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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

So, by quoting a 2-year old book on Facebook and displaying one stock graph, the author of this post arrives at the following concluding graf:

Sandberg should start an ad agency on the East Coast. Miami is nice. That’s a job she’s qualified to do. Her rampant lack of business creativity should have no place in centers of innovation.

I found this piece superficial and, by the end, a little bit creepy.

Blaming the top management at Facebook for building a business on advertising is a little like blaming scientists for gravity. Who's bidding more for Facebook's functionality? The end users, who appear to be willing to pay $0.00, or the advertisers, who in the aggregate are demonstrably willing to pay billions?

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Yeah, I found the tone of the article to be vaguely sexist. It depicts Sandberg as "charming" a hapless Zuckerberg, then suggests that Sandberg should move to Miami (because it's "nice") and start an ad agency because "that’s a job she’s qualified to do."

Yeah, I wouldn't normally care about stories sniping at Facebook, but those passages were exactly what set me off; a second read shows that the whole thing is cribbed opportunistically from a book that predates even Facebook's S-1.

I'm sorry but how is it sexist?

I would agree that it is a poor article with little reasoning behind it, but I have no idea what sex the author is nor do I think it is sexist.

If anything it seemed like the author was discrediting her because her strategy included locking out developer. I'll meet you half way on the Miami sentence on agreeing that it was tacky. However, I think you are taking it out of context. It is apparent that the author doesn't like her, but no where does the article mention that she is not qualified because she is woman or anything remotely to that effect.

Please enlighten me. Did I miss a whole paragraph somewhere?

I'll have to apologize if I came off as sexist. I'm not even completely anti-Sandberg. I had hoped this bit would cover that:

At Google she had excelled at selling online advertisements and growing Google into a cash gushing behemoth.

Any sniping I do at her in the rest of the piece, if you could call it that, couldn't offset praise as high as this.

The point of the article is not that Sandberg herself screwed up. I'd say she's responsible for almost every dollar of revenue Facebook has earned. The point of the article was that Zuckerberg and Facebook screwed up by hiring her, and the should rectify it by firing her and apologizing with a big severance package.

It does come across as sexist, sorry, but also as an ad hominem attack.

The point you are making about advertising at Facebook can be made without pointing the finger at one person. It would be a lot clearer, and the gaps in logic more obvious.

Even if one person is at fault (I'm not arguing that), in business, as in all things, it's generally better to focus on fixing the problem rather than giving up on the person. If we fired people every time they made a mistake then we'd all be unrmployed.

I found your response bit creepy.

The part you quote are the last sentences; obviously it shouldn't be taken 100% seriously and I am surprise you did, since he obviously joked, as there are many other places than Miami that are nice to live, something I am pretty sure you are aware of.

Of course blaming top management is a way to go. That's the major difference between junior, senior and executives; in first two instances for your failures, up to some degree can be blamed rightfully anyway you want to: on a weather, on other emps unwillingness to work hard, etc. But when you are that high in hierarchy as an executive who can hire or fire thousands of emps at once, and should have broad insights into every company's corner, there are no more excuses available to you: you either did your job and succeed, or you did your job miserably and failed. There is just too much power all the way on the top to blame weather or junior emps for your own failures.

Said that, this article is quite frankly right on spot. Other than obviously the author is not a stock market researcher and may not know the numbers behind this stock (P/E f.e.) cannot help but push it down to a reasonable levels, he is right that CEO and COO had entirely different approach to making money.

No part of this comment responds to mine. Let me simplify my comment, which was simultaneously prolix and a little dashed off. I have 2 points:

1. The source material for this whole article, which concludes by suggesting that Sandberg should move to "nice" Miami to start an ad agency, is a book that was published in June '10.

2. The core critique of the article is that Facebook derives most of its income from advertising, when it (somehow?) might have done something different. The author never specifies what. The most damning thing the author appears to be able to say about that decision is, the entire Facebook upper management team agreed with Sandberg about this.

Aside from that: what's "creepy" about my response? I wasn't explicit about this, but what was "creepy" to me about the story was the way it pitted nerdy male Zuckerberg against "nice" female Sandberg.

I don't know, just the way it sounded creepy to me.

I guess the guy wrote the article trying to explain how Zuck had this idea about network where eventually revenue will come from API/graph/developers and at the end he throw a sentence that Sandberg should move to Miami. I am not sure if being focused on this one last sentence was his goal and you made it sound like it did.

As of "nerdy male Zuck" vs. "nice female Sandberg", sorry but that did not cross my mind even once.

Well, it crossed my mind immediately, and then crossed it again, then walked into the middle of it and started jumping up and down. So I wrote a comment.

I think the word you meant to use, regarding my comment, was "obnoxious". All pejoratives are not created equal. Singling one person out in a blog post and lobbying that they be fired with no evidence other than what was written years ago in a mass market book, and that they should go to a "nice" city and start an ad agency? I found that creepy. Yelling on HN about that point of view? You found that obnoxious, I'm betting.

Sure english is not my native language and I can only try to use it as good as I can.

I'm sure I'd do much worse in your native language. :)

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