Meta keeps 'block' lists of ex-employees – and even a VP can't get you off them

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-secret-block-lists-bar-rehiring-some-former-employees-2025-2

by rntn • 1 year ago

43 20 1 year ago

Would this be only Meta though? I don't think they are nearly the only one who will not re-hire you or who keep a list of 'blacklisted' potential employees, I'd just assume that's a standard way of doing business.

Could perhaps someone, preferrably from an HR space, confirm or deny this presumption of mine?

josephcsible• 1 year ago

It's common to have such a blacklist. It's uncommon that even senior executives don't have the authority to remove people wrongly added to it.

golly_ned• 1 year ago

Amazon has one.

scotty79• 1 year ago

I once was invited to apply for a job by a company that I quit less than two years earlier, specifically because I worked there so they kept a whitelist of former employees rather than a blacklist. And I know of at least one person that took such offer and came back and was happy about it.

bigfatkitten2• 1 year ago

This is standard everywhere I've worked.

If your manager checks the unregretted attrition box on the exit forms (the name varies, but it invariably means they wouldn't want you back), you're not getting rehired without intervention from someone fairly senior.

bediger4000• 1 year ago

I thought the USA had refuted cancel culture, and was broadly against it. If not exactly cancel culture, this seems like a step towards it, and if labor laws were adjusted or diminished, if this blacklist was shared, it would have exactly be cancel culture.

salawat• 1 year ago

Cancel culture == ye olde time honored practice of blacklisting which is specifically called out as a form of unfair labor practice. Welcome back to the days of the Gilded Age; repeat and relearn. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

tetromino_• 1 year ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250305165359/https://www.busin...

linotype• 1 year ago

The only reason Meta is able to persist is because relatively well off software engineers keep working there. Vote with your feet Meta employees.

BonoboIO• 1 year ago

You are, who you work for.

zonkerdonker• 1 year ago

It's easy enough to say, but damn, those golden handcuffs must just be so shiny.

Plus, if a principled and ethical engineer leaves the company, I assure you there is a large backlog of very eager replacements. Personally, Id rather see effective dissent from within the org.

bluefirebrand• 1 year ago

Personally, Id rather see effective dissent from within the org

There's really no such thing, simply because of that large backlog of eager replacements

From the company's perspective they will happily fire you if you dissent and replace you if they have to

GoToRO• 1 year ago

Also meta serves me scam ads (ad for Decathlon offer, points to Decathlon fake website and when you click to pay, redirects to possibly a genuine car parts website that has it's card processing page highjacked) and they also refuse to remove it.

That's how you keep the stock price up I guess.

byefruit• 1 year ago

I think this is where (in the EU) a Subject Access Request could work.

silisili• 1 year ago

Do you also get on said list by sending nasty emails to their recruiters? Because they completely stopped bothering me years ago shortly after that, whereas it used to be a once every couple weeks thing.

altairprime• 1 year ago

I theorize that, since layoffs are often used to lower total salaries paid out for a given number of positions by firing several times as many people as necessary, and then forcing positions that have to be refilled to only hire lower-skill / lower-pay workers.

If that theory holds, then Meta’s blocklist will hold every worker ever fired by Meta during a salary-reduction layoff, to ensure that the pay reduction affects rehiring.

Which would set up Meta to be vulnerable to an age discrimination lawsuit, since layoffs of people with “excellent performance” records would likely be constructed from salary pay tiers, and thus disproportionately affect people who are with Meta longer, and thus are older.

The discovery questions are twofold, and could be presented to a judge by Meta in order to evaluate the merits of either continuing or cancelling a discrimination lawsuit — negating any objections Meta might file about revealing sensitive workplace data.

1. What is the age distribution of the Meta block list, in percentages only, with a bucket size of 5 years started at age <17, then 18-22, 23-27, etc?

2. What quantity of workers were added to the Meta block list in the six months preceding and following each of Meta’s last few layoffs, truncated to the first significant digit? i.e. 14999 is reported as 10000-19999, 622 is reported as 600-699, etc.

Were I pursuing such a thing, which I am not, those are the class-action discovery questions that I feel would rapidly expose whether a lawsuit could proceed or not. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)

bhhaskin• 1 year ago

You would have to prove that it was deliberate and not just a correlation.

lazide• 1 year ago

Not under the theory the Department of Labor was using for years related to gender/race/age discrimination, which was with a large enough sample, a divergence from the expected numbers based on population distributions is de-facto evidence of discrimination.

That is the other side of the double edged sword used to push DEI.

If statistically, white dudes are getting laid off more than any other group, isn’t it fair to call that racial/sex discrimination regardless of other criteria?

Just like a lack of say women (or women’s pay being different) was being used as evidence of discrimination regardless of criteria?

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

Author is really burying the lede here.

Meta's block lists aren't foolproof. In an incident that resulted in a lawsuit filed last year, Meta accidentally rehired a former employee as a contractor despite him being on a "Do Not Hire" list after he was accused of stalking and harassing a coworker for over a year.

Surely that has to have something to do with why it's so hard to get off the list.

Despite their experience, the senior engineer told BI that they would still return to Meta if given the chance.
"It's the worst company I've ever worked for," they said. "But they also pay the best. If I could get in there for a couple more years and make bank, I would do it."

I don't want to be too mean to people I don't know, but it seems pretty plausible that someone who would say this to a reporter could be misunderstanding whether they left on good terms.

bigfatkitten2• 1 year ago

Standard practice in many companies.

I've never understood the appeal of returning to a place you left. The one time I did, I quickly rediscovered why I left the first time. I was gone again a year later.

Meta keeps 'block' lists of ex-employees – and even a VP can't get you off them

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