Facebook recruiter got brutal rejection letter from Ben Werdmuller

Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg.
Photo by Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Facebook may be losing out on talent thanks to the cumulative
  impact of its various data and fake news scandals.
• Ben Weissmuller, a Bay Area-based product manager, turned
  down a Facebook recruiter because of the Cambridge Analytica data
  breach.
• He said people who work at Facebook are also disappointed in
  the company but feel they can do good inside the organisation.
• Werdmuller said there was an “endemic problem” with Silicon
  Valley not taking its social responsibilities seriously.

Facebook has had a rough 2018. There was
the long, ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal, which wiped
$60 billion off its stock price and evolved into other data
scandals. Then the firm
had to accept that it had a key role in spreading fake news
during the 2016 election. Then
Instagram’s founders quit. Then WhatsApp’s cofounder Brian
Acton dunked on the company
in an explosive tell-all with Forbes. Now the company has

confessed to what looks like the biggest hack in its history.

Apart from denting the stock price, the cumulative effect of all
these mishaps might be impacting Facebook’s ability to hire the
best talent.

Business Insider spoke to Ben Werdmuller, an ethically minded
product developer who recently gave a Facebook recruiter short
shrift. He turned down a potential interview on the basis of the
firm’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, which enabled the
consultancy to weaponize Facebook data during the 2016 US
presidential election.

Werdmuller tweeted this his rejection letter last
week:

Turning down a potential job at Facebook is no small thing. The
company’s median pay in 2017
was almost a quarter of a million dollars, and prospective
employees fight for jobs.

Werdmuller was previously an engineer at Medium, an investor at
Matter VC, and now works on Unlock, a new way for creators to
make money from their content. He lives in Oakland, in the San
Francisco Bay Area.

“I know quite a few people who are very critical of Facebook,”
Werdmuller said. “I actually think it’s not fair to be solely
critical of Facebook. There’s a much more endemic problem in the
tech industry, and in Silicon Valley in particular, which is…
not being respectful.

“As tech becomes more and more ingrained in society, we need it
to be more respectful of context. Facebook is the punching bag
because it’s the largest.”

Unlock
product developer Ben Werdmuller (R)

Flickr/Doc
Searles licensed under CC BY 2.0

As Werdmuller sees it, Facebook is incapable of shouldering its
social responsibility. As well as the 2016 election, he points to

the impact of Facebook’s insistence on users using their real
names on the drag queen community, which “shut those people
from that whole slice of discourse.”

“If they are not able to put their social responsibility above
their responsibility to shareholders, then it’s very difficult to
endorse working for them,” he said. “It’s actually much easier to
endorse finding ways to disrupt them.”

He added: “It would be wrong not to bring politics into
technology, because technology is so ingrained in society. You
have to make ethical decisions… you can’t look at tech in a
vacuum.”

There are signs that Facebook staff are also questioning their
future at the company. According to
a New York Times article from April, unhappy engineers
requested transfers from Facebook’s main product to its cooler
acquisitions, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Werdmuller accepts that he’s in a privileged position to be able
to turn down a potentially high-paying job.

He added: “I am friends with Facebookers as well as people who
work at Google and Twitter and so on. And I think they agree with
me. It’s not that they’re opposed to what I’m saying. There are
lots of people who feel they can do good inside these
organisations… They’ve made different decisions, which I
respect.”