What Price Money?
by Miki Saxon
Your life.
Profiled in data.
With or without your permission.
Collected and sold to anyone.
Much of it done by your best friend Facebook.
For years.
When Facebook was challenged?
It took a traditional approach.
The next time, leadership denied and denied and denied.
When that didn’t work they again lied and lied and lied.
Then they hired a PR firm that essentially poured gasoline on burning waters.
And while Facebook is clearly the poster child for data misuse, Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t exactly on the side of the angels.
Politicians on both sides are weighing in, but, considering the money involved in US-approved corruption, AKA, lobbying, that effort is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
One question comes to mind.
Is there anything more valuable than data?
The answer is yes.
Talent.
And the talent isn’t happy.
“Increasingly — and especially given the political environment — a key part of this consideration for workers has become the moral and ethical implications of the choices made by their employers, ranging from the treatment of employees or customers to the ethical implications of the projects on which they work. This is especially true given the central role of ‘big tech’ in new fears about information, rights, and privacy and the growing feeling that a lack of oversight in this sector has been harmful.” –Prasanna Tambe, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions
In fact, the hiring luster isn’t just thin, it’s becoming nonexistent.
“Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there,” said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. (…) As Facebook has been rocked by scandal after scandal, some young engineers are souring on the company.
“Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”
“They do a lot more due diligence,” said Heather Johnston, Bay Area district president for the tech job staffing agency Robert Half. “Before, candidates were like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do team interviews. I want a one-and-done.’” Now, she added, job candidates “want to meet the team.”
“They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”
The criticism by Google employees played out much more publicly.
More than 20,000 employees and contractors walked out of Google’s offices around the world Thursday, Nov. 1, organizers said. The group is protesting sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a non-inclusive workplace culture.
So.
Perhaps “we, the people” will have more force in the corporate world than it does elsewhere.
Image credit: Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat
