Just finished it! Been camping since Thursday, so had time to read. I expected it to sort of decline in intensity as I got closer to the end, but it's pretty darn fascinating the whole way. Highly recommended.
I read Careless People and then Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter and they felt like a good pairing. "Character Limit" is also one of the best book titles ever. I highly recommend both.
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.
Not linking to the docket/filing is a thing that “LawTwitter” absolutely melts down over. There’s some court reporters that consistently do a good job. The rest just don’t want you clicking away.
>Sarah Wynn-Williams served as director of global public policy at Facebook, now operating under parent company Meta Platforms Inc., from 2011 until her firing in 2017. “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.
I would have liked to learn about specific allegations of "cruel and otherwise disturbing" from the article, instead of leaving this completely ambiguous.
He throws huge temper tantrums and pouts so much when he loses at board games while traveling on the facebook private jet so all his staff conspires to let him win.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's hilarious that anyone would give a shit about Zuck having a bad attitude about losing board games. Hopefully the book has something more damning than that.
The book has plenty of prurient private-jet-boardgame stuff, but also deals directly with facebook's adoption in Myanmar at at time when the inflammatary online speech was directly fuelling ethnic violence against the Rohingya. It covers the inability and possible unwillingness of facebook moderation staff to intervene, including a report that one paid moderator was not effective in their work because their personal views aligned with the regime.
The Myanmar struggles where Zuck explicitly valued a feature and the approval of the administration over open threats to harm dissidents.
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?"
One good example: Facebook was ignoring Brazilian law. An employee in brazil was arrested and charged with contempt. He spent a while in jail. Zuck started posting about the guy being a martyr for free expression while the lawyers trying to negotiate the release begged him to keep quiet.
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.
"This feature/posture you really want to roll out in Burma is something that Burmese protestors, hell, the Burmese government has told us will be used to harm dissidents."
"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.
>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.
> Ms. Wynn-Williams’s colleagues were frustrated that they could hear her baby in the background on late night work calls. As a proposed “solution,” Ms. Sandberg told Ms. Wynn-Williams that she should “[b]e smart and hire a Filipina nanny” because they are “English speaking, [have a] sunny disposition, and [are] service oriented.”
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.
> 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.
Yikes. If it's normal for a superior in any company you work for to tell you how to run your personal life, to include the race of the "service people" you need to hire on your own dime, you have some seriously toxic workplaces.
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"?
Filipino isn't a race. It's the name for people who come from a specific country.
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.
She was a Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. Probably cleaned up. On the arbitration, they mentioned there was 300k in business expense reimbursement. Signed an NDA, went through arbitration, got paid out pretty nicely and now wants to cash in 10 years after the fact? Claimed it was signed due to "financial distress". Give me a break.
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.
> he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma
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.
Personally, I think the takeaway is to not be a terrible human being wielding enormous power, but sure, the main problem is letting people learn more about how terrible of a person you are.
It was very well written and I plowed through it in just a few days. It’s probably more than you think, like the part about Sheryl making her reports cuddle in bed with her.
I'd support the Careless People effect.
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.
The money they piss away on the vanity projects should probably have always been going to risk management.
Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.