Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism ★★★★☆

Going into this book, you expect the ramblings of a disgruntled employee or the naivety of a bureaucrat who wants to earn the millions you can in the tech sector that you would never do in public service. But by the end of ‘Careless People’, you feel sorry for Sarah and all that she had to go through, even as a regular employee at yet another tech company, much less as vaunted as Facebook.

The casual toxicity of working with Sheryl Sandberg, or the creepy ignorance of Joel Kaplan, the apathy of Elliot Schrage, and the hilarious stupidity of Mark Zuckerberg is proven with dozens of anecdotes that Sarah cites with real names, events, and locations that she could be sued over by powerful corporate lawyers if it weren’t true. In fact, we all would’ve never heard of the book if Facebook hadn’t done exactly that and after reading the book, you can see why. Sarah exposes their true nature at pursuing growth at all costs, as most Silicon Valley companies do, with scant regard for ethics, law, or even basic humanity.

Written in simple language , she doesn’t need to embellish her narrative to shock you. Every person’s actual words and actions do. The last time I felt such incredulity at the inner workings of a tech company was when I was reading ‘Bad Blood’ featuring Elizabeth Holmes. Although ‘Careless People’ would hardly determine a similar fate for these people, every fan of the tech world should read this book. Sarah goes into behind-the-scenes of several key decision points such as the Myanmar genocide which makes you think what were the tech press doing at the time. But then you remember, they are there mostly to polish the turds.

I’m glad I shut down my Facebook account in early 2017 after the infamous election and I was glad to read that everything I feared about Facebook was not only true but also intentional on part of Mark Zuckerberg. May his bad deeds not be interred with his bones.