7 ms·

Over the past year I've slowly started to realize this as well. What changed? Working for a company that is publicly known enough for people on HN (and Reddit)

Over the past year I've slowly started to realize this as well. What changed? Working for a company that is publicly known enough for people on HN (and Reddit) to comment about it. It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. In this case, it's easy for me to recognize they are wrong. But what about other topics (or companies) I don't know much about? I have no easy way of recognizing inaccuracies so I default to mostly accepting them. Sadly, you need to be skeptical of almost everything you read even when the person sounds like they know the subject matter.

robomartin 6y ago
The problem is that the masses are not equipped to separate fabrication from reality. It often takes hours of research to actually get to the bottom of a story. Nowhere is this more prevalent and hideous than in US politics. Media outlets, under cover of constitutional protection lie with impunity, consequences be damned. All they care about is hitting resonance and feeding it. It is hard to estimate the damage they have caused this nation. In some cases discovering the truth has a time element as well. I remember a very specific case from the 2016 elections that drove this point home for me. I was watching CNN. They featured this story about a black church that had been burned down and the phrase “Vote Trump” spray painted on the side. The network pounded on this story for a week or so. They painted Trump as the racist instigator who inspired someone to do this. None of this made sense for me. Unless crazy, a supporter of any political candidate would know that burning down a church would not be a net positive for their candidate. Something was wrong, yet it was impossible to discover at that time. I was so puzzled that I set a calendar reminder to look into the story a few months later. Sure enough, three months later they arrested the guy who did it. Who was he? A member of the church. Yes, a black man. Why did he do it? Because he had a problem with the pastor. Why did he spray paint “Vote Trump”? Because he thought that would send investigators in a different direction. Do you think CNN devoted a week’s worth of 24/7 coverage to correct the absolute falsehoods they spread? Of course not! They could not care less! Millions of people walked away from a one week carpet bombing campaign across most of the media with lies upon lies pounded into their heads. This one event truly changed my views. I started to research everything. I can say that in nearly 100% of the stories I look into the media lied with impunity. While I don’t consider myself a Trump supporter, I started to understand what the man was dealing with. He has had to endure this for four years. This is a horrific violation of the trust and privileges granted to the media by the US constitution. Some might be OK with this because they dislike Trump. That is a terribly myopic position to adopt. Today the media attacks those you dislike, yet nothing in life is constant. Tomorrow, whenever that may be, the tables might change...sadly that’s when people finally realize that a principled unbiased position in favor of truth and justice is the only one that can protect everyone.
Koiwai 6y ago
When general media has some report about my specific field, they're usually filled with nonsense, then I realized the only logical conclusion is that other fields face exactly the same problem, it's just that I couldn't identify the bullshit in them. I got that like 15 years ago.
m463 6y ago
On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the kool-aid. I've also worked at companies where wikipedia has more accurate and detailed information than the internal wikis. So maybe some of those insane people have - expertise and perspective. Now not all. A lot of press is fawning. And nowadays, maybe due to algorithmic feedback, a lot of stuff is sort of fake controversial.
- bretthopper 6y ago
  You make a good point and I do agree. Also at any bigger company, no one person's experience is completely representative. It depends on the person, manager, team, org, etc. There's no way any one person could know everything about a company. But my comment wasn't really about cultural or org issues (which can be much more subjective); it was more about specific facts that are binary. I'll read people say something like "x company is rewriting everything in Go because Rails is slow" when it's not true at all.
  - loopz 6y ago
    One person is enough to change or make new facts about the company too.
- konjin 6y ago
  >On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the kool-aid. The idea that the drones in a company know more about the company than the public is laughable. Unless you have your own office you do not know what the company's goals actually are.
- bcwarner 6y ago
  That's interesting how an internal wiki could be less accurate than Wikipedia, how big were these discrepancies?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    It kind of makes sense - wikipedia has rules about sourcing, and lots of eyes on it. Your company's internal wiki is internal documentation that is probably nobody's job to update and has pages in it last edited 10 years ago by people who have long since quit.
MichaelZuo 6y ago
“Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.” - Michael Crichton
- sebmellen 6y ago
  I'm surprised Crichton thought Murray Gell-Mann was more famous than he was! I would think the reverse (and the Crichton Amnesia Effect is a great name).
  - Talanes 6y ago
    But dropping his own name can ascribe no more importance to himself. Dropping in another famous name, and one from a complete different field no less, ascribes greater credibility than Michael Crichton alone can manage.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Gell-Mann would be more famous if anyone could remember his name... :P
baby 6y ago
The same happened to me after I started at a company than HN hated and realized that it’s much different inside that the picture painted here. I became really skeptical of any big claims about other big corps too.
- doitLP 6y ago
  Facebook? Riot? Microsoft? SoftBank?
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    I'd guess that it's Amazon
  - tomcam 6y ago
    No one puts baby in a corner.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Do hn hate those? Maybe facebook has a lot of haters these days. Last time i heard someone bash on microsoft, slashdot was still big. On the whole i think hacker news tends to be pretty positive to big tech.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > On the whole i think hacker news tends to be pretty positive to big tech. Perhaps to a fault, the same applies to the CCP Bots you see here posting anytime anyone questions China: you have people here with self-interest guiding their words and creating rationalizations like those above stating how erroneous 'the media' and 'outsiders' portray them in a bad light and that some how they are poorly informed and thus their views are nothing more than unsubstantiated conjecture. But one needs to only look at the recent behavior of Apple riots in India and Amazon exploiting warehouse workers and firing them during COVID due to reasonable concerns--like lack of PPE and distancing/hygiene/prevention methods. Its so commonplace and thus very easy to realize that if these massive monoliths, who benefit from very skewed tax, legal and labur laws, are not going to put Human Rights/Labor Laws before Profit or Market Share even during a Global pandemic, then they never will: and Governments on a whole are either/or both complicit as they ignorant on their business models making legislation solutions entirely moot. And I'm not even going to mentioned Google as this rebuttal would never end. But nothing changes those objective truths regardless of how much you may want to sugarcoat things, and the fact that so many here still think FAANG is the end all and be all of Tech shows just how misguided if not entirely indoctrinated (from within or otherwise) they really are and how easily they are bought off with the illusion of prestige, a meaningless title and an often over bloated salary and by extension a sense of self worth for the things they've actually bring to the World often, most notably: Social media that creates discord and division and devices that promote further dependence on self-infatuated naval gazing while our Environment and hapless languish in mines and suffer ever greater exploitation, and these businesses make them increasingly more within the closed source, planned obsolesce paradigm business model. Not to mention the depression and suicide these addictive things are meant to create in a sort of intention span casino addiction model. So, no, I don't think what you're saying is true, and what you are referring to is told with very obvious biases. People should be critical of these exploitative and frankly often unnecessary and cancerous business models, the problem is that they wield so much power and money they simply destroy any competition they may have had in the past, assuming they didn't acquire them and we get less choices due to these monopolistic practices. I think it was Chamath that said it best when he describes what banks and big tech excel at that most the Industries can't as the 'intellectual lobotomization' of a generation(s) best minds as they spend(t) their talents and drive to often pointless (facebook) and often nefarious ends (credit default swaps, naked short selling/high frequency trading algorithms etc...).
austincheney 6y ago
> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. Sounds more like stupidity than insanity. People do this to express an uninformed opinion with unearned authority because that opinion and any resulting agreement are more valuable than facts and boring predictable conclusions.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I used to think this too, but when I look at the COVID and lockdown opinions of my facebook friends, they greatly differ, but their intelligence doesn't differ that much. I know people as intelligent as me, to have complete opposite opinions. My first reaction was that they are stupid, but I actually know they are pretty smart. It's easy to dismiss someone elses opinion as stupid, but it's really hard when you know it's not actually the case. With the COVID situation, I concluded that there are more authoritative, "follow the rules" people, and more rebel, "we hate the rules" people. Thanks to covid I have a clear view who of my contacts belong to which group. Most of them are intelligent.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Intelligence have often less to do with rationality and objectivity, which can be used as facade to hide the biases.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    That is not the same thing. I doubt your friends are claiming to be some sort of insider expert and then imposing that expertise upon others like a hammer, which is entirely different than just being disagreeable.
    - koonsolo 6y ago
      Well, the rebels claimed that the covid tests were crap, numbers were being exagerated, government took the opportunity for more control, lockdowns are not necesarry, experts were short sighted idiots, thanked the anti-vaxers for not making vaccinations obligatory, gave everyone shit for not taking the streets and fighting authority. Then the lawful people claimed extreme situations require extreme measures, experts know best, high numbers are because stupid people don't follow the rules, etc.
jcims 6y ago
I'm a middle-aged, white, cis male heterosexual married father that has started and run companies, hired and managed engineers, make ok money, lean a bit right of center politically, worked for the government, large banks, healthcare and retail and lives in a rural location in the midwest. What you've described is something I experience in almost every facet of my life. I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast majority of time that I don't even bother to argue because there's nothing to even work with as a ground truth. The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity. Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that platform.
- robomartin 6y ago
  I had the same experience you described, except, in my case, it was Facebook. People in my industry who I have known for 20+ years dedicated 100% of their online presence to spewing out and promoting such incredible hate-filled garbage that I was in shock. Otherwise intelligent educated people got sucked into amazing resonant chambers of hatred. It was beyond belief. I finally unfriended everyone on FB but about a dozen close family members. This was an experience I don’t care to repeat.
- bigmattystyles 6y ago
  Same - and although I've been able to resist it so far, it's so tempting to retort, well fuck you too. I can see why people get pulled towards the extremes. The reasonable (in my case progressive stand point) is not good enough for the extremists.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  > cis male heterosexual married father How I long for the good old days when people used the word "man" to describe this.
  - 6y ago
hourislate 6y ago
"Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have" - Dr. Hildern at Camp McCarran. Great quote from a fictional game (Fallout) character.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  It's easy to see things black and white when you're not well informed. When you're the expert, it's all about tradeoffs, and every decision or opinion always needs to be balanced out.
throw0203 6y ago
I had a similar experience at a bigco that had a minor controversy on HN/Reddit a while back. In this case I was literally able to look at relevant source code and internal documents. Many of the comments were wildly inaccurate and conspiratorial, although there were a couple voices of reason mixed in.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  I've gone through that a few times and it's bittersweet. On one hand, it's gratifying to see that my colleagues aren't as immoral or incompetent as xxYoloSwag420xx on reddit claims they are. On the other hand it's frustrating not being able to debunk their blatant bullshit that's been upvoted by a thousand people (which means it's probably been seen by 10,000 people who take it at face value).
tdumitrescu 6y ago
I've noticed this regarding companies I've worked at too. When it involves any knowledge that wouldn't be available to the public, people on HN spout plausible-sounding theories as though they're fact, but they actually have no basis in reality. "Turned out Company X was having trouble monetizing Feature Y so they've decided to pivot and adopt a new marketing strategy which is why customer support now takes so long to respond if you're not on an enterprise tier." And for other random companies that stuff sounds perfectly plausible, but every time I've been in a position to fact-check against deep personal knowledge of the company in question, it's been total BS. Just wild speculation presented with an air of authority.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  Every color science and/or accessibility thread trends towards quoting and reinforcing the same gentleman who has blotted out the sun by writing extremely long (and informative!) explanations of color theory on several sites, in service of an extremely flawed conclusion that is fixed by an hour of Mathematica and experience with actual color science.
  - dxdm 6y ago
    Now after reading all of the above, I'm painfully aware that I have no idea whether what you just said is true or random BS. :(
    - watwut 6y ago
      I am betting BS
    - refulgentis 6y ago
      Hah, very good ;)
  - itronitron 6y ago
    Can you post links to either the HN threads or color theory sites that you feel are reinforcing the flawed conclusions?
closeparen 6y ago
Older friends lament that you used to be able to have perfectly good conversations arguing about trivial questions of fact. Now there's always some asshole with a smartphone to look up the right answer and ruin the fun. It helps to look at HN the same way. It's not about the truth, it's about enjoying the conversation.
- 0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
  Now everyone thinks they’re geniuses too just because they can google random facts. You should talk faster than they can type just to keep having fun at their expense. Also, if you talk long enough chances are very good that you’ll find something they’re unable to easily google it. Most people are still lazy thinkers anyways.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    That's what HN is... bullshitting claims that are too expensive to disprove even with time to research.
    - 0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
      You’re certainly enjoying the conversation! /s
- bawolff 6y ago
  I never got this. If your question could be answered by googling, its not really an interesting question. Meaning of life -> interesting question What is the capital of Canada? -> who cares, and if you did care why would you want to debate it instead of looking it up? [Its just an example, i am Canadian and obviously know what the answer is]
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    Using a search engine requires skill. Asking a good question does as well. The saying is, "the most stupid question is the one you haven't asked". However it omits one should put in effort to do their own research. That effort is somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't equal using Google (I generally don't even use Google search engine), nor does it require success in using Google. A good basis is the ability to do research; I believe the emphasis should lie there. And it needs to be taught before university (which is 18+ age).
da02 6y ago
What were some of the inaccurate things said by the HN/Reddit crowd?
- mtberatwork 6y ago
  Look no further than this comment thread. HN (and Reddit) is filled with conspiratorial rants about journalism and the news media. This is not to dismiss valid media criticism but the vast majority of posts on HN make laughably inaccurate assumptions about the news business.
  - da02 6y ago
    What's one inaccurate assumption (that stands out among others) about the news business the HN crowd has made in 2020?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blago 6y ago
Or you just trust people who qualify their statements, moderate they views, and have balanced and nuanced opinions.
legerdemain 6y ago
Case in point: Palantir. People would rather spread bizarre FUD they hear in the media than face the fact that they just don't know how much good Palantir does.
- Veen 6y ago
  What good does Palantir do? I'd be quite interested to hear about it.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    Certainly more good than news media taking an occasional drive-by shit on them will admit. It behooves people who still read the news to develop a healthy skepticism about motivated negative coverage.
  - zeofig 6y ago
    Don't know much about them, but they do appear to support/do the development of pyls (python language server)
    - varjag 6y ago
      Do they build Autobahns too
  - Aunche 6y ago
    They have a surprising number of humanitarian projects. For example, they're partnering with the World Food Programme to optimize food distribution.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      That might be a corporate form of moral self licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
- chillacy 6y ago
  I got nothing against Palantir (disclosure: I'm a shareholder) but you do have to acknowledge that people have very different definitions of "good" that factor into their opinions. Some people find that bringing technology into the government is of course good, others are vehemently against agencies like ICE or the military industrial complex.
JohnBooty 6y ago
It's sobering, to put it mildly. It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. In the early days of the Internet, there was this widespread naivete that the truth would win. People generally wanted the truth, right? And this "global information superhighway" would act as sort of a de facto peer review. We wouldn't always get things right, but overall it would surely be a win for "the truth" or at least, for reasoned opinions. Or so we thought. How naive we were.
pmiller2 6y ago
I have had the exact same experience with my most recent employer. They certainly didn't do everything right, but, generally, it seems they are quick to acknowledge and fix their mistakes, and, certainly they try to be as ethical as possible internally. This company is pretty universally hated across the internet, yet, in the 2 years I was there, I didn't see even a tenth as much unethical or otherwise bad behavior there as I did from Facebook, for instance. Surprisingly, relatively few people outside of a techie / HN-type bubble seem to hate Facebook.
lhorie 6y ago
It's much broader than just public perception of companies. A lot of stuff that passes off as information is actually entertainment. For example, news about some new nutrition study typically don't involve any of the hard scientific line of inquiry that actual science work entails (e.g. critically thinking about potential methology flaws, for example.) Reading about some politician slipping out a gaffe says nothing about what is happening in terms of law making (and nuances are often lost in translation when an article does talk about new laws). Etc. A lot of articles are filled with rethoric and/or "real life" stories that don't really have a direct impact on the reader other than to elicit some form of emotional response. Contrast to actual educational material that is denser and drier, and can make a real impact in the reader's future when studied properly.
tester756 6y ago
I always wondered how do Google, MS, FB, {popular_game e.g Riot Games/CDPR} and so on employees feel when they read that bullshit
- pmiller2 6y ago
  As someone who worked for a company that's widely hated on the internet (I'm talking front page of HN-level hate), my reaction was always to sigh and let our PR people handle it. I deliberately stayed out of any discussions involving my former employer.
programmertote 6y ago
We can translate that to pretty much anything that we hear/read/watch second-hand from any source (including the news media). I grew up in a South Asian country and came to the US in early 2000 for college. Before then, I listened to BBC, RFA and VOA religiously and thought what they report there about my country is the truth (we were ruled by the military regime back then and most of the population assume everything the government said is a lie. An example in which people were already desensitized to disregard the government--the military government broadcast a public health service announcements after 8pm news everyday and those includes things like not using too much oil in the food for fear of heart disease. The general public would assume the government cannot import sufficient amount of edible oil from abroad--because of economic sanctions--so they are discouraging everyone to use less oil in cooking!). But when I came to the US and started to learn who is feeding these news to the VOA, RFA, etc. and how these people and organizations (including the UN orgs) got funding, I realize not everything that I read is true. This became very apparent when I read news about my country (reported by NYT and other reputable media outlets) that are too simplistic and one-sided. Then I stopped reading news altogether since 2016 and quit FB. That was the best decision ever and nowadays I only use Reddit to follow very specific subreddits (just sports, aww and funny). People are very opinionated about things that they have not experienced, and with online anonymity, people can sprout baseless stuff and easily buy into believing things that are simply not true. Everything I said here applies to HN as well. There are a lot of very poorly-informed-but-opinionated users here just like everywhere on the internet.
anonunivgrad 6y ago
People aren’t psychologically equipped to handle this kind of dishonesty. We evolved to deal with small groups. People would either be forced into honesty by socialization or reputational fears, or they’d be exiled or executed. Now, you just go on Twitter and virtue signal about some nonsense idpol stuff while robbing everyone blind, and the people will love you.
throwaway473229 6y ago
I’ve worked for two companies now that are high-profile HN fodder. Discussions of both of them have been complete batshit—from the technical engineering to the business decisions, and everything in between. I will never understand why it’s so hard for people to realize and admit when they don’t know what they’re talking about. One thing that helped me was when I was taught how to answer questions in a legal context. (Patent deposition.) Every answer has two parts: the answer to the question is the second part, to be preceded by your confidence in the answer. “I believe,” “I think,” or just plain “I don’t know,” and so on. Ever since then I’ve just habitually asked myself, “do I actually know this, or do I just think this, and on what basis?” Do this enough and you’ll be surprised at how little you actually know. Especially about what goes on inside companies you’ve never worked for.
- prox 6y ago
  Good point. A quote from Michael J Straczynski : “The truth is a three edged sword : your opinion, my opinion and the truth.”
ajuc 6y ago
I've had exactly the same revelation about traditional media a few years back. I listen to talk-only radio a lot, they have some of the best experts in the country supposedly, a lot of famous names. And then they talk about some topic I am familiar with (like Polish army modernization or computer science) and they spew bullshit for 1 hour with 100% confidence and there's 10 people in the studio who I'm sure know it's bullshit but they say nothing. It's surreal. It means they don't even spend 5 minutes on the most basic research before a 1 hour debate.
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
I used to read editorials on Slate.com, the articles seemed interesting and discussed topics I didn't know much about. I did that until I read an article about something I did know something about, and I realized they were getting everything wrong. And I realized that they were just taking a devil's advocate position about everything and writing things that were contrary to how things are, presumably to get clicks.
alsetmusic 6y ago
I have experienced exactly this. I worked for a company who is highly covered in tech news. The most popular stories and themes knew almost nothing about the reality of we were doing. Maybe one in five voices was correct. It was totally disheartening to the point that I completely stopped reading any related topic. Way off base. To this day, I am frustrated by misinformation about the work we did. The internet (and general knowledge) is not intelligent.
- prox 6y ago
  To counterpoint, what did you or the company do to set things straight?
  - alsetmusic 6y ago
    We spent months that were planned for developing new features ripping out features that didn't perform well enough. The intent was good: bring the new shiny to people with older hardware. The result was poor: people with older hardware thought we were deliberately slowing them down.
    - prox 6y ago
      I understand. Relationship management is a tough nut to crack. I know few companies who tick all the boxes. Discord is usually great with its splash screen what they are doing at the moment.
Aunche 6y ago
You see a bunch of blatantly wrong things about countries as well that would be obvious for anyone who lived there. As a uncontroversial example, Winnie the Pooh clearly isn't banned in China, given how much merchandise is manufactured there. The "ghost cities" that were reported in about in China a few years are largely populated. They were empty at the time because they were new.
naikrovek 6y ago
> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. That's true with everything. Everyone has their own way to feel superior to everyone else, and for a lot of people, that superiority comes from knowledge, real or imagined.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I treat nearly every comment online like they are a user who is actively trying to deceive me and it's sad.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  I do something like this when a comment provokes an emotional reaction the fits with current societal trends. I literally ask myself "What if this comment is an echo of a troll?" I don't impute bad faith to the individual, but that they too may have been seduced by the power of easy emotions.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    Same here especially after watching the CGP Grey video on anger.
jiggawatts 6y ago
The fish is the last to know it lives in water. Often companies deal with their own staff very differently to how they treat their customers or their competition. The average Oracle developers probably has no inkling of how Oracle screws over their customers with onerous licensing, for example. Insiders that aren't in very senior management positions may not even be aware of the high-level decisions being made by their company. You often hear stories of employees being completely blind-sided when scandals or corruption are revealed. Similarly, I've noticed that employees tend to make excuses for their company's behaviour, casually dismissing bad behaviour that isn't so easy to ignore for everyone else. This is tribalism at its finest. Lastly, you hear rationalisations galore from people in senior management positions, carefully avoiding any mention of the real motivations for their bad behaviour. These lies are especially important when they speak to internal staff, especially staff they're screwing over. As a random example, I worked at a large company recently where they essentially fired their entire IT department and replaced them with an outsourcer that charged half as much. I was an outside consultant working for senior management, so I got to see the real inside story. The staff were deliberately kept in the dark, and even outright lied to. The real reason for the whole thing was that outsourcers cycle employees through every three months on temporary working visas, avoiding income taxes and essentially all mandatory payments such as worker's compensation. The whole thing was a huge tax dodge. I read an article in a newspaper calling this out. The article was mostly true, but I guarantee you that 99% of the people at the company would have never known any of this. Being an insider only gives you really detailed information about your own team, perhaps a dozen people. If you're at a FAANG, this might be 0.01% of the company at large...

robomartin 6y ago

The problem is that the masses are not equipped to separate fabrication from reality. It often takes hours of research to actually get to the bottom of a story. Nowhere is this more prevalent and hideous than in US politics. Media outlets, under cover of constitutional protection lie with impunity, consequences be damned. All they care about is hitting resonance and feeding it. It is hard to estimate the damage they have caused this nation. In some cases discovering the truth has a time element as well. I remember a very specific case from the 2016 elections that drove this point home for me. I was watching CNN. They featured this story about a black church that had been burned down and the phrase “Vote Trump” spray painted on the side. The network pounded on this story for a week or so. They painted Trump as the racist instigator who inspired someone to do this. None of this made sense for me. Unless crazy, a supporter of any political candidate would know that burning down a church would not be a net positive for their candidate. Something was wrong, yet it was impossible to discover at that time. I was so puzzled that I set a calendar reminder to look into the story a few months later. Sure enough, three months later they arrested the guy who did it. Who was he? A member of the church. Yes, a black man. Why did he do it? Because he had a problem with the pastor. Why did he spray paint “Vote Trump”? Because he thought that would send investigators in a different direction. Do you think CNN devoted a week’s worth of 24/7 coverage to correct the absolute falsehoods they spread? Of course not! They could not care less! Millions of people walked away from a one week carpet bombing campaign across most of the media with lies upon lies pounded into their heads. This one event truly changed my views. I started to research everything. I can say that in nearly 100% of the stories I look into the media lied with impunity. While I don’t consider myself a Trump supporter, I started to understand what the man was dealing with. He has had to endure this for four years. This is a horrific violation of the trust and privileges granted to the media by the US constitution. Some might be OK with this because they dislike Trump. That is a terribly myopic position to adopt. Today the media attacks those you dislike, yet nothing in life is constant. Tomorrow, whenever that may be, the tables might change...sadly that’s when people finally realize that a principled unbiased position in favor of truth and justice is the only one that can protect everyone.

Koiwai 6y ago

When general media has some report about my specific field, they're usually filled with nonsense, then I realized the only logical conclusion is that other fields face exactly the same problem, it's just that I couldn't identify the bullshit in them. I got that like 15 years ago.

m463 6y ago

On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the kool-aid. I've also worked at companies where wikipedia has more accurate and detailed information than the internal wikis. So maybe some of those insane people have - expertise and perspective. Now not all. A lot of press is fawning. And nowadays, maybe due to algorithmic feedback, a lot of stuff is sort of fake controversial.

bretthopper 6y ago
You make a good point and I do agree. Also at any bigger company, no one person's experience is completely representative. It depends on the person, manager, team, org, etc. There's no way any one person could know everything about a company. But my comment wasn't really about cultural or org issues (which can be much more subjective); it was more about specific facts that are binary. I'll read people say something like "x company is rewriting everything in Go because Rails is slow" when it's not true at all.
- loopz 6y ago
  One person is enough to change or make new facts about the company too.
konjin 6y ago
>On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the kool-aid. The idea that the drones in a company know more about the company than the public is laughable. Unless you have your own office you do not know what the company's goals actually are.
bcwarner 6y ago
That's interesting how an internal wiki could be less accurate than Wikipedia, how big were these discrepancies?
- bawolff 6y ago
  It kind of makes sense - wikipedia has rules about sourcing, and lots of eyes on it. Your company's internal wiki is internal documentation that is probably nobody's job to update and has pages in it last edited 10 years ago by people who have long since quit.

MichaelZuo 6y ago

“Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.” - Michael Crichton

sebmellen 6y ago
I'm surprised Crichton thought Murray Gell-Mann was more famous than he was! I would think the reverse (and the Crichton Amnesia Effect is a great name).
- Talanes 6y ago
  But dropping his own name can ascribe no more importance to himself. Dropping in another famous name, and one from a complete different field no less, ascribes greater credibility than Michael Crichton alone can manage.
- taneq 6y ago
  Gell-Mann would be more famous if anyone could remember his name... :P

baby 6y ago

The same happened to me after I started at a company than HN hated and realized that it’s much different inside that the picture painted here. I became really skeptical of any big claims about other big corps too.

doitLP 6y ago
Facebook? Riot? Microsoft? SoftBank?
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  I'd guess that it's Amazon
- tomcam 6y ago
  No one puts baby in a corner.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Do hn hate those? Maybe facebook has a lot of haters these days. Last time i heard someone bash on microsoft, slashdot was still big. On the whole i think hacker news tends to be pretty positive to big tech.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > On the whole i think hacker news tends to be pretty positive to big tech. Perhaps to a fault, the same applies to the CCP Bots you see here posting anytime anyone questions China: you have people here with self-interest guiding their words and creating rationalizations like those above stating how erroneous 'the media' and 'outsiders' portray them in a bad light and that some how they are poorly informed and thus their views are nothing more than unsubstantiated conjecture. But one needs to only look at the recent behavior of Apple riots in India and Amazon exploiting warehouse workers and firing them during COVID due to reasonable concerns--like lack of PPE and distancing/hygiene/prevention methods. Its so commonplace and thus very easy to realize that if these massive monoliths, who benefit from very skewed tax, legal and labur laws, are not going to put Human Rights/Labor Laws before Profit or Market Share even during a Global pandemic, then they never will: and Governments on a whole are either/or both complicit as they ignorant on their business models making legislation solutions entirely moot. And I'm not even going to mentioned Google as this rebuttal would never end. But nothing changes those objective truths regardless of how much you may want to sugarcoat things, and the fact that so many here still think FAANG is the end all and be all of Tech shows just how misguided if not entirely indoctrinated (from within or otherwise) they really are and how easily they are bought off with the illusion of prestige, a meaningless title and an often over bloated salary and by extension a sense of self worth for the things they've actually bring to the World often, most notably: Social media that creates discord and division and devices that promote further dependence on self-infatuated naval gazing while our Environment and hapless languish in mines and suffer ever greater exploitation, and these businesses make them increasingly more within the closed source, planned obsolesce paradigm business model. Not to mention the depression and suicide these addictive things are meant to create in a sort of intention span casino addiction model. So, no, I don't think what you're saying is true, and what you are referring to is told with very obvious biases. People should be critical of these exploitative and frankly often unnecessary and cancerous business models, the problem is that they wield so much power and money they simply destroy any competition they may have had in the past, assuming they didn't acquire them and we get less choices due to these monopolistic practices. I think it was Chamath that said it best when he describes what banks and big tech excel at that most the Industries can't as the 'intellectual lobotomization' of a generation(s) best minds as they spend(t) their talents and drive to often pointless (facebook) and often nefarious ends (credit default swaps, naked short selling/high frequency trading algorithms etc...).

austincheney 6y ago

> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. Sounds more like stupidity than insanity. People do this to express an uninformed opinion with unearned authority because that opinion and any resulting agreement are more valuable than facts and boring predictable conclusions.

koonsolo 6y ago
I used to think this too, but when I look at the COVID and lockdown opinions of my facebook friends, they greatly differ, but their intelligence doesn't differ that much. I know people as intelligent as me, to have complete opposite opinions. My first reaction was that they are stupid, but I actually know they are pretty smart. It's easy to dismiss someone elses opinion as stupid, but it's really hard when you know it's not actually the case. With the COVID situation, I concluded that there are more authoritative, "follow the rules" people, and more rebel, "we hate the rules" people. Thanks to covid I have a clear view who of my contacts belong to which group. Most of them are intelligent.
- loopz 6y ago
  Intelligence have often less to do with rationality and objectivity, which can be used as facade to hide the biases.
- austincheney 6y ago
  That is not the same thing. I doubt your friends are claiming to be some sort of insider expert and then imposing that expertise upon others like a hammer, which is entirely different than just being disagreeable.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Well, the rebels claimed that the covid tests were crap, numbers were being exagerated, government took the opportunity for more control, lockdowns are not necesarry, experts were short sighted idiots, thanked the anti-vaxers for not making vaccinations obligatory, gave everyone shit for not taking the streets and fighting authority. Then the lawful people claimed extreme situations require extreme measures, experts know best, high numbers are because stupid people don't follow the rules, etc.

jcims 6y ago

I'm a middle-aged, white, cis male heterosexual married father that has started and run companies, hired and managed engineers, make ok money, lean a bit right of center politically, worked for the government, large banks, healthcare and retail and lives in a rural location in the midwest. What you've described is something I experience in almost every facet of my life. I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast majority of time that I don't even bother to argue because there's nothing to even work with as a ground truth. The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity. Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that platform.

robomartin 6y ago
I had the same experience you described, except, in my case, it was Facebook. People in my industry who I have known for 20+ years dedicated 100% of their online presence to spewing out and promoting such incredible hate-filled garbage that I was in shock. Otherwise intelligent educated people got sucked into amazing resonant chambers of hatred. It was beyond belief. I finally unfriended everyone on FB but about a dozen close family members. This was an experience I don’t care to repeat.
bigmattystyles 6y ago
Same - and although I've been able to resist it so far, it's so tempting to retort, well fuck you too. I can see why people get pulled towards the extremes. The reasonable (in my case progressive stand point) is not good enough for the extremists.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
> cis male heterosexual married father How I long for the good old days when people used the word "man" to describe this.
- 6y ago

hourislate 6y ago

"Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have" - Dr. Hildern at Camp McCarran. Great quote from a fictional game (Fallout) character.

koonsolo 6y ago
It's easy to see things black and white when you're not well informed. When you're the expert, it's all about tradeoffs, and every decision or opinion always needs to be balanced out.

throw0203 6y ago

I had a similar experience at a bigco that had a minor controversy on HN/Reddit a while back. In this case I was literally able to look at relevant source code and internal documents. Many of the comments were wildly inaccurate and conspiratorial, although there were a couple voices of reason mixed in.

Rebelgecko 6y ago
I've gone through that a few times and it's bittersweet. On one hand, it's gratifying to see that my colleagues aren't as immoral or incompetent as xxYoloSwag420xx on reddit claims they are. On the other hand it's frustrating not being able to debunk their blatant bullshit that's been upvoted by a thousand people (which means it's probably been seen by 10,000 people who take it at face value).

tdumitrescu 6y ago

I've noticed this regarding companies I've worked at too. When it involves any knowledge that wouldn't be available to the public, people on HN spout plausible-sounding theories as though they're fact, but they actually have no basis in reality. "Turned out Company X was having trouble monetizing Feature Y so they've decided to pivot and adopt a new marketing strategy which is why customer support now takes so long to respond if you're not on an enterprise tier." And for other random companies that stuff sounds perfectly plausible, but every time I've been in a position to fact-check against deep personal knowledge of the company in question, it's been total BS. Just wild speculation presented with an air of authority.

refulgentis 6y ago
Every color science and/or accessibility thread trends towards quoting and reinforcing the same gentleman who has blotted out the sun by writing extremely long (and informative!) explanations of color theory on several sites, in service of an extremely flawed conclusion that is fixed by an hour of Mathematica and experience with actual color science.
- dxdm 6y ago
  Now after reading all of the above, I'm painfully aware that I have no idea whether what you just said is true or random BS. :(
  - watwut 6y ago
    I am betting BS
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    Hah, very good ;)
- itronitron 6y ago
  Can you post links to either the HN threads or color theory sites that you feel are reinforcing the flawed conclusions?

closeparen 6y ago

Older friends lament that you used to be able to have perfectly good conversations arguing about trivial questions of fact. Now there's always some asshole with a smartphone to look up the right answer and ruin the fun. It helps to look at HN the same way. It's not about the truth, it's about enjoying the conversation.

0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
Now everyone thinks they’re geniuses too just because they can google random facts. You should talk faster than they can type just to keep having fun at their expense. Also, if you talk long enough chances are very good that you’ll find something they’re unable to easily google it. Most people are still lazy thinkers anyways.
- closeparen 6y ago
  That's what HN is... bullshitting claims that are too expensive to disprove even with time to research.
  - 0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
    You’re certainly enjoying the conversation! /s
bawolff 6y ago
I never got this. If your question could be answered by googling, its not really an interesting question. Meaning of life -> interesting question What is the capital of Canada? -> who cares, and if you did care why would you want to debate it instead of looking it up? [Its just an example, i am Canadian and obviously know what the answer is]
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Using a search engine requires skill. Asking a good question does as well. The saying is, "the most stupid question is the one you haven't asked". However it omits one should put in effort to do their own research. That effort is somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't equal using Google (I generally don't even use Google search engine), nor does it require success in using Google. A good basis is the ability to do research; I believe the emphasis should lie there. And it needs to be taught before university (which is 18+ age).

da02 6y ago

What were some of the inaccurate things said by the HN/Reddit crowd?

mtberatwork 6y ago
Look no further than this comment thread. HN (and Reddit) is filled with conspiratorial rants about journalism and the news media. This is not to dismiss valid media criticism but the vast majority of posts on HN make laughably inaccurate assumptions about the news business.
- da02 6y ago
  What's one inaccurate assumption (that stands out among others) about the news business the HN crowd has made in 2020?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

blago 6y ago

Or you just trust people who qualify their statements, moderate they views, and have balanced and nuanced opinions.

legerdemain 6y ago

Case in point: Palantir. People would rather spread bizarre FUD they hear in the media than face the fact that they just don't know how much good Palantir does.

Veen 6y ago
What good does Palantir do? I'd be quite interested to hear about it.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  Certainly more good than news media taking an occasional drive-by shit on them will admit. It behooves people who still read the news to develop a healthy skepticism about motivated negative coverage.
- zeofig 6y ago
  Don't know much about them, but they do appear to support/do the development of pyls (python language server)
  - varjag 6y ago
    Do they build Autobahns too
- Aunche 6y ago
  They have a surprising number of humanitarian projects. For example, they're partnering with the World Food Programme to optimize food distribution.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    That might be a corporate form of moral self licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
chillacy 6y ago
I got nothing against Palantir (disclosure: I'm a shareholder) but you do have to acknowledge that people have very different definitions of "good" that factor into their opinions. Some people find that bringing technology into the government is of course good, others are vehemently against agencies like ICE or the military industrial complex.

JohnBooty 6y ago

It's sobering, to put it mildly. It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. In the early days of the Internet, there was this widespread naivete that the truth would win. People generally wanted the truth, right? And this "global information superhighway" would act as sort of a de facto peer review. We wouldn't always get things right, but overall it would surely be a win for "the truth" or at least, for reasoned opinions. Or so we thought. How naive we were.

pmiller2 6y ago

I have had the exact same experience with my most recent employer. They certainly didn't do everything right, but, generally, it seems they are quick to acknowledge and fix their mistakes, and, certainly they try to be as ethical as possible internally. This company is pretty universally hated across the internet, yet, in the 2 years I was there, I didn't see even a tenth as much unethical or otherwise bad behavior there as I did from Facebook, for instance. Surprisingly, relatively few people outside of a techie / HN-type bubble seem to hate Facebook.

lhorie 6y ago

It's much broader than just public perception of companies. A lot of stuff that passes off as information is actually entertainment. For example, news about some new nutrition study typically don't involve any of the hard scientific line of inquiry that actual science work entails (e.g. critically thinking about potential methology flaws, for example.) Reading about some politician slipping out a gaffe says nothing about what is happening in terms of law making (and nuances are often lost in translation when an article does talk about new laws). Etc. A lot of articles are filled with rethoric and/or "real life" stories that don't really have a direct impact on the reader other than to elicit some form of emotional response. Contrast to actual educational material that is denser and drier, and can make a real impact in the reader's future when studied properly.

tester756 6y ago

I always wondered how do Google, MS, FB, {popular_game e.g Riot Games/CDPR} and so on employees feel when they read that bullshit

pmiller2 6y ago
As someone who worked for a company that's widely hated on the internet (I'm talking front page of HN-level hate), my reaction was always to sigh and let our PR people handle it. I deliberately stayed out of any discussions involving my former employer.

programmertote 6y ago

We can translate that to pretty much anything that we hear/read/watch second-hand from any source (including the news media). I grew up in a South Asian country and came to the US in early 2000 for college. Before then, I listened to BBC, RFA and VOA religiously and thought what they report there about my country is the truth (we were ruled by the military regime back then and most of the population assume everything the government said is a lie. An example in which people were already desensitized to disregard the government--the military government broadcast a public health service announcements after 8pm news everyday and those includes things like not using too much oil in the food for fear of heart disease. The general public would assume the government cannot import sufficient amount of edible oil from abroad--because of economic sanctions--so they are discouraging everyone to use less oil in cooking!). But when I came to the US and started to learn who is feeding these news to the VOA, RFA, etc. and how these people and organizations (including the UN orgs) got funding, I realize not everything that I read is true. This became very apparent when I read news about my country (reported by NYT and other reputable media outlets) that are too simplistic and one-sided. Then I stopped reading news altogether since 2016 and quit FB. That was the best decision ever and nowadays I only use Reddit to follow very specific subreddits (just sports, aww and funny). People are very opinionated about things that they have not experienced, and with online anonymity, people can sprout baseless stuff and easily buy into believing things that are simply not true. Everything I said here applies to HN as well. There are a lot of very poorly-informed-but-opinionated users here just like everywhere on the internet.

anonunivgrad 6y ago

People aren’t psychologically equipped to handle this kind of dishonesty. We evolved to deal with small groups. People would either be forced into honesty by socialization or reputational fears, or they’d be exiled or executed. Now, you just go on Twitter and virtue signal about some nonsense idpol stuff while robbing everyone blind, and the people will love you.

throwaway473229 6y ago

I’ve worked for two companies now that are high-profile HN fodder. Discussions of both of them have been complete batshit—from the technical engineering to the business decisions, and everything in between. I will never understand why it’s so hard for people to realize and admit when they don’t know what they’re talking about. One thing that helped me was when I was taught how to answer questions in a legal context. (Patent deposition.) Every answer has two parts: the answer to the question is the second part, to be preceded by your confidence in the answer. “I believe,” “I think,” or just plain “I don’t know,” and so on. Ever since then I’ve just habitually asked myself, “do I actually know this, or do I just think this, and on what basis?” Do this enough and you’ll be surprised at how little you actually know. Especially about what goes on inside companies you’ve never worked for.

prox 6y ago
Good point. A quote from Michael J Straczynski : “The truth is a three edged sword : your opinion, my opinion and the truth.”

ajuc 6y ago

I've had exactly the same revelation about traditional media a few years back. I listen to talk-only radio a lot, they have some of the best experts in the country supposedly, a lot of famous names. And then they talk about some topic I am familiar with (like Polish army modernization or computer science) and they spew bullshit for 1 hour with 100% confidence and there's 10 people in the studio who I'm sure know it's bullshit but they say nothing. It's surreal. It means they don't even spend 5 minutes on the most basic research before a 1 hour debate.

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

I used to read editorials on Slate.com, the articles seemed interesting and discussed topics I didn't know much about. I did that until I read an article about something I did know something about, and I realized they were getting everything wrong. And I realized that they were just taking a devil's advocate position about everything and writing things that were contrary to how things are, presumably to get clicks.

alsetmusic 6y ago

I have experienced exactly this. I worked for a company who is highly covered in tech news. The most popular stories and themes knew almost nothing about the reality of we were doing. Maybe one in five voices was correct. It was totally disheartening to the point that I completely stopped reading any related topic. Way off base. To this day, I am frustrated by misinformation about the work we did. The internet (and general knowledge) is not intelligent.

prox 6y ago
To counterpoint, what did you or the company do to set things straight?
- alsetmusic 6y ago
  We spent months that were planned for developing new features ripping out features that didn't perform well enough. The intent was good: bring the new shiny to people with older hardware. The result was poor: people with older hardware thought we were deliberately slowing them down.
  - prox 6y ago
    I understand. Relationship management is a tough nut to crack. I know few companies who tick all the boxes. Discord is usually great with its splash screen what they are doing at the moment.

Aunche 6y ago

You see a bunch of blatantly wrong things about countries as well that would be obvious for anyone who lived there. As a uncontroversial example, Winnie the Pooh clearly isn't banned in China, given how much merchandise is manufactured there. The "ghost cities" that were reported in about in China a few years are largely populated. They were empty at the time because they were new.

naikrovek 6y ago

> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. That's true with everything. Everyone has their own way to feel superior to everyone else, and for a lot of people, that superiority comes from knowledge, real or imagined.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I treat nearly every comment online like they are a user who is actively trying to deceive me and it's sad.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
I do something like this when a comment provokes an emotional reaction the fits with current societal trends. I literally ask myself "What if this comment is an echo of a troll?" I don't impute bad faith to the individual, but that they too may have been seduced by the power of easy emotions.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Same here especially after watching the CGP Grey video on anger.

jiggawatts 6y ago

The fish is the last to know it lives in water. Often companies deal with their own staff very differently to how they treat their customers or their competition. The average Oracle developers probably has no inkling of how Oracle screws over their customers with onerous licensing, for example. Insiders that aren't in very senior management positions may not even be aware of the high-level decisions being made by their company. You often hear stories of employees being completely blind-sided when scandals or corruption are revealed. Similarly, I've noticed that employees tend to make excuses for their company's behaviour, casually dismissing bad behaviour that isn't so easy to ignore for everyone else. This is tribalism at its finest. Lastly, you hear rationalisations galore from people in senior management positions, carefully avoiding any mention of the real motivations for their bad behaviour. These lies are especially important when they speak to internal staff, especially staff they're screwing over. As a random example, I worked at a large company recently where they essentially fired their entire IT department and replaced them with an outsourcer that charged half as much. I was an outside consultant working for senior management, so I got to see the real inside story. The staff were deliberately kept in the dark, and even outright lied to. The real reason for the whole thing was that outsourcers cycle employees through every three months on temporary working visas, avoiding income taxes and essentially all mandatory payments such as worker's compensation. The whole thing was a huge tax dodge. I read an article in a newspaper calling this out. The article was mostly true, but I guarantee you that 99% of the people at the company would have never known any of this. Being an insider only gives you really detailed information about your own team, perhaps a dozen people. If you're at a FAANG, this might be 0.01% of the company at large...