Hey, I know the author personally.

I’ve worked for him at Facebook; moved on to Deliveroo and lobbied our CEO to get him on board there. I’ve witnessed him make a lot of tough calls along very difficult to navigate moral lines, including race and extreme poverty. I’ve provided context and data to make those decisions.

I’m on the record calling him, to his face, let’s just say… “insensitive” (I used words that HN would frown upon). That’s because he’s really good at making a hard call when teams disagree, no option is the one good and the faster you get out of there, the better. That is (for someone in his position) a really good thing. He is very comfortable with being the bad guy when you need one. Happy to give more details, but I have good reasons not to like the guy.

But that guy is genuinely great. I really like him.

Mike is not a piece of shit, not even close to one. Mike is a genuinely great, complex human being. He’s the closest thing to a Russian novel protagonist — clearly not all shining white, but very articulate with his own contradictions and his own failings. That makes him a shockingly good leader.

He cares, dearly, about people without shelter, about those people’s children. I have walked with him passed people begging in the street; I have seen him respond many times to someone begging while we were the pub. I wasn’t able to confirm that, but I have reason to believe that he spent some time in similar circumstances.

But, like most people we work for, his temptation is to seek a solution ‘at scale’ and he doesn’t have one for poverty. And he indeed clarifies: his life and making the future is great. The juxtaposition is not. And he has no reason to not say that the contrast makes a bad situation worst. That’s not moral bankruptcy, that’s honesty.

He has no clear reason to consider that what he is building is making things worse for the poorest in America: poverty and wealth are rising simultaneously, in the same place. It’s ominous, like the SciFi he also refers to, but it’s not an econometric argument.
On the other hand, he has good reasons to think that Facebook and Deliveroo are giving to lower-middle class people more chances (I know: I wrote or reviewed some of those presentations).

If you read more of his blog posts, you’ll notice he talks about things that he can’t change in there. Knowing the guy, being powerless is far from his comfort zone. He likes fixing things, especially wrong incentives; he needs to.

I completely understand why you would think he is a piece of shit: he is blunt about his own moral failings. But he is the furthest from that. He’s a powerful person, who cares deeply about empathy, especially with the poorest people, without a way to change it, without the dial that he’s asking for. He likes having dials; that’s his favourite metaphor. He’s got a ton of dials at work (I know: I built many of them).

I would suspect that the reason being increasing visibly poverty in San Francisco is the lack of a budget at the Mayor’s office or the State level to help people with health issues, dependency, education, social support. I have been in SF about three days in my life, so happy to be explained otherwise. I would suspect that a lot of that missing tax could be linked to how large internet company process their added value. Again: I’m not a tax accountant, so feel free to criticise. That link would mean that, yes, extreme wealth from tech companies is related to extreme visible poverty in SF, but not because the software that let you earn a living leveraging Facebook or with Deliveroo is wrong or biased (i.e. it’s not Mike’s day job that is causing that). That would mean that the dial that Mike is talking about is the “fiduciary duty” that board members impose on companies (also a conversation that Mike is part of) de facto demanding that they use the Dutch sandwich.

If things were that simple, Mike would be immediately clearer about the issue and speak in the right context, i.e. in private. He would not write about it in his blog, a place that he uses for processing. Therefore, I know that reality is not as straightforward as my explanation.

The way I read this post is:

1. Mike cares about focusing on things that he can change (a big thing at Facebook in general & something he’s evangelical about, which is why I did shameful things to get him at Deliveroo) therefore he feels like he can’t afford to spend too much time thinking about a problem he’s got no ability to fix.
2. He also knows that distance drives indifference. His work on empathy at both companies was stunning.
3. I take this post as him writing about it to process the contradiction: he needs to put that problem aside because he’s got other things to do, but he doesn’t want to because he cares about it. He doesn’t want to change his own preference, his own happiness function to become someone who doesn’t care.

What you can do, if like me, like Mike, you care about this issue, is to find the person who was in charge of homeless welfare in SF and presumably has not been able to do their job. Ask them to respond to Mike, explaining what is happening, what could be solutions. Not sure I would be able to help (I now live in Manchester, UK, where the situation is visibly worst) or that Mike will have the time (him going to SF reaks of busy things happening at Deliveroo) but if we can help, we will.

Please don’t assume that because we are powerless, we are indifferent. We are uncomfortable.