Mark Zuckerberg: “Please Resign” (2010)
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Am I crazy for thinking that this is completely reasonable in context?
Lighting up everyone's notifications with "From: Mark Zuckerberg Subject: Please resign" has a cost to everyone's quality of life, IMO.
If you change the subject line and cut the 3rd paragraph it comes across as pointless but standard corporate nonsense where they feel the need to reiterate common sense stuff and ignore the fact that most people work for money not ideals, but having such a petty line reeks of playground bullshit.
The real threat went unmentioned because it's illegal. It was "Quit or we'll find you and fire you and every other company/startup in SV will know why we fired you."
There are plenty of good reasons for companies to not honestly describe bad behavior of former employees, but I don't see that one of them is that it's illegal.
I think a number of people misunderstand that the reason why a lot of companies have a "Don't talk about why someone left" de-facto policy is because if there's any ambiguity it's probably not worth the cost of having to defend yourself from a possible libel lawsuit, and not that it's against any law.
The cost/benefit of that changes if there's no ambiguity, evidence of truth is after all a good defense against libel charges (in most sane jurisdictions...), and if the reason is "big" enough they may feel obliged to make it known.
Similarly, they leaked data but didn't or he lied and they were entering the phone market? Details wrong could be a long civil case, all the details right could still be a long case.. The only reason to engage in that kind of behavior is to sabotage yourself.
If you want to project power as a ceo you have the communication task delegated to someone who specializes in company communications and information security.
He has some extremely important message to pass to entire company (failed projects due to lost trust in mobile sector can easily shake company).
Why on earth delegate that and have yet another canned corporate email that will be forgotten 20 minutes later? You can always run content by someone experienced if you want to round up the edges, but if you have something to say to people usually it's best to just say it.
I hear on HN 99% of the time how folks don't like corporate speak and that they wish leaders were more forthcoming and honest, and here someone is arguing that they just want the corporate-speak version of it. It is completely baffling to me.
Corporate leaks are pretty serious, and maintaining a culture of no leaks is a CEO-level priority.
Handling these at the CEO level feels far more appropriate and effective than delegating it to a security specialist nobody's heard of before and whose e-mail will mostly just be ignored.
I don't see "insecure loser" at all, I see a CEO acting correctly to nip a problem in the bud.
Except for the "please resign" subject line which is a bit hyperbolic.
This is private enforcement of secrets with employees. If you leak company secrets, your in opposition to what you were hired for, and you get fired.
Nobody's arguing the journalist who published the story shouldn't have been legally permitted to.
Hell, I could sue companies before the supreme court determined they're people for election campaign fund purposes.
This email was famous, the clickbait subject gave some people a fright, but overwhelmingly people were strongly aligned with the sentiment and spoke about it in a positive way.
Now at another big tech co and I hear from my CEO and CVPs via mainstream news instead of internal channels. I feel very little connection to the culture and have no idea what our strategic direction is.
This was shared externally from our internal company meeting. I'd like to remind everyone that keeping the information shared in these meetings confidential allows us to be more open with all our employees. etc.
There may be times for the CEO to send the message but, especially at a high visibility company, it's probably inevitable it will become more of a personal thing.
(But I agree that this sort of communication, if not its exact wording, is more appropriate at a smaller company.)
They now have 70k, so they were 3% of the size back then.
I stand by my point.
The Facebook experience feels worse, but that's because the novelty wore off and people don't share anywhere as much as they did back in the heyday.
WhatApp came with 55 employees, instagram had 13. They introduced groups October 2010. No messenger or mobile app.
People have stopped sharing but many shares are suppressed and ads appear every 3rd post. Things haven't improved.. but I see they are selling verified profiles now I guess some people were looking forward to that product offering
Information that is false isn't a leak; it's rumor anyone could have started, pretending to be a Facebook insider. Someone could have forged an e-mail, which someone else believed and so it goes.
You can't simultaneously say that it's a fabrication, and imply that it's a real leak by calling for someone to be let go.
Everyone who received the e-mail would have first seen the subject line "Please Resign" and that it's from Zuckerberg, before seeing that it has many recipients. That doesn't seem very reasonable, even in case of an actual leak.
The CEO calling it 'an act of betrayal', appealing to the social good and appealing to building a company culture, is an admission to my ears that company structure and his authority is not his primary concern.
The CEO already has the authority to remove someone/everyone for this behaviour, so the appeals to the good and to not betray a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg himself or cultural connection that Mark wants, just ring hollow. If the leaker-employee sees benefit in revealing secrets to the public, losing the relationship to a billionaire he's never going to meet, or cutting down a company culture he is willing to lose, is not a deterrent.
Setting up a tone and example for future leakers, is better done by establishing the reaction authority will have to the behaviour in the future.
You're not crazy for thinking it's reasonable in context, but it's also not crazy to disagree with you.
It's like a teacher dressing down the entire class for something one student did. A single person at the company made this fireable offense. Why is he treating the rest of them like naughty children? Especially since he's so sure he'll be able to catch the guilty party. Catch the person who did it, send a professional email to the rest of the company reminding them that leaking confidential info will get you fired. Treat the adults in your company like adults.
It's a shitty, insensitive, email subject line though. Many people are going to see that and have a very negative reaction.
I think the snowflakes probably arrived, what 2015?
The signal Mark Zuckerberg is sending is that it is OK for a manager to be a bully "in the interest of the company".
No it is not.
The lack of professionalism, in this example, is the menacing email.
Of course there are rules to follow when working for a company, and some degree of loyalty is naturally expected.
But this kind of email is completely unwarranted, there is no need for this tone.
Sometimes corporations face tough intense competition, where margins are pressured and products need to be shipped or media/government/bad actors go on a propaganda. If you can't handle that please join a steady, stable electric company or join the government.
Last time I had an awful boss I triggered him on purpose to get fired.
As they used to say in the Mafia, the fish rots from the head, I think that Facebook/Meta is such an horrible company because of Zuck.
Obviously I don't mind people leaking things that are cause for serious concern (i.e. whistleblowers), but yeah it results in kind of a crappy company culture when the people setting the direction for the company are afraid to share their plans with the people actually doing the work. Maybe that's just inevitable for a company with a hundred thousand employees, though.
An atmosphere of lack of trust is built. It can be through neglect, or through evidence, but it doesn't occur spontaneously. It is a failure of upper management.
Don't be naive. You don't leak a fake story to the press because of a lack of trust (???). You do it because you like gossiping. In this case, management would be right to not trust the leakers.
Oh man do we have a generation w/ communication problems. News is a spectrum, and the whole point of sharing internally is to learn more so when shared externally the information is _useful_.
This is such a bizarre take. You don't think toxic employees exist?
However, it's only applicable at an extremely general level, and if you wanted to you could draw a connection between this kind of article and any number of new stories, if you're willing to stretch the terms enough. If it were up to me, comment section etiquette would discourage links to generic Wikipedia articles like logical fallacies, Dunning Kruger effect, or more or less familiar economic concepts unless they had some strong connection to the article.
I figured folks would be able to make the obvious connection between a very important Systems Design concept and what OP was commenting on. I guess I assumed wrong.
In written communication, context is king.
What happened, did things like this keep distracting them ?
However, folks there also sincerely believed that authentic identities would curb some of the toxicity that was being seen on the anonymous internet. That being exposed to diverse perspectives from friends could be an Avenue for increased tolerances. That giving common people a platform would be a net benefit to the world (Arab Spring was around this time).
In hindsight, much of that was wrong, but that doesn’t change the sincerity of the belief in that moment.
Then you could send these out in a coordinated fashion to identify which group, if not person, is leaking.
The message says that they will find the leaker, but I doubt it (of course this is from 2010, so if they were found they have been for a while now).
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226
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Post-truth is the era where nothing is attributable to a human because of AI interventions, and liability is shielded at every level because of it. It's insane.
Is he really confident of this?
Hence if they can’t do that, he’s gotta send an email about it. Tesla even had to send encoded spaces in letters to get leakers.
If you can’t measure what’s going right, you sure as hell can’t measure what’s going wrong.
And your remark about performance metrics is irrelevant to the question of, who accessed this sensitive company data?
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-forced-twitter-put...
If you can't handle that, then just leave.
Regardless of how correct the premise, this is language unbecoming of a CEO.
"But no realistic situation would require you to leak" is not a good strawman defense for Zuck's word choices. There is a broad history of whistleblowing in America being the necessary first step to unravel bad things. You don't even have to leave Silicon Valley to find Theranos, the Google/Apple/Facebook no-poach collusion, etc.
1. "We are a company that promotes openness and transparency"
2. "Let's commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions"
That's a tense few moments before opening it for people.
I’d open an email from the CEO without reading the subject tbh
Half the commenters in here are saying this a completely reasonable thing for him to say, and the other half are saying this is completely unacceptable for a CEO to send out
I like this kind of direct messaging and dislike the weak corporate messaging of today’s landscape. “Moving on to a bright future..” and then 2 paragraphs of meaningless fluff before finally finding out that there’s a product line being shut down or there was a security breach.
I did laugh a bit out loud reading this.
Tough to say, Mark doesn’t know how to build a device. However may be he could have made the device free in exchange for reaping all of user’s data. May be not. It would cost a lot of money and probably put google at a crossroads because apple and Facebook would then be positioned on either end of the spectrum with google not knowing what to do. I would have loved to see mark try to make a phone instead of Bezos.
I was interning on the team building the first ever touch screen for ChromeOS, in Waterloo, ON. We had barely gotten anything working yet. It was all super early days stuff.
We all laughed at the article and thought nothing more of it.
I think TechCrunch was just basically throwing darts and seeing what hit.
That's quite hypocritical. "We make our money spying on people. Spying will not be tolerated."
There's so much power for good in the platform, which is being held back by the need to return a profit.
Zuck sounds like he has no idea what he’s doing?
I work at a non-profit and wouldn't dare to utter these words to any employee. I understand believing what you preach, but actually saying you work on "changing the world" in an internal email seems very problematic? Is it just me?
Yes it’s problematic.
No, it was the usual thing to say back in 2010, it was normal.
My unicorn adopted the value “We advance humanity, through the power of software” in 2013 and that triggered me quitting and relinquishing half my stock options. I was a problematic employee so it was a winwin for them, but nonetheless it was a fucking gross thing to say, especially with the videoclip of a girl limping in Africa, for which we made the software that helped the developer that helped the doctor that helped the little girl getting stilts. We don’t advance humanity, we get overpaid from large corporation margins for outputting good software, with a sidenote of donating 1% for the greater good. It’s not even open-source.
That’s fucking extremely gross and inappropriate to say that’s advancing humanity. It lacks humility.
To their credit, they didn’t prolong the campaign and I’ve never heard them say it ever since 2013. I still have this ad in my new startup. In the toilet. To remind people to take care of their family before the corporation. Social fabric is what ties humans together, not our software.
Billions have lives have changed due to these corps, while your Non Profit may affect 100s
Ten years in, the company has been renamed, numerous variations of hardware and software have been tried, and all the pieces for a platform are theoretically in place. Yet users seem to only show up for occasional fitness and horror games. But Apple is entering the headset market this year, which could be a turning point eventually.
Can Quest 3 be like Windows 3.0? Seems unlikely, but at least it’s interesting to see these giant companies push so hard for a new interaction paradigm.
If you're already struggling to get developer mindshare, the last thing you should be doing is making backwards-incompatible changes every other year and force everyone to start from scratch.
A Facebook phone would have many problems, but I'm sure they would at least not be as stupid as Microsoft was.
Different positions mean different contexts mean different actions.
I assume Zuckerberg understands that legal jeopardy so he did not honestly expect anyone to comply with this rant. It’s merely a position statement
That said I wonder if there was anyone about to resign, but held off, to avoid it looking like this was the reason?
It’s an entertaining idea, but also sounds like a genuine possibility
I'm always curious to what extent people in positions like Zuck believe their own bs.
Personally, I like their work in the Telecom sector: Evenstar (open RAN) and TIP (https://telecominfraproject.com)
Fully. At least where I worked.
Company X wants to keep plans and products confidential and internal, yet at the same time, wants to achieve world domination and penetration of its products to all the world's users. Somewhat inevitable to be in conflict, these goals, especially when you start to have on the order of 100,000 people you hire to be able to take over the world.
And I get the frustration, but not the outrage of executives. You created this human-based organization to power your capitalist (in the best sense) ambitions -- don't imagine that you have full control over it, especially if your past actions have created a culture that doesn't trust your publicly stated intentions fully.
And just to caricature even more, boo-hoo, my problem is that the media got told my huge company is building a phone, but we're not. Cry me a river. It's the greatest injustice humanity has ever experienced.
> We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook.
The irony of these two statements being separated by three paragraphs made me lol
> Even now, we're in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because they now think we're competitors. They think we're building a phone to compete with them rather than building integrations to make their phones better.