Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work

Careless People: A story of where I used to work, is an insiders expose on the dodgy shenanigans that are going on behind the scenes at that most evil of evil enterprises, Facebook/Meta. Told by an ex-employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, who is driven to join Facebook, seeing it as an agent of good in the world. Over the many years of her tenure she gains more and more access to the senior levels of the company and what she finds, and writes about, is pretty much what we all expect to hear.

The story of Sarah’s time at Facebook covers over seven years. She is interested in policy and how Facebook can work with governments to bring real positive changes to the citizens of the world. It is very quickly evident that Facebook’s senior leadership (including the humanoid robot Mark Zuckerberg) are less interested in doing good and more interested in becoming insanely wealthy. The corporate culture of bullying, sexual harassment, lying under oath and endangering the lives of its users are frightening to read about, but not very surprising.

Some of the treatment Sarah receives from her superiors is frankly mind-blowing. However, I did get a sense of her not being strong enough or standing up for her values, even in the face of such awful treatment. She does talk about the fear of losing her job and the adage of being able to do more good from the inside that from the outside, but at times (maternity leave is a prime example) I just wanted her to tell them to stick their job and walk out of the door.

As I’ve already mentioned, the themes of the book are awful but do not come as a surprise. Perhaps the level at which these awful decisions are made consciously and in the pursuit of profit is the biggest revelation. The irony is I am going to post this on Instagram, which is part of Zucks evil empire, which I hate but have no other choice. Read this book if you want to be thoroughly depressed by greed, corruption and general human awfulness.

I did enjoy the book BTW!