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malermeister

I quit Facebook because I was getting pings by Zuckerberg himself on button padding on one of his pet projects.

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You self selected because he turned up the heat on those buttons, and you know what? He’s okay with that

(Being facetious)

But why was your padding work so shoddy?

He's a low performer; it's just one of his immutable and context-independent properties.

Cause i was modifying the shoddily built codebase of the feature we were modifying.

Turns out "move fast and break things" doesn't make for maintainable code.

Padding work is hard and the benefits are often marginal.

Is this literally true?

Shouldn’t that take only a few minutes?

Haha, not in the codebase I was working in at the time. Paddings being manipulated programmatically all over the place.

Also, what a clear signal the CEO is not focusing on what matters. This was during the time the Cambridge Analytica thing broke... There's really nothing more important that needed his attention?

Maybe he needed something to direct his stress into and distract himself. I'm not saying what he did was right, BTW.

That was kind of my read too. Focus on the small things you can control to make up for the loss of control over the big things.

I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his coping strategy.

> I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his coping strategy.

That's a very fair need. Hope your life turns out better than you ever hope it to be.

At a company the size of Facebook, the CEO should not be involved at that level.

Why not? It's his company. He can do what he wants.

Should not, not must not. He can do what he wants, but he shouldn't.

His company pays design and UX experts a huge amount of money to come up with designs that work for users, not for him personally. Meta isn't Zuckerberg's toy. Ignoring that expertise, and designing for himself instead of users, is failing the shareholders by wasting money and not maximizing revenue.

The parallel to Steve Jobs is a fair one, except that Steve was brilliant at design and UX and got things right. He wasn't bothered about tiny details like the padding on a single button but rather the design of the entire system, and he picked up on things that didn't sit in the overall architecture brilliantly.

He also drove people to leave Apple, and that was a bad thing. Things aren't right or justifiable just because they're like things Steve did. Sometimes he got things wrong, particularly when it came to managing people.

CEOs dog fooding their products and leaving feedback on them is not failing shareholders. Would you prefer a CEO to completely ignore everything their company makes and just trust others to tell him how things are going?

A wise CEO doesn't bypass the product and engineering process he's delegated to be put in place. Bypasing the process not only interferes with someones sprint and product roadmap, but more importantly, tells the people who own the process that they don't really own it after all. Which leads to people quitting.

If the CEO of my company prodded me about a feature I work on, I think that's actually a great opportunity to build rapport.

Right…

Happy to talk about it (who doesn't like talking about what they're up to?), and indeed it is nice if they're taking a genuine technical interest.

If they want a change made that's basically a completely trivial detail that was already within my ability to have done when I was doing the work (e.g. just putting some padding that just felt about right), then sure, I guess. Not sure it's actually important, but whatever.

If it will go against other work (e.g. the padding comes from some central styling rules), entails substantial off-route work, or adds future maintenance debt or project risk, it should go via the product manager if there is one. A good CEO knows not to preempt the people who decide how the product works, what it needs to do and how the team(s) are going to get there. He should also know that product will consider a valid suggestion (and he should know if they're so slammed that they can't even think about it, in which case he can help in other ways than moaning about padding).

In this case it sounds like Zuckerberg is bikeshedding over something trivial (doesn't get much more trivial than padding on a specific button) just to swing his dick about. If he has something insightful to say about the business logic, that would actually show engagement and understanding.

I'm surprised that nobody is questioning this. Zuckerberg owns ~17% of Meta shares, so it quite clearly not "his" company where he can do whatever he pleases. Primarily he is an employee and has a responsibility to the owners (which does include him) to do his job, arguably looking at button padding is not part of his job description.

Zuckerberg has a voting majority. As long as he believes he is acting in the companies best interests he can do whatever he likes.

Not really. The role of the fiduciary is to act in the best interests of the organization, including seeking counsel and advice from experts. “I was doing what I thought was best,” is not an affirmative defense, and has been successfully argued to be a dereliction of duty in corporate and contract law.

This isn't strictly true, Zuckerberg has to act in the interests of the minority shareholders as well. He can't take a deal that helps himself while hurting all other shareholders.

Getting involved in button padding issues isn't one of those cases though. He can spend all the time in the world on that if he likes.

That's irrelevant when discussing ownership. He owns 17% of Meta. That he retains control of 90% of Meta doesn't mean that he has the moral right to ignore his responsibilities to his co-owners.

No one has the moral right to do anything since the entire idea of moral rights is absurd. Yes, Zuckerberg has a duty to act in the best interest of shareholders. Courts have repeatedly ruled that good faith belief is all that requires. Unless you think his interest in button ui is somehow in self interest over company interest he didn’t do anything wrong.

17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights. I don't know the current numbers, but Zuck was known for aggressive use of priority shares to retain voting control of the company as he was selling shares.

Share of stock class != Share of stock class

Zuck controls 90% of the voting rights of FB: https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...

>17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights

Stock classes are the biggest robbery of modern times.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robbery

> larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat

How does Facebook’s share offering meet the definition of robbery?

That Zuckerberg was selling a product with such high demand and so little supply that he was able to sell at a very high price does not qualify as Zuckerberg robbing others. It is not even bread for a starving person, it is equity to chase returns.

It seemed obvious to me that robbery was being used in the colloquial sense (rip off)

It's not like people aren't aware of stock classes when they buy it.

You're essentially right. It's not the job of the corporation to act morally. The job to create a moral framework under which corporations operate is the nation's.

Unfortunately, corporations have been successfully lobbying on removing constraints on what they are doing and against adding new ones.

Respectfully: Zuckerberg has earned the right to care about whatever he darn-well pleases at company the size of his.

Sure. But random employees also have the right to quit, if they don't like that meddling.

As soon as you start talking about “rights” you’re just having your own argument. We are obviously talking about what’s best practice.

Steve Jobs was famously known to be involved in even more micro product details than that.

“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow” said Steve.

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?” Of course this was okay with me.

Just like working hard won't make you rich on its own, it's not enough to be a micromanager. The directions you give have to actually produce results.

Facebook is no iPod.

It takes a few minutes once, it takes a few minutes another time, ... and now you have an exec who is like Pavlov's dog got used to prompt completion of his/her caprices. That isn't a way to a happy life for you (well, until you a one of those who thrive in execs' attention). Instead you wait until second or third reminder (if it is important the exec would remind, if not - then there wasn't a reason to bother to start with, and given the ferret like attention span of a typical exec...), you similarly wait for reminders another time, ... and now you have an exec frustrated by such an impedance mismatch and who as a result would move their attention to somebody else to promptly care for his/her caprices :)

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