No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation.
I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices.
The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people.
EDIT There’s an interesting additional complication I’ve seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it’s almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as ‘fake news’.
When I worked at a Fortune 500 company during an economic downturn, we were simultaneously seeing endless austerity measures while being plastered with endless positive spin. The free pens and stuff disappeared. The new job listings shrank overnight from pages and pages to a handful. They cut back on janitorial service. There was a pay freeze. Etc.
But all the press releases and news articles being forwarded to our email was about how we flew up the Fortune 500 ranking (iow we were sucking less than other companies during the recession, even though the company shrank, because it's a relative ranking) and our CEO was named one of the biggest wealth builders in the nation and so on.
I was painfully aware of the disconnect. But I sometimes wondered if other employees really noticed or not. I never asked any of my coworkers. I felt like that would be a good way to end up eventually fired. But I wondered how many drank the kool-aid without noticing that it didn't jibe with the austerity measures we were seeing.
Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad.
Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.
Hollywood et al popularize the misconception that evil is fantastic and done with intent. Most of the time evil is banal[1]. The larger problems happen when the unremarkable, small deviances from acceptable behavior becomes normalized[2][3].
Are you suggesting they aren't even aware of these issue because there's a big difference for one to look for answers and stay educated and one who chooses to stay ignorant knowingly. No one will empathize with the latter group because that's how most weak people in history become complicit to great atrocities.
There is a difference with the NSA, I remember they recruited pretty heavily on our college campus and you are presented with the chance to work for and defend your country with your brainpower ostensibly. Then we throw in this war on "terror" and for me it seems like the questions and answers for an employee at the NSA would be much harder than for someone at a private company where it's much easier to just quit and walk away (if one were not indoctrinated as you describe.)
> I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures
Wall Street, too, after the crisis. “Of course we bet against our counterparties! They’re counterparties, not clients. If they didn’t read the prospectus they’re morons who deserved to lose their money. We're just the political whipping boy du jour."
I think it also kinda helps that most of the engineers are probably not "rich kids"; they're probably mostly from middle class backgrounds. They've never seen that kind of wealth before, never seen that insane level of benefits. Its much easier to think of someone (or some org) as benign, to give them a second chance, when they treat you personally so well. Its kinda what immigrants feel when they do well in the US as well.
I wanted to include this in the original post as well. My cynical/ironic phrasing of this phenomenon is “not wealthy enough to have principles”.
Which I totally get. I’ve been a victim myself. And the truth is it’s hard to find successful companies that aren’t profiting off of some kind of exploitation (e.g. pollution, natural resources stolen from a developing nation, behavioral manipulation of users, injecting animals with antibiotics, high fructose corn syrup, lobbying (institutionalized corruption, preying on people’s fears (media), child labor (lots of clothing supply chains), predatory lending, extreme leverage ratios in a too big to fail context, etc).
It’s weird to me that people often don’t understand the root problem here is unrestrained/underregulated capitalism. In any naturally competitive system without adequate rules, the winners will be cheaters/exploiters. In reverse: you often cannot win unless you cheat.
Hence: most people dont have the luxury of working exclusively for socially responsible companies.
I've seen the same behaviour, excellent comment and thanks for sharing. It would be great to see a documentary on these companies and their relationships with the companies they work for.
I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices.
The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people.
EDIT There’s an interesting additional complication I’ve seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it’s almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as ‘fake news’.