“No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.”
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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books/Macmillan, 2025) wouldn’t normally have made it onto my reading list. In a perfect example of the Streisand Effect, though, Facebook fought so hard to prevent her from promoting the book that everybody was talking about it this past summer. I’m not particularly interested in tech company tales, but this one appealed to my love of a good David and Goliath style fight. I’m glad I gave in to my curiosity.
Wynn-Williams is a great story teller who manages to bring the reader right into the rooms where Mark Zuckerberg and his executives weigh money against idealism and responsibility. Drawing on personal anecdotes, she reveals absurd, sometimes shocking behaviour at Facebook, from sexual harassment and toxic masculinity in leadership, to the formation of survival alliances among women employees. Her narrative is rich with details of private jets and vanity art commissions alongside tales of high-stakes negotiations and the hair-raising ways senior leaders responded to major crises. She describes herself as one of the few idealists in the organization, repeatedly clashing with corporate priorities that placed market growth ahead of meaningful ethics. These moments paint a picture of an organization where power and profit outweighed all other values.
The challenges facing women at Facebook and in the tech world in general are an important theme of the book. The author describes ambient gender discrimination, and sexual harassment, highlighting the many ways company policy and culture fell disastrously short of stated commitments to gender equality. One of the most cringeworthy sections describes how, in response to criticisms from a group of female employees, the company created an “ally award,” where men could nominate each other for showing strong “ally behaviour.” It didn’t sound like women were eligible for the award, nor were their nominations the ones that counted. And of course, getting an “ally award” was a plus on a male executive’s performance review, while raising discrimination issues was risky at best for women.
Wynn Williams is particularly pointed in her criticism of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile COO and author of 2013’s Lean In. She recounts incidents exposing the gulf between Sandberg’s public advocacy and the lived realities of women managers at Facebook, including incidents involving a serious lack of boundaries with staff and pressure to adapt to toxic structures rather than agitate for real change. I rolled my eyes particularly hard at the description of how women were expected to donate their time to pour drinks and take coats at promotional events for Sandberg’s book, i.e. precisely the type of “unprofitable” work Lean In warns against.
Some critics have faulted Wynn-Williams for leaning too heavily on memory and personal perspective without fact-checking her own recollections, leaving herself open to accusations of bias and exaggeration. Her analysis of business decisions and global market forces has also been called naive at times, favouring moral outrage over nuanced understanding, especially when it comes to the very real need for constant growth in an organization structured like Facebook/Meta. Still, she has produced a compelling and timely memoir highlighted by sharp social insight and critique. Her intersectional lens exposes not only the carelessness of Facebook’s leadership but also the unfulfilled promises of corporate feminism in Silicon Valley (and beyond). The book’s vividness and candour make it worthwhile reading for anyone interested in real-world insights into how technology and power function, now and for the future.