, friendship seems like a good thing — and it is, unless you also have to have a professional relationship with that person. Because everyone you know works with you, sooner or later, you have to ask for a code review from your ex who cheated on you. Or the person responsible for your peer review knows you as their friend’s hookup gone wrong.
Even without a coworker who knows juicy gossip about you, there’s the endless specter of sexual harassment. When a guy on your team adds you on Facebook, is he just being friendly, or is he going to ask you out? When your director invites you to his home for dinner, is it a career chat or a “back rub”?
Facebook’s freewheeling, we’re-all-friends culture normalizes these interactions and makes it impossible to separate out a personal life from your work life. It’s impossible to escape. Even people you meet organically outside of work are bound to work for Facebook, because nobody else would choose to live in Menlo Park. It doesn’t matter if it’s a meetup, a friend’s birthday party, or a church event. I can’t tell you how many new people I’ve met have introduced themselves with: “Oh, you work at Facebook? Me too!”
It wouldn’t be so bad to be surrounded by Facebook culture if the culture wasn’t toxic. Everyone is focused on results. That result could be lines of code, amount of compensation, or a promotion, but it’s the only thing that matters. Not your health. Not your family. And the obsession makes sense, because people who have families get penalized. I’ve seen people stuck in the same role for years, sidelined by bad management or health issues, unable to get promoted until they ultimately left. I’ve watched a former mentor get pushed out of her leadership role while on her maternity leave, getting replaced by someone who had half her experience.
Everyone is obsessed with compensation and promotion. People talk about it at lunch. My roommates, who also work at Facebook, talk about it in our living room. There’s an internal spreadsheet where people add their compensation every year, for the sole purpose of comparing your pay to everyone else’s. There are internal discussions, hundreds of messages long, about how to get paid more. Those that are paid above-average feel momentarily smug, then long for more; those that are being paid less feel jipped and more pressure to sprint to the next promotion. Being happy with what you have never happens.
I’m also convinced now that Facebook — the company and the product — is making the world worse. User privacy is treated more like a burden than an ideal to uphold. My manager has asked me to talk to someone in person rather than writing them an email, in case a record of the technical details is incriminating. Facebook tries to spin stealing people’s data as a positive: “making the world more open and connected.” But the reality is that we’re preying on unsuspecting people for our own profit.
Of course, there’s the studies that using Facebook contributes to rates of depression and isolation. Users who use Facebook more feel less satisfied with their friendships and have lower self esteem. Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns) are platforms where posts are curated and everyone else looks like they’re having the best time, leading to higher rates of depression among Facebook users. Madison Holleran, a student at Penn who committed suicide, struggled with feeling inadequate, which was magnified by other people’s happy posts on Instagram. She posted a beautiful picture on Instagram right before jumping off a parking garage her death. How can we claim to be making the world more “connected”? Is this our idea of a better world?
I’ve been working at Facebook for a few years now. This may be an indictment on Facebook, but I participated in Facebook’s monoculture too. Like any human, I’m influenced by people around me: I also wish I was paid more, I tried to meet people outside of work but it didn’t work, I wrote code that contributed to people growing apart from their friends while also stealing their data.
Ultimately, I’ve become just as greedy, single-minded and dishonest. I regret coming to Facebook. Sometimes “moving fast and breaking things” results only in breaking yourself.
