leCapitalist

Edit: removed (can’t seem to delete?)

Easy.

The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.

The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.

The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation.

Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they're trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it's all said and done, over $1M is wasted.

Welcome to life at a big tech company.

While technically true, I find the use of the word "voluntary" inappropriate here given that this was a requirement for the students to graduate.

The new CEO found out about this, publicly disclosed it then fired the people responsible. Seems like progress to me.

I was left wondering the same thing. The author did not present evidence that global warming is the cause, and from the Palmer Drought Index data, the current drought appears no more severe than those of the 30s and 50s.