Would I work at Facebook… No*

My name is Joseph Ngo and I am lucky enough to be a student at Stanford University. I am currently in the process of interviewing for Product Management roles, so I’d thought it’d be interesting to apply some strategic/analytical/execution frameworks to help me answer this question.

First, let’s clarify the question. There’s 3 things that stand out to me in this question: “Would I”, “work”, and “Facebook”. Let’s take Facebook book at face value, the company incharge for The Facebook and all it’s subsidiaries such as Instagram and Whatsapp. To “work” I assume would mean to be employed by Facebook and contribute to their company in some way. 

But the term in this question that really strikes me is “would I” work at Facebook.

Now, the reading suggest that: yes, I am free to work at an ethically difficult work place if I consider how I work there and if I accept the fact that the company could be ethically immoral. In short, if I do work at Facebook, I can work from the inside to change it or I could consider how close my work is to the unethical things I think Facebook may do.

It would be very convenient for me to land a job that I believe is ethically moral and I am happy to work for, but it turns out that our world isn’t so perfect. Of course it would be optimal for me to work at a high paying job that I love and believe in, but it would also be great if I had to ability to fly, but flying isn’t exactly possible. There will be tradeoffs, and nothing will be perfect.

Let’s consider 2 very simple user journey to help us understand this “would I” part of the question.

1) Linda goes to college (2) Linda applies and gets an offer from Facebook (3) Linda contemplates the decision (4) Linda denies the offer because she thinks the company is too immoral. 

1) Shreya doesn’t go to college (2) Shreya works hard and gets an offer from Facebook (3) Shreya comtemplates the decision (4) Shreya accepts the offer

What’s the difference between these 2 user journeys? Well one thing we might not consider and I believe this reading did not address, is the background of the person who has been offered a job at Facebook. Linda may be in a position where she is able to comfortably deny a Big Tech offer, but Shreya might not be so lucky. Shreya may come from a low income family, maybe couldn’t afford rising college tuition prices, and decided to stay home to help the family with bills. So Shreya may have to take this one and only job offer so that she could better support her family; even if the work is somewhat immoral. Some things come before universal ethics, and one of those things may be the quality of life and literal health of Sherya’s family.

Now let’s use some success metrics to analyze user outcomes. We could track the income of Shreya’s children or friends. We could track the the CSAT score of Sheya’s family to see if the money from Shreya’s Facebook job increase their quality of life. These metrics could help indicate the positive local affect of Shreya’s Facebook job.

I wouldn’t work at Facebook. I acknowledge that I have the luxury to deny the offer, but others don’t. I am just a lucky first generation, low income student that won the lottery to be accepted to Stanford, but there’s a version of me other there in some parallel universe that really needs a Facebook job to support my family. And I know that if I were him, I wouldn’t think twice about working at a ethically difficult company.