Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company
blog.holler.com
blog.holler.com
http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
The users that use and the advertisers that advertise don't care 1 bit about the backend.
What I'm just saying there is definitely huge value, sales wise, in having a good well built product. The bold statement the parent made that the backend of Facebook doesn't matter to the people or advertisers who use it is flat wrong. If it was slow, constantly crashing or down it would become a ghost town relatively quickly. In the end sales cannot compensate for a bad product, the product is always king in the end.
As to your comment, I like to use the analogy of a land rush to describe the software technology landscape right now. There is a lot of open land and so many people get away without having to seriously compete, particularly if they are solving niche problems. There is still a lot of land out there, this is also a reason that makes forming start-ups so attractive right now.
Myspace is dead because users no longer think it's cool / trendy / view it as old / a dead-end.
> So they would use a completely terrible product too if that's what it was?
Absolutely. Sales/marketing is always king. Make something new / cool / exclusive / etc and you'll have a winner.
Users do not care 1 bit about the backend.
Whatever you do, though, don't host a public event with a separate area for the VIPs.
A private party is just that -- a private party. The only people that know about it are the invitees, and I certainly wouldn't feel excluded if I wasn't given an invite to a small gathering because I wasn't in-group.
I'd be damned insulted if you hold a public hoo-hah with some big names on the playbill, and then whisk said big names away to some sort of private, exclusive party, where I can't go, because I'm not one of the cool kids. Not because the exclusive gathering was, well, exclusive, but because the open-to-the-public side of things had some massively false pretenses.
I'm all for companies that can keep developers and engineers up at the front, being deeply technical involved and interacting with their communities. But that's not going to be all companies, and Facebook in particular is one of those companies that is by their nature a closed system that builds itself not out in public (ala, say Mozilla), but through the proxy of press releases and new features dropped onto users' and 3rd partys' laps.
The other big factor I'd pitch would be consistency: how much technical content is there, and what amount is appropriate for a developer to be showing off? If the event is not inherently a technical event, a fifteen or thirty minute segment from a developer might seem really out of place. Developers are to be respected, but Facebook isn't a technical company, it's a networking company.
I'm not one of their employees and yet I know how their build system works, how they store more photos than the rest of the internet combined (Haystack), how they process their analytics and likes (HBase counters + scribe + ptail + puma), how they store messages (HBase), how their data centers are built (open compute), the list just goes on and on.
As far as large internet companies goes Facebook has one of the most open engineering departments I've ever seen.
If I want to get into a good party (which is seldom), I go to whatever club is the current flavor of the month and shove a filthy wad of cash in the bouncer's hand. I could give two shits about an "exclusive" SV party, and I would hope most Facebook employees feel the same way.
they forgot what these conferences are supposed to be about
If Marketing, PR and BD hijacked a programming competition, I'd be surprised. If they hijack a conference about anything, not so much.
It's a business, not an egalitarian democracy. We all know some numbnuts will get drunk and embarrass themselves and the company. It's easier to avoid the potential of that happening by restricting the invite list to only the strategically important people. As a developer, I never considered myself to be such. Also, I never invite my boss to any of my parties, so whatever.
As far as the marketing/biz dev/party planner people us concerned, they're a necessary evil who more often than not display asshole behavior of the kind described in the post, but as a developer you should ask yourself if your life is worth working with/for people who's great idea is a car-sharing service with the need for a VIP room.
And it certainly doesn't represent startups (at all).
I should also add that I'm not suggesting that exclusive events are alone the source of the problem. They can even be useful in some cases. I'm simply stating that exclusive events are not useful when you are trying to build a community of any type (in Facebook's case it's a community of developers).
Some people are inaccessible (you likely won't get a meeting with Steve Jobs by sending a cold email), but it's an exception rather than the rule. I also suspect it has more to do with his schedule than his attitude (unlike other parts of the world).
That being said, people will be people, and there's plenty of VIP-type nonsense going on here. The thing is, you can't think of these things in absolutes - you have to compare with the rest of the world, and SV is by far the most open place I've ever seen. That being said, I'd really like the culture of disrespect for the respectable here to get even stronger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kirzr6lnSs&feature=playe...
Been visiting Lake Wobegon recently I see.
The situation with the B-list party could probably have been handled better with regard to musical talent and an obvious discrepancy between the talent invited.