I get that. I really do. I appreciate our conversation here so let me add a bit more color.
I'm a big fan of systems thinking. My friends get on me for it, but I wholly believe "if you aren't thinking about the system, you aren't thinking" or some aphorism to that effect. Donella Meadows, Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming all inform my thoughts on this.
When an individual contributor like you are mentioning above is in a system there are four options they can take when they see something off.
1) Do nothing
2) Distort the system (often seen as a band-aid fix)
3) Distort the data (when Alan Mulally took over Ford all of their dashboards were "green" which meant good while the company was slated to lose billions of dollars that quarter)
4) Change the system
From Deming I learned this: who is responsible for the system? Management. Who is the top manager at FB? Mark Zuckerberg. So that's my perspective on using the word "ultimately." I also noticed that with your wording "...but for it to reach him" gives the sense that these behaviors are percolating from the bottom up. My sense, is looking at it from the other perspective--Zuckerberg down. He has set the tone, built the system, and the culture that allows (demands?) this behavior.
Another Deming quote that I have seen all too viscerally in my 17 years in the professional world is this
"A bad system beats a good person every time."
I don't excuse unethical or illegal behavior of ICs or managers, but I can look at the system they are a part of and understand it.
As someone who has quit a software engineering job, partially over ethical objection to how my software was being used, I really appreciate this thread and this topic. Even if your role is just “3rd engineer grunt from the left” you share the ethical blame and consequences with the other actors in the entire system.
I'm a big fan of systems thinking. My friends get on me for it, but I wholly believe "if you aren't thinking about the system, you aren't thinking" or some aphorism to that effect. Donella Meadows, Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming all inform my thoughts on this.
When an individual contributor like you are mentioning above is in a system there are four options they can take when they see something off. 1) Do nothing 2) Distort the system (often seen as a band-aid fix) 3) Distort the data (when Alan Mulally took over Ford all of their dashboards were "green" which meant good while the company was slated to lose billions of dollars that quarter) 4) Change the system
From Deming I learned this: who is responsible for the system? Management. Who is the top manager at FB? Mark Zuckerberg. So that's my perspective on using the word "ultimately." I also noticed that with your wording "...but for it to reach him" gives the sense that these behaviors are percolating from the bottom up. My sense, is looking at it from the other perspective--Zuckerberg down. He has set the tone, built the system, and the culture that allows (demands?) this behavior.
Another Deming quote that I have seen all too viscerally in my 17 years in the professional world is this "A bad system beats a good person every time."
I don't excuse unethical or illegal behavior of ICs or managers, but I can look at the system they are a part of and understand it.