Working with Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

Working with Mark Zuckerberg

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45 pointsraghus36 comments

No offence, but am I supposed to expect a blog post on the Company blog about working with the founder to be unbiased?

Given that and the reverential tone, I am inclined to discount it.

Bonus exercise: Replace "Zuck" with "Chuck Norris" in the entire post and note how it doesn't seem any less ridiculous :)

One sentence that caught my attention was "He doesn't care what he said yesterday, even if he was presented with the same product."

Well, then it'd probably suck to work for him. Is that supposed to be a hidden message...

If you're constantly trying to build the right thing, you have to be constantly willing to reject failed or obsolete ideas to keep moving forward.

Yeah. But, changing your stance every other day is something your engineers wouldn't probably appreciate all that much.

That depends on how engaged your engineers are in the product development process. If they are mere instruments of someone else's vision, no, but if they are also part of the idea creation process, then yes. Facebook constantly deploys and has an experimental mindset towards product development, so it's probably not as obnoxious as it sounds.

I am beginning to wonder if the guy who wrote the post put some of this stuff in intentionally.

There are obviously limits about what an employee can say about his boss, but I'd trust Boz's assessment more than just about anybody else's at Facebook. He didn't glorify Mark as some perfect boss but tried to communicate honestly about the nuances of his management style.

My intention was not to cast aspersions on the author of the post, I was merely pointing out that an employee who has to write about his boss on an official blog can't do much other than sing his boss' praises. Or as you put it, there are limits to what an employee can say about his boss on the official blog.

I work at facebook (not speaking offically, mind) and can vouch for the fact that this was originally not intended for public consumption. It was written and circulated on an internal mailing list months ago. We only put it up on the engineering blog after it "leaked" in a WSJ article yesterday, and we realized the "leak" really did more good than harm.

I can see how this email can make it sound like there's a "personality cult" surrounding Mark Zuckerberg. It's not really that strange. Inside facbeook, he's a force of nature, like all other founder-CEOs: "working with Zuck" is properly a special topic, and facebook employees pay special attention to it, as I assume Apple employees do to "working with Steve", google employees do to "working with Larry and Sergey", and I did to "working with Diane" while at VMware.

O.K. It makes more sense now.

Reminds me of children's short stories about Lenin by Mikhail Zoshchenko. (I can't find them in English though, to put this in context for you. Anybody knows if they were translated?)

There is absolutely nothing in there which isn't matter-of-fact. Again, I work for FB (and I joined less < 2 yrs ago) so you will generally diss this as well, but w/e...

Look, don't take this personally. I use Facebook everyday so clearly Zuck and his team (y'all) are doing something right.

It is perhaps unavoidable that there will be a certain "dear leader" aspect to any essay on "How to work with the boss". I can even see why it may be necessary to share such an essay internally with a team that is growing fast. But given that essay is public, reverential and the content is something which outsiders can never verify personally, there's not much we can do except comment on the tone.

I would argue with the assertion that he doesn't look at other products when evaluating Facebook. Its clear they've been copying from Twitter and FriendFeed for years, so I don't know where the Boz is getting that from.

He had the same idea as Twitter, some time before it launched. His version involved aggregating AOL Instant Messenger away messages--and that's the closest thing to Twitter, before Twitter.

I had that idea too, and so did thousands of other people. Twitter is the one who executed on that idea.

clearly change is a big part of the facebook environment, and I guess we can credit Zuck fostering that.

The question I have is, seeing as most users don't come to the computer with fresh-eyes every day, can too much change eventually end up hurting the company.

They clearly do change extraordinarily quickly, and so far it has worked well for them, but is it just a matter of time before they go too far. The most recent redisign, I don't think added any benefit to the site, I don't think it looks as good, and I don't see where there was an improvement in functionality.

Yes, I've heard. Kills competitors by the hundreds. And if HE were here, he'd consume the Google with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse!

How cretinous the comments are. Facebook clearly fails as a blogging platform for this sort of content.

Fails as a blogging platform or fails as a comment platform?

I don't think anything about these "blog notes" and how they are presented could improve on some of the inane comments; that's just the users.

I am getting very close to writing a Firefox extension called "CommentBlock". If people want to comment on blog posts and newspaper articles, fine, but I don't want to see them. They just make me mad.

You might like http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup/

Brilliant. Thanks for the link.

I dislike the fact that "zuck" is worthy of writing about like this. He's no genius, he seems to have gotten very lucky, which is fine.

He's a terrible public speaker and he's terrible at conveying his ideas. This smells, given that it's written on FACEBOOK's blog. What's the point of this?

IIRC he built a million dollar product while still in hs. "Luck favors the prepared mind."

I see an inordinate amount of vitriol directed at him online. I assume it's mostly jealousy. He built a monster product that in hindsight seems very obvious, and you didn't.

There's definitely a lot of jealously, particularly among the wantrepreneurs that frequent this site. Why don't you go out and try to build your own thing rather than spend so much time trying to nitpick at the foibles of successful people and feed off karma points as a sense of validation for your valueless comments?

This is one of my favorite quotes of all time: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt

Oh please. The guy built a billion dollar business good for him. However, that's not a reason to deify the guy. He is just a man with failings and idiosyncrasies like you or I. He should not be treated like a a deity who came down from on high to hand us social networking.

IMO, the bulk of the vitriol comes from two issues (not that I think much of it is sound):

- Multiple claims of outright dishonest behavior and undue credit-taking entitlement from his co-founders (even prior to the lawsuits)

- His extremely privileged background. Given his family's political connections, wealth, ivy-league legacy, and prep-school pedigree, he risked very little (compared to most entrepreneurs) when giving a pre-undergrad start-up a go.

I'm not impressed by Mark, but I don't see a good reason to hate him, especially regarding the second, which is not at all his fault.

Exactly. It's the silver-spoon opportunity cost fallacy over which he has ZERO control.

It's irrational and wrong, but sadly makes for more "press" and "drama". A prime example is the plethora of rich-kid "reality" t.v. shows which leverage those atavistic reactions it to the hilt.

Its quite funny that at last years startup school he was berated for being too good a public speaker.

"Zuck" was a disaster in 2007. Mitch Kapor gave a great speech (one of the best, actually) on why to be a meritocracy, not a "mirrortocracy", in which there's low diversity of thought, age, and gender among influential people.

Zuckerberg came on an hour later and started about how one should only hire young people.

Ha, I saw that one. I thought he came off like an arrogant princeling, and the mood was ugly. In retrospect I think he was just inexperienced.

Probably. I think he was too busy building a company to focus on cultivating an image that doesn't make people dislike him (which is very hard to do for a 22-year-old billionaire introvert).

I find him pretty unimpressive but I don't see him as worthy of hatred. I wish him the best, although I get annoyed by the fellation of him by Lacy et al.

Really? The impression I get from having seen him talk in a few videos is that he is clearly where he is because he "gets it" - he has that deep, long-term vision that goes way beyond the app, and taps an underlying culture-shift.

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