(Since the TikTok post was swapped out with this one, I'll repost my late comment here, since it applies to a lot of companies.)
> As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...]
I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook.
And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit.
My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear?
* Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this?
* Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?)
* Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil?
* Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled?
* Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire?
* Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public?
* Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?
My team at Facebook in the 2010s made many such reports.
We did that work because our mandate was to understand the users and how to serve them.
We did that with full good natured ethical intent.
We turned the findings in to project proposals and MVPs.
The ones that were revenue negative were killed by leadership after all that work, repeat cycle.
Interesting. Any sense whether that system was consciously constructed? (Like, Task a group to generate product changes appealing to users, and then cherrypick the ones that are profitable, to get/maintain profitable good product.)
Or was it not as conscious, more an accident of following industry conventions for corporate roles, and corporate inefficiency&miscommunication?
It was extremely scientifically methodical. Everything is designed from UX and other sources of holistic research. Then validated with the most built-out AB test system you can imagine. Only winners are kept.
Meta is doing this thousands of times per month, all the time.
> Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear?
They hire people on the autism spectrum who are inclined to say things out loud without much regard/respect for whether they are "supposed to" say it. *cough* James Damore.
I didn't guess that autism was involved in that case, and I'm a little uncomfortable with something that might sound like suggesting that autistic people might be less corporate-compatible.
There are plenty of autistic people who wouldn't say what Damore did, and there are non-autistic people who would.
I also know autistic people who are very highly-valued in key roles, including technical expert roles interfacing directly with customer senior execs in high-profile enterprise deals.
People are individuals, and we tend to end up treating individuals unfairly because of labels and biases, so we should try to correct for that when we can.
On the contrary, autistic people who don't hesitate to speak uncomfortable truthes are vital to the health of organizations, and society as a whole. You would all be lost without us.
(Note my indifference to your discomfort with my comment.)
In my opinion it's unhelpful to pathologize behaviour like being blunt or speaking your mind. It's just another expression of the impulse to split the world into an in-group and an out-group. I especially agree with the last paragraph of the GP. Doing this may be fun to do when you're making statements like "autistic people are inherently superior in some ways", but it's obviously an issue when some other misguided person makes a statement that I think most rational people would disagree with, such as "autistic people are inherently inferior in some ways". We are all just people.