I wonder if, because Facebook regularly gets very bad press here (stories about Facebook are overwhelmingly negative, and so are comments), FB people don't feel confident to speak. Do you share that feeling?
Still, it's a great place to work for in many ways, and while a lot of the criticisms from outside somewhat exaggerate and misrepresent things a bit, I kind of agree with a lot of them too. A few years back I worked for Microsoft and felt quite similarly when they got bad press for whatever.
To be honest, I don't get why some people go out of their way to cheerlead for their employers. Not that it happens here much, but when it does, it's quite sad to see such naïve fealty. Personally I prefer the mercenary state of mind when it comes to employment, it's good to keep a healthy work-life attitude.
The biggest reason you don't see comments from Facebook employees is exactly what others here have pointed out: HN is overwhelmingly negative in its attitude toward Facebook.
This leads to a super pragmatic reason not to post. If you post anything neutral or positive, you typically get downvoted a lot. If your comment somehow avoids going negative, then you get a ton of replies accusing you of being a paid shill, and people stalking you on other social media trying to "out" you as a shill. That's not fun and I assume it's enough to discourage most people from posting.
That being said, I used to post a lot about FB and still do, even when it gets me downvoted. I worked on recommendation ML and contributed to a bunch of different surfaces, so I think I have an unusually well informed perspective on how things actually work at FB and what sorts of processes/motivations lead to the negative outcomes that cause bad PR. I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong.
HN has some decent flamewar prevention automation to prevent me from spending too much time arguing here, so at the end of the day its a decent way to vent and represent an alternative point of view besides "FB bad Zuck evil".
Most of us come here for free spirited discussion and interaction of ideas, and ultimately to optionally contribute and mostly to learn.
On that note I have seen many identify where they see relevant that they work at Meta/FB just as much as any of the other FAANG participants.
For some, posting "I work at FB" is an admission that "I am part of the $PROBLEM" for any of the many, many ills people attribute to Facebook / Meta which garner that negative opinion and bad press.
But definitely if there were a post about why fb is evil and I worked at fb I probably wouldn’t mention that. You don’t see that many google rms defending google on HN either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401
It’s a fresh perspective on targeted advertising in what is normally a boring discussion with the same predictable comments. Whether you agree with the post or not doesn’t matter. It’s a candid insider’s view that drives curiosity and precisely the kind of content that keeps me returning to HN.
The problem is that presenting yourself as a Facebook employee gives you a deluge of angry HN responses that are normally unrelated to your current post. It's not the bad press alone, but the design of HN and other comment ranking systems make it harder for "unpopular" commenters to get a good signal to noise ratio.
Also, there's the media. Everyone has seen too many clickbait stories based on a single anonymous comment by an FB employee to risk writing anything.
So why would any Facebook employees volunteer to be part of that? If you say anything neutral or even positive about Facebook as a non-employee your comment will attract rapid downvotes here. Imagine commenting as an employee on the inside of the company.
FWIW, I know several people at FB who also comment on HN. They have no interest in discussing FB on HN because we all know exactly how the discussion will go regardless of the veracity of any claims or content.
All in all, I don't like what most of these companies do, but I also don't like moralizing employees directly for it. Rarely if ever do they work on the things that make those companies a problem. That requires coordination that engineers are not typically involved in.
This attempt to bind HN participation to employer is confusing to me. Is this not a (mostly) anonymous board? I usually have zero idea who anyone is working for at any given moment unless explicitly mentioned in whatever comment.
A more likely middle ground conclusion is that you are partially correct - perhaps most FB employees who post on HN just don't disclose who their employer is at the same frequency as others, so the aggregate perception is that fewer FB employees frequent this board.
For the vast majority of employees, it's just tiresome to keep hearing negative hot takes being parroted over and over by people who don't have any insider insight, and often times not even the decency of verifying their sources before jumping on a bandwagon to bash some strawman for some internet points.
A lot of times, these hot takes are clearly victims of egregious cognitive biases, like suggesting that working for X employer must necessarily mean that you share the company ideology, or that getting paid more money is somehow directly associated with being morally corrupt. There's also armchair "hiring managers" who boldly claim they would never hire FB people (an actual hiring manager knows how hard it is to find talent and knows they don't really have the luxury of flaunting arrogance, and they certainly know that discrimination - even of non-protected classes - is a no-no). These threads often devolve into what-about-isms galore and I-dont-use-X-because-reason anedoctes that frankly are not very snowflakey or insightful at all.
These employees get it, they've heard them all. It's like asking which twin is older: people think they're so clever for having the "insight" that one must necessarily have come out first, but that's literally the first thing everyone and their brothers asks. So, put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what you would do if literally everyone that met you made a remark about a facial feature of yours or something like that. Chances are, you'd grin awkwardly, roll your eyes and find some way to change the subject to something less tiresome. On the internet, you'd just find another less bothersome thread to spend your precious attention span in, and that's exactly what people do.
Even when people say who they work for, they need to be cautious of the content they write. Defending a company against negative press is the role of CEOs and other personnel.
Who here is upset with some of the decisions of their employers? Who else is upset that the management they work under are scumbags? I would dare say most of us fit that category.
I used to work for a company whose product is pretty good, but the CEO and CTO behave unethically. They are fine with lying and cheating if they can get away with it.
For example, it was discovered that in some cases the company was double-charging customers. When it was fixed, the CEO and CTO noticed a drop in revenue and told the employee to "unfix" it. That employee has ethics and thus refused revert the change.
All my previous coworkers are good people trying to make a living. I was happy that my efforts were providing the users a good product and that the company was financially supporting my coworkers. I was unhappy that my efforts were enriching scumbags.
I share that feeling, but also... Apple, Amazon and Netflix have some halfway decent customer support, whereas Google and Facebook have next to none so I think part of the cause may be people tired of being abused as unpaid customer service / "grievance counselor".
It seems that most people on here don't post who they work for, Facebook or otherwise.
You also have to remember that these are public companies and engineers often work on stuff the public hasn’t learned about yet. There are too many land mines to be super open.
I see people do this, but I also found people that i know to be facebooker not disclose it probably due to unrelated comments made on fb more so than topic on hand.