Focus
boz.com
boz.com
Ask anyone at Meta and they will readily agree that Boz is among the most incompetent and unserious leaders in tech. His only qualification is being Zuck's friend, and that shields him from all criticism. At a more "focused" company he would have been fired a decade ago. As it stands he lost the shareholders $150B+ (and counting), dipped from the metaverse org, and got rewarded with a new role overseeing the shiny new thing - AI.
When you put it like that, I kinda warm to the guy
I don’t think self-awareness is really his thing.
[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/read-the-con...
I guess the culture at Facebook was set very early and we’re still seeing the effect of that play out today.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
Or they might say “engagement,” but I think they’d agree on the substance.
> To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the company Q&A’s he now hosts) people would sometimes ask about having the company support this nonprofit or that cause. Mark would always say no.
> Over time, this principle slowly eroded. More and more employees asked. At some point we had enough money to do it without making an immediate trade-off. And if so many employees wanted it, maybe it was more cost effective just to do it.
The problem with that is that it seems pretty obvious that Meta's "lack of focus" is 100% a leadership problem. Excuse my French, but they fucking renamed the entire company for a product vision that was just Zuckerberg's halcyon dream. It wasn't like Bob in Accounting was clamoring to reposition the entire company to something that had nothing to do with their core competency. Everyone knows the problem with Meta is that Zuckerberg has majority voting rights and thus can't be fired regardless of the outcome of his decisions.
Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).
I'm not sure the process can even be stopped, if the company is successful and the new changes appear to be, and probably are, profitable.
They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.
And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.
98% of newsfeed is recommendation slop.
That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.
This is harder to do accidentally now, for better or worse.
But I suppose there are lots of other alternatives nowadays.
Not like any of these features are particularly good, but the combination beats anything else out there, which is surprising because usage of groups seems to be huge.
Discord comes close, but the complaint I see from FB group users is they don't like the real-time chat stream.
Facebook groups have destroyed online forums and with that killed long discussions on the internet.
But sure,somehow Facebook doesanage to suck you in and wate time on bullshit. For that it's awesome.
I never heard of him before reading this article just now.
I am learning the same lessons at my far smaller and less evil endeavour. There is so much good you can do, and some many low-hanging fruit, but eventually these small detours that each come with small obligations pile up and make every next move harder. There comes a point where your main task is delayed by a yak shaving expedition that started as a small favour to a single user.
I never got good at it, but I see the value in ruthless prioritisation.
Attention is the scarcest resource, and complexity eats away at attention.
There's lot of other threats to attention, the relevant one here is cognitive load. Your mind keeps track of things even if they're not in conscious awareness. Every item has a "handle" on you.
If you take inventory, you may find many are not worth the cost! Worth doing, every now and then.
They certainly hoped that would be the outcome. But they would have been idiots to not know most startups fail.
Every now and then it really looks like the hot new drug in Silicon Valley is MPPP and the tech bros got hit with a bad batch
But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.
I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.
Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.