I suppose psychopathy and machiavellianism are diversity points as well. Should of just done insider trading like the rest of the world leaders. It's harder to prove in court evidently.
Like all sufficiently large organisations, with huge amounts of money, this is less a control problem and more a scale problem.
First, we should note that 4 mil, over 4 years, is a rounding error in the meta financial. Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you.
Second it's worth noting that spending any amount of money, at scale, is inefficient. Once you get past the stage of "the owner writes all the checks" you need rules, limits and so on. The more the money , the more people spending it. At which point you are hiring people -just- to spend money, and then more people to watch over them, and then even more people to watch over them.
So yeah, once you have enough people, you'll inevitable have some that are comfortable fleecing some out. Since preventing that is infinite oversight, it's simpler to just accept that it'll happen as a cost of doing business.
On the one hand you can describe this as "bad internal controls". On the other hand, if the controls cost more than the losses then that's "worse".
> Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you.
That is almost surely wrong, even after taking into account the declining marginal utility of money. FB's net income for 2022 was $23.1B. $1M is 1 part in 23100 for them.
$1 for most any SWE in the US is ~4-20x less concentrated when compared by annual income.
A former co-worker of mine ran nearly this exact same scheme. As an executive for a cable network, he bilked his company out of 8 million dollars. He invoiced the company for video production work that never happened. $25k here, $20k there. He has since served his time of 4+ years in a New York state prison. He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn.
I expect she will do the same and she’ll be back on the market in a few years with her Facebook diversity manager role at the top of her LinkedIn.
Thats why you do background checks when hiring staff.
After being caught once, the judgement will show in your record for 7 years. Most employers would be adviaed to steer clear of such fraudulent employees
In this case, it's not clear if the guilty plea was for embezzlement of all the money or got reduced to some minor misdemeanor that looks like a marijuana conviction on a background check. But still somebody will look past it on check, even Anthony Levandowski got investor money after his convictions.
I believe this as well. My co-worker will have no problem getting another high-profile role in tech. His embezzlement will be seen as go-getter material.
I was more speaking to the audaciousness of it all. I expect many employers will still do their due diligence and with high profile cases like these it’ll be impossible to hide. So I guess the perpetrator ultimately has to own their actions and maybe including these indiscretions in their LinkedIn is inevitable.
I should add my former co-worker is easily found in Google. He is not a low-profile kind of person. He is best known for owning expensive cars and bankrolling “cannonball run” record attempts.
@mods -- could we link to the DoJ post linked to in the article? the article doesn't contribute anything new other than superfluous (at best) images and salacious descriptions.
I wonder if the lawyers could be in trouble for "receiving stolen goods"-type charges if they accept payment to represent the guy their own firms is defending.
I'd like to know why she did it. I'd hope she already made a good living on Facebook TC. And fraud risked getting caught and hurting not only herself but also the larger social mission.
... defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” US Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said ...
I could see doing it 'just this once,' for an emergency - but then you get away with it, and next time it's a little less of an emergency - and eventually, it's just "hey I want more money" so poof now more money magically appears for you.
The question is, was this even a person that really believed in the cause, or were they simply there for their benefit and also criminal.
I see people sometimes argue this about the Catholic church priests molesting boys.. are they even examples of a believing Catholic? Or just a fraudster trying to get off?
But... DEI positions do also attract heavily traumatized / toxic people, some of whom seem quite proud of it.
In my state alone in recent years I can think of two prominent cases. A Community College near me had a "diversity happy hour event" that invited everyone... except white people.
And then when people called that out as not being particularly inclusive, the DEI coordinator doubled down: "If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that."
For added irony, the coordinator had taken on a native name and touted her native ancestry. But it was later revealed that she was Caucasian.
Another university very near by had had a "Day of Exclusion" planned by DEI groups that basically planned to "exclude white students from school buildings" for the day. In the past, many students (of all races) had stayed away from campus that day in support, or protest. It was unclear though, what would happen if white students did try to enter school buildings (one of the groups websites for the event included the URL fragment "/no-neonazis-allowed".
And then there was Rachel Dolezal, who faked being African American and ended up as the leader of the NAACP and a professor of African Studies at EWU, born to white parents and claiming that she "self-identified as black" (though that seems at odds with her lying about her parents race on application forms.
Crazily, though, both these people are still in diversity positions. One is a Director of the Diversity program at a California school, and the other holds multiple community and diversity related roles.
And then we get to some of the tech crowd and diversity/community/evangelist position people who are openly anti-male, like Randi Harper, running an anti-harassment support organization while setting her Twitter handle things like "Kill All Men", submitting bio pics to conferences with her drinking from a mug with "Male Tears" on the side. Or Adria Richards, Coraline Ehmke, famous for joining open source projects with codes of conduct that were not "aggressive enough" (her own words) and then trying to get contributors kicked out of those projects for things they'd said elsewhere in life. And then losing her shit when people pointed out the numerous times she'd advocated for violence elsewhere in life, until GitHub, who had hired her for "Community Safety" had to fire her for obvious hypocrisy.
There are people who are working (not just in tech) in DEI to restore some balance (because there absolutely are areas that are profoundly sexist, racist, and so on) whose laudable work is being undershadowed by people who obviously have unresolved issues in their personal life or in their mental health who see working in DEI as some form of ... therapy or catharsis for them.
What's wrong with that? If I understood it correctly, in the US someone identifies as whatever they want, by law.
Since such a provision isnin place it is normal that people will use it to their advantage. If I was American and, say, being black have me some advantages at the university I would certainly try to identify as Afro-American despite being white, blond and blue-eyed.
Doesn't this happen often? Who then decides that you are not black/white/whatever enough?
This has happened before. A white guy originally from South Africa rightly qualified for an "African American" scholarship and got a ton of backlash for it.
Is there a measure of "blackness" (or "whiteness" or "asianess" or "whateverness"), or is it decided ad hoc by the committee that provides the scholarship (as an example)?
I am not sure how discriminating some people as "minority-enough" can be legal (except if there are some genetic tests I guess)
> For added irony, the coordinator had taken on a native name and touted her native ancestry. But it was later revealed that she was Caucasian.
This isn't the first time and there should be no excuses for that. It is racism and sanctioned racism by large companies. That certainly includes Microsoft and Github, which are quite leading with this bullshit.
Even if there are unresolved issues, corporate leadership champions putting those issues on the shoulders of other people so they suffer this toxicity too.
Corporate DEI is a fad of ostentatious pseudo-sympathy. It's a jobs program for even more bullshit jobs. But one should know they're on the Titanic when there is lots of diversity of the 5 other people in the building who aren't doing anything constructive but are socializing loudly for hours at work with no apparent hustle or purpose.
Meta is spending over $22 billion on servers in 2023 and again in 2024 without a specific product strategy or need. Build it and depreciation will come. Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.
A bit hard to show someone the door who has more than 50% of the shares vote from dual class shares. He can only be booted if he votes himself out as CEO.
> It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it.
As long as Zuckerberg prints money, I do not care what he burns up as part of the thousands of experiments being run at his company every day. Similar to Musk, these two have made me multiple millions with no effort expended on my behalf.
> Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.
I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...
Most managers are pointless at large companies, but a diversity manager is one of those signs that your company has reached a new level of bureaucracy.
What a stupid comment. Greed is universal, it's not especially American. Furthermore America is one of those countries where you can steal millions and still end up in jail. In many countries a few million is enough to avoid jail forever.
DEI in itself is a corrupt scheme to begin with. The related fields in academia work only towards justifying their own existence, their salaries and positions, by finding proof for their beliefs. Their activism and claims like the one that „diverse teams perform better“ then allow them to move their peers holding useless degrees into made up positions of power in business.
If you're a person of color, better yet a woman, you can hire yourself out to front a company. That puts the company at the front of the line for government contracts, as well as contracts funded by government money indirectly. You get 30%!
When I hear about a case like this it actually warms my heart. As the 20th century ideological parties/governments/organizations demonstrate, compared to true believers, criminals faking it to enrich themselves are a lesser evil by far!
1) What exactly qualifies someone to be a "Head of Diversity"? She has a BA in Poli Sci and a Masters of Public Administration. No formal training in anything HR related. It seems like every job she's ever held has been the same - Sr Manager/Director/Sr Director of DEI at Viacom, Cox, Nike, Facebook.
2) What exactly does a Head of Diversity do? Other than hire a consultant to develop an Employee Diversity Training course and establish metrics/targets for hiring by diversity category. Seems like you could just hire the consultant directly and then let them go after their month or two of work is done.
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