What I Learned Working for Mark Zuckerberg
noahkagan.com
noahkagan.com
Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.
While at-will employment does mean you can be fired at any time, the default assumption is that your job will continue, barring something happening (like poor performance, or the company being unprofitable, or your boss being in a bad mood that day).
The phrasing here makes it sound like the default is that it's time-limited and an extended interview. Sure, technically at-will and "a tech interview" both have the same amount of job-security (exactly zero), but there's social expectations around employing and firing people, and overhead for the company, which lead to full-time employment having more security in practice.
Not sure about other at-will states but in Utah one can apply for unemployment after losing their W2 gig. If this trial period doesn’t involve W2 paperwork then I wouldn’t think it’s comparable.
However, AppSumo is apparently promising the opposite - they are setting the expectation that it is quite likely new hires will not work out and you should be fully prepared for termination.
Now that's an assurance I'd take seriously.
The fact that they explicitly call out this practice is probably a sign that they lay off a larger percentage of new hires compared to the average company. Otherwise, why mention it?
Just go to a regular place of employment. I've never seen any place with these kinds of deviant methods and process end up be a remotely successful company or an actual good employer.
What other employer do you know what does this?
Your double negative is genuinely confusing me. Is this intentional, or is it an error?
- you're going to be treated like an employee, because that's the plan, and I'd wager many Contract-to-Hire setups would fail the government's "20 Factor Test"[1]: Level of instruction, degree of integration, demands for full-time work...
- I've yet to see a non-VP+ level contract with severability clauses that require contractual compensation, i.e. most contracts are "severable without notice", no different to "At Will"
Indeed, the practical side effect of this is "We're going to hire you and we get to avoid paying you benefits for an extended period of time (the contract duration)."
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/oda/shared/Documents/Publications/Nat...
There is not a chance I would leave a real job for a gig like that. I can't imagine many folks who have mortgages and families to support would consider it.
However, we do not really have such titles since it's a very small shop. So, perhaps I am not the best at judging whom is truly a mid-level vs. senior.
It would help people more if there was a clearer expression of "this is a trial. You might not pass it".
In the US? Yeah, they don't make much sense.
More accurate: "They can hire you a contractor for 3-12 months and not have to pay you benefits for that period."
But if you're a FTE you will likely be able to get unemployment. As a contractor there is zero chance that can happen.
On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses, and if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule.
Each has + and -.
There's probably not a lot of contractor-specific expenses you'd see in a C2H role. Hell, the two I did (admittedly a while back) gave me a company laptop. WFH tax concessions?
You're also not likely to get a C2H situation that looks like this:
FTE salary: $150,000, but for the duration of the "ramp" contract is paying you $150/hr.
You might have a small bump for tax discrepancies, but the last time I played that game you'd most likely find your contract rate to be $80-90/hr, i.e basically the same. They're not going to pay you effectively double for three months to hire you on at the base rate.
> if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule
I'd love to see the C2H that says "Hey, since you are a contractor, you can work your own hours and have your own availability". Or it might be said as lip service, but that's not how you're going to get the "hire" part.
As a contractor, you're a business. There's overhead to run that biz. Those are business expenses.
There's also the risk of wrongful termination lawsuits if you're hiring someone full-time only to immediately lay them off for not impressing you enough.
It is much simpler to hire someone as a contractor. You may not even have to go through HR to do it.
In the US, when someone says "trial period", it usually means "extended interview" where there's a high chance of failure, while in other countries, the trial-period is a formality to make sure you're a functioning adult, but with no real chance of failure if you're not grossly incompetent.
But for smaller orgs, the probation period where either side can terminate at will is very, very real. I have both fired someone during their probation, and walked away from a role during probation. It's not a formality, and just turning up on time and moistening a chair is not enough to pass it in many cases.
With a probationary period, your default state is “employed”. Typically what happens even if you fail the probationary period, is that probationary period is extended before any new hire dismissed.
Plus even in the UK, it’s actually not that hard to fire someone outside of their probationary period but inside of 2 years.
It’s also worth noting that generally employers still hold all the power even with the stronger employment laws. For example, unless you’ve got a very clear case for unfair dismissal, the cost of fighting a dispute isn’t generally worth the trouble - and in many cases the (ex)employee isnt even financially secure enough to hire a solicitor to begin with. So it’s easier to part ways and focus that energy on the opportunity.
Though the length here was not specified, it could be e.g. 3 days that you can do while still employed.
You need to work with someone much longer than that to figure out their (non-obvious) flaws.
They're not perfect, and you really do need to make sure the task is targeted at what you actually want to see from the person when they join, but they definitely give more signal than 6 hours of leetcode.
That could easily put you in violation of your employment contract. And could result in your (ex-) employer coming after you, and/or your new employer.
I don't necessarily agree that it should, but it absolutely could.
If people are concerned about the risk of being paid, well, either you want to get paid or not, that's up to them, you can't have you cake and eat it too here.
I'd be happy and it would be fair.
Plus, most people very lazily state the problem when they give the take home exercise to a point large parts of the problem are open to big interpretation. To the effect any deliverable you produce feels either overdoing or not doing anything at all.
Some people take a part of the problem they are trying to solve at work and just put it in a paragraph and ask you to solve it. Most the times the context is missing, they don't give data you need to complete your work and more importantly it feels they just want this requirement off their table and don't wish to be bothered. So when you go back to them for the data or context, they straight up reject you.
When you do get a company/team, that gives you a good problem to solve. They don't bother to read through your solution. When they do, they want you to go through a live code review in front of the whole team, or work through feature requests on the code you just wrote with dozens of people watching as you type. Then followed by that rounds of grilling you on esoteric trivia. Which in case most companies have a policy that if even one person gives a negative feed back they reject you.
In all, you end up doing lots of work for nothing.
The idea anyway is to find someone capable for solving problems with a specific tech stack, be able to discuss ideas with other people amicably and write decent code.
To me removing the tools which can and are actually using during the job is like asking someone to write flawless code on paper: is that what you are trying to filter for?
Are probation periods not a thing in the US? Maybe because of at-will termination?
In Australia most roles have a 3-6 month probation period in which either party can terminate the employment agreement at will. That's essentially a "paid trial period".
After that, employers have much stricter rules for what reasons they can fire you (in theory) and and both employers and employees must give 2 weeks notice or extra if agreed upon in contract.
>Mark’s goal was 1 billion users.
>Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
>If it wasn’t driving toward that goal, we didn’t do it.
A lot of people have described Facebook as a cancer, but I have never seen it spelled out so literally.
> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. If he thought something was shit he would tell you and you’d have to start over.
Perfection seems a bit incongruous with moving fast and breaking things. Maybe different standards for copy (assuming this was external facing and not an internal document) vs code? Still a bit weird.
That particular right to flexible mistakes applies only to him. The employees get the privilege of 3 am emails nagging them about punctuation.
I'd love to see the guy apply such harsh standards to his own firm place in the company.
If you are still up at 3am that’s a problem in the first place, but being asked to fix a period when you are up is not.
Perhaps being a billionaire changes your view on perfection but I'm not sure I buy the narrative about him being a perfectionist given how decidedly mediocre a lot of what he's touched is.
Actually it's more like ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain. Wait, what were we talking about?
Not true.
Source: worked for Zuck.
Do it.
Do it right.
Do it fast.
So in this case, Move Fast and Break Things means that when an aspect of the work is in phase 1, there should be evidence of things breaking so you know that progress is happening at the maximum possible speed. Then because things are moving fast, work quickly moves into phase 2 of taking the breakages and fixing them to a high standard. Although I make no claim as to how it actually worked at Facebook.
As for 3.00 am and a missing period. Well, trying to judge someone on a sample size of one is heavy handed.
Email aren't meant to be responded to immediately.
This article lists out why he was fired. I was mostly curious if he was screwed over right before vesting or if he was legitimately fired.
Im actually impressed by the author, it takes a lot to move on from such a mistake. Id be interested in reading about that but i figure its painful to talk about
https://noahkagan.com/why-i-got-fired-from-facebook-a-100-mi...
E.g.:
> Lesson learned: Go see if your weaknesses are hindering you at your job. Ie. I wasn’t great at planning or product management at this time. Fix them or move to another position. Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired*.
* Unless you do something really stupid or the company goes out of business.
Ya only if you have some ownership in the company. Otherwise much better to do it for your own company / projects. You are hired to do a job, don't need to go beyond for a company who will not pay you more.
In most companies and for most people in them, this would be useless at best and most damaging at worst. Just as an example, if making the company more valuable causes you to come into conflict with your manager/boss, chances are that your brilliant ideas, along with your work, will disappear into the void. No champagne at the end of the quarter, no vacations to the Maldives paid for by the company.
As always in life, it is a matter of probability. If I had to choose between pursuing my ideas, which (perhaps) would make the company more valuable, or hiding them in the corner of my mind because they would irritate my manager, I would choose the latter.
Mileage may vary for smaller companies with a more direct path between the work done and the company's revenues and profits.
We know for a fact that's nonsense given how imperfect his main products (that he's spending most of his time on) are
> I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!)
Yes, this is not about perfection, but one of those effort sinks that can take all your sleep time and more while leaving you with no energy to focus on much more consequential things
How? Who wakes up from an email? Phone call sure, but an email?
normal to work 12+ hour days
Fired 9 months later
Kagan told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington about Facebook's plans to expand beyond college students to a professional social network for companies like Microsoft and Apple... A few weeks later, Kagan was fired.
[Kagan] tried to use his role at Facebook to make a name for himself... used to host startup gatherings at Facebook's headquarters... frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site about Facebook's business... Zuckerberg asked [Kagan] to choose between himself and Facebook. Somehow, Kagan still didn't get the message, and he wasn't able to save his job.
> frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site about Facebook's business
He's still doing it lol
I guess that is what Kagan meant by this:
> When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
“They’re human beings”, he’d scream.
This is just too rich, considering the person and company the post is masturbating all over, and that company's current real-life treatment of users as something even less than users.
The whole post reads like a simplified fairy tale recounting of how glorious it was to be in the presence of some exalted being.
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
> He was just trying to help connect people at college.
Are you saying the author's hagiography of Mark Zuckerberg is misleading? I'm shocked.
> The marketing team’s plan was not to do anything and the night before we opened Facebook to the professional market (anyone with a @microsoft.com, @dell.com, etc…) I emailed TechCrunch to let Michael Arrington know to publish it in the morning. He ended up publishing it that night (I was at Coachella and will never again attend) before the actual product was released in the morning. I immediately notified the e-team and assumed full responsibility.
I guess the guy disagreed with the marketing strategy and did something he thought would be more effective for the company.
Curious on how others weigh in on this. Occasionally you hear stories of startups in the early stage, where some guy goes against some decision that was sub-optimal and it makes all the difference. Are these stories usually just positive selection bias and its better everyone falls in line? Of course, i'm not saying what this guy did was necessarily the right choice either.
But there's the Cambridge Analytica thing...
First section is about growth:
> “Mark, we’re not profitable. Let’s try selling tickets inside Facebook events,” I pleaded. > He said no. > Then he took a dry-erase marker and wrote on the board: GROWTH. > Mark’s goal was 1 billion users. > Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
Putting growth above profitability can only work when you are getting some sort of outside funding. Facebook didn't turn a profit until 2009, which means it was about 5 years of burning through other people's money. That is not sustainable for the almost all individuals who are wanting to start a company now or people who are running smaller companies.
Move Fast:
> At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.
That is just awful and it is painful to think that giving up so much of one's life was the norm there.
> We shipped several updates to the site every day. In comparison, companies like Microsoft would take months to write out product details, discuss them in a lot of meetings, and finally build them. > As a startup, your biggest advantage against giant companies is speed.
There is a reason why things would take longer at Microsoft, you can't "go fast and break things" when it comes to an operating system or other software that is businesses may rely on for their day to day work. The fact that Noah makes the comparison to Microsoft is concerning since I don't believe that Microsoft had any social network product around the time that Noah worked for Facebook (though I could be wrong). A better comparison would be MySpace, since they were an actual competitor of Facebook's at the time and also worked on comparable products.
Treat Your Employees Well:
Many of the perks that he lists out are designed to ensure that the employee stays at the office as much as possible. It is easy to get your employees to work 12+ hour days when you make it so they don't have to go anywhere to get good tasting food 3 times a day, didn't have to worry about your laundry and would even get money for living very close to the office.
Scratch Your Own Itch:
>At the start, Mark never intended to build a company. He was just trying to help connect people at college.
I'm not really sure how creating a clone of "Hot or Not" really helps people connect. If Harvard didn't take Facemash down and Mark didn't face any sort of threat of punishment (expulsion, violation of copyright, etc) would Facebook actually exist currently? I don't think the "scratch your own itch" mantra works in this situation
Pay attention to details:
>He was meticulous about capitalizing the “F” in Facebook
Facebook is the name of the site and company and as such it is a proper noun. I don't know why it would even be a noteworthy thing to want to ensure that a proper noun is capitalized.
Give ownership to the team:
>Engineers and product managers could come up with features and build them out without needing anyone’s approval.
But previously Noah stated that:
>Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
With that kind of reaction to a feature being suggested it doesn't seem to me like there was as much free reign to build features as this section implies.
Well, if his goal was to get fellow students to upload pictures of pretty girls from his campus, that would indeed be a "scratch your own itch" situation. The entire story has strong Revenge of the Nerds vibes - and I mean that in the more recent revisionist "oh god, all of them should be in prison for sexual harassment and at least one count of literally rape" sense.
If a company was smart they'll hold onto you for life because you will care and give it 110% because that loyalty used to be gaurentee good output.
Obviously none of this exists anymore and it's a damn shame.
Plenty of those civilians are lifers with a serious sense of purpose for their work.
You get the occasional dead weight, but it's far less common than you might expect.
Ladder climbing lifers don't phone it in.
Senior SWE lifers? Phoning it in pretty hard.
Other industries are probably different.
One business owner said to another "what if I hire someone, put all this time into training them and then they leave?"
The other replied "what happens if you don't train them and they stay?"
Well the company always has options to fire such people.
Turns out they’ve always been able to take it away at any time
9 times out of 10, the reason they do it will have nothing to do with you, your work, or your performance
Just do what you can when you have a job and remind yourself it’s just a job
Suspiciously, the only individuals impacted by the reorganization were director level, and were replaced by people the new president knew from prior employers.
I took it hard until the pattern emerged. That's when I realized:
Most times it's not about you. It's about someone else, you're just collateral damage.
> At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.
That is called unpaid overtime.
> Mark constantly pushed us to have a sense of urgency.
That is how you stop employees from reflecting on their situation and how you set them up for burnout. Sure, they're all 20-somethings and can pull all-nighters but that is literally burning the candle at both ends.
> Even our customer support team was filled with Harvard PhD’s.
Conflating "A PLUS players" with "Harvard PhDs" says more about the monoculture of early Facebook. Notably Zuckerberg himself is a Harvard drop-out.
> Mark recognized that having a work environment you want to work in would [..] make the existing [employees] [..] stay later at night
This is not about creating a "work environment you want to work in", this is about creating an atmosphere of group pressure and lock-in:
> Delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner catered
In other words: people are expected to come in before breakfast and stay until after dinner. This means they're expected not to have families or relationships outside work except whatever fits in weekends or late evenings. This helps isolate them, giving the company more weight in their social sphere.
> All expenses paid company trips to Las Vegas, Free happy hours every Friday
In other words: frequent "team-building events" except they're framed as social outings with your colleagues - who if you're staying from before breakfast until after dinner (and sometimes even for all-nighters) are your entire social circle.
> Subsidized housing. $600/month if you lived within 1 mile of the office.
That $600/month is effectively just a bonus paid out to employees moving closer to the office. But framing it as a subsidy prevents employees from asking why (hint: again reducing the time spent outside the office as living close makes the paid breakfast/dinner/laundry more appealing than if you have a longer commute) and it creates lock-in by enticing employees to commit to a more expensive apartment closer to the office and not thinking about the high rent they're actually paying because it is offset by the "subsidy". It also means if they get fired they suddenly pay $600 "more" in rent and will likely want to move away quickily, reducing their influence on their former colleagues still living close to the office.
> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. If he thought something was shit he would tell you and you’d have to start over.
Doing detailed checks for punctuation, spelling, grammar and branding on everything public is one thing. But this makes it sound like Zuckerberg would come in after 90% of the work was done, tear it to shreds and tell people to start over - that would normally be the opposite of making employees feel appreciated or like they're given free reign but makes perfect sense if you instead want to make them internalize "what would Mark do" instead of following their gut.
> When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
Yes, and they won't be an owner. And they'll find out when they get fired on the spot and are left with nothing except the accrued compensation for their work. Again, this is about making people overcommit the way they would for their own startup or their own family and to go beyond their limits until you no longer have any use for them.
> My boss was fired the day I started. My next boss was fired a month later. I got fired in 9 months. [..] He removed the people that were holding Facebook back immediately and he quickly promoted the ones that were helping Facebook achieve its goals
In other words every employee was constantly at risk of getting on the wrong side of Zuckerberg and being fired on the spot - despite all the commitment demanded of them. This is an entirely one-sided relationship and it's exploiting it to the fullest extent.
> When I was at Facebook all I did was think/talk/dream about Facebook. Facebook was my girlfriend. It didn’t feel like a job, so I put in all my hours.
Heck, if you think anything I said is exaggerated, this is the author literally agreeing with me: Facebook was their life while they were employed by Facebook - and yet they were fired after a mere 9 months. They didn't own anything. They committed their life to the company until it all got taken away from them. And here they are proudly talking about wanting to continue the cycle of abuse in their own company.
I'm not saying this doesn't work. But this should put some of the early Web 2.0 era "Facebook is a cult" allegations into perspective - and I don't just mean the secret hoodie linings. These are literally social manipulation tactics we know from cults. Like, this is cult 101 stuff: https://people.howstuffworks.com/cult4.htm
- Isolation: I think I've already explained that aspect.
- Induced Dependency: This is literally what all the Web 2.0 boom era on-site "perks" are for (three meals, laundry service, housing subsidy, etc)
- Dread: The constant sense of urgency, the random firings, the risk of having your work torn apart for being "shit".
Facebook isn't a cult. And Facebook isn't alone in this - other companies like Google are well-known for having engaged in similar manipulation tactics. And many have likely come out successful or were able to use their employment history as a career boost or to write influencer think pieces like the author, but these are still deliberately manipulative cult tactics and they're specifically used to make employees overcommit at the expense of their private life. And of course they also prevent any moves towards unionizing but that's probably just a coincidence.
EDIT: The author's "how I got fired" actually repeats what I said: https://noahkagan.com/why-i-got-fired-from-facebook-a-100-mi...
> They walked me back to the office and removed my laptop and my cell phone. Then I proceeded to the Verizon store to use their phone, called my gf (at the time) and drove to the house I shared with 6 other FB guys. Packed up all my stuff in my CRX, [..] and drove to my friend Johnny’s place.
> To spell it out. Facebook was my entire life. My social circle, my validation, my identity and everything was tied to this company.
At the same time blaming themselves for not putting the company first enough:
> I wanted attention, I put myself before Facebook.
The older I get the more Rockets, space, crazy weapons all seem trivial compared to the underlying human problem