In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.
“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’” the 2021 document read.
The fundamental problem, according to the engineers in the hearing, is that Facebook’s sprawl has made it impossible to know what it consists of anymore; the company never bothered to cultivate institutional knowledge of how each of these component systems works, what they do, or who’s using them. There is no documentation of what happens to your data once it’s uploaded, because that’s just never been something the company does, the two explained. “It is rare for there to exist artifacts and diagrams on how those systems are then used and what data actually flows through them,” explained Zarashaw.
>>I know some very talented people (Ph.D.s from Berkeley in CS) in Silicon Valley or San Francisco who are "parked on the beach" to use a term from Marc Andreessen. Basically, in the Valley, as soon as people can stop coding financially, they often do. This seems to be because the money/power people who run the companies are so nasty to work for. I personally do not work at Google or Mozilla because of this. As a friend of mine said when he quit Google "yeah, it looks a lot shinier from the outside".