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When Chinese Employees Ask for Justice, Facebook Silence Their Voices

162 pointsby AFascistWorldover 5 years ago

8 comments

smailiover 5 years ago
It&#x27;s quite the lengthy article but the crux of what they believe led to his suicide is here:<p><i>Relevant sources unveiled that before Mr. Chen’s last PSC, he had already been under pressure from the advertising department, so he expected to shift to other groups to maintain his job in Facebook and the opportunity to work in the United States.<p>According to informed sources told PingWest that, Mr. Chen’s group had undergone organizational restructuring, during which the group’s original manager hopped to another group. A new manager was hired to lead Mr. Chen’s group, but the manager soon realized that many of his ICs were already transferring groups, resulting in a sharply-increased workload per capita within the group.<p>Mr. Chen, who was already in high pressure, submitted his transfer request as well, and was pre-approved by another group, meaning that all that’s left is to have his own manager sign off on the transfer.<p>The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the &quot;Meets Most&quot; rating, which factually voided Mr. Chen&#x27;s transfer request because the other group is very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.<p>Mr. Chen, who had been on the verge of collapse, was mentally pushed off the edge by a Facebook robot, according to people familiar with the matter as well as other employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace social networking app.<p>Two weeks before the tragedy, the Facebook advertising system experienced a Severe Site Event (SEV), which is essentially a server crash. A SEV management bot created a task for the SEV to be resolved and assigned the task to Mr. Chen, requiring him to fix the bug and submit the SEV report before the deadline, which is roughly one hour after the time of his death.<p>Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change and maintained the deadline to be met in 12 days.</i><p>It sounds like the already existing pressure in Ads + reorg + new manager blocking his transfer request + SEV caused him to just give in. Given Zuckerberg&#x27;s public push on transparency, openness, and wanting to connect the world, I&#x27;m honestly quite surprised and disappointed at how secretive they&#x27;ve been on this tragedy.
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citrablueover 5 years ago
This article appears to have some fundamental misunderstandings. Their description of the review system is not stack ranking, in which employees are ranked in a hierarchy and the lowest on the totem are fired. Instead, the &quot;meets&#x2F;exceeds&quot; scale has been pretty standard wherever I&#x27;ve worked.<p>Further, it seems that FB HR asked the source of this article to not speak to the press about an internal event that involved a very sensitive issue. Yet, the journalist repeatedly states that Mr. Yin was asked to speak with nobody about the issue. It looks like he ignored the advice, and became a very visible interviewee, even appearing on public news. He told his manager after the interviews - what was he thinking? It&#x27;s pretty obvious that FB doesn&#x27;t want it&#x27;s employees speaking to the press.<p>This article&#x27;s inaccuracies in an attempt to spin a tragedy into some sort of Facebook conspiracy reinforces the correctness of the company&#x27;s &quot;do not speak to the press&quot; attitude.
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jeffk_teh_haxorover 5 years ago
My brother, a GP doctor, said that he writes a <i>lot</i> of scripts for antidepressants every performance review season. Performance management sucks.<p>The racial tenor of this article seems bizarre and over the top, though?
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throwaway66920over 5 years ago
Seems like there’s a few things at play here<p>Foremost it sounds like Facebook has a shitty performance management culture. Let’s forget intent for a minute. Looking at the details offered, it’s just bad. If you get a rating of “meets most”, and that’s really bad then your system is off the bat not clear.<p>The implied story I got was about Chinese worker and visa abuse. But it sounds like it’s more just bad company culture with high degrees of competitiveness and finger pointing. I don’t see anything especially relevant to his race or immigration status. The idea that they’re dangling anything over his head (as is a common and important problem for many low skilled tech workers, (which probably doesn’t describe this guy)) because it’s implied they were going to push him out.<p>The internal push to silence any internal discussion on it is shameful.<p>But overall this seems like the result of organizational incompetence rather than malice. And I don’t think it should be surprising to anyone that this is the case because you’re going to be selecting for a very specific profile for a company like Facebook. Namely, people who put higher value on money and prestige.
whoevercaresover 5 years ago
This incident has gone wild on popular overseas Chinese forums criticizing the double standards and mistreatments. It’ll be interesting and eye opening if someone could translate the information shared there.
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bigpumpkinover 5 years ago
How can Facebook be claiming to protect the family&#x27;s privacy when it is in fact preventing employees from speaking to the press about bad working conditions?
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jonnybgoodover 5 years ago
Is his suicide linked to some kind of maltreatment of Chinese employees at Facebook? The article doesn&#x27;t make that clear.
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thaumasiotesover 5 years ago
&gt; to hold a vigil for a Facebook employee who took his own life after allegedly [being] bullied in the company and suffering extremely excessive work pressure<p>&gt; Most Attendees wore black<p>Huh. Why not white?
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