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Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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.

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