Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Wow, what complete horseshit. Adam and Dustin were two of the most talented people Facebook had - they were the key to the engineering culture that made Facebook work in the first place. Half of Facebook's infrastructure and featureset either wouldn't exist or scale if it weren't for Adam's efforts, and Dustin was the guy who always rallied the troops...
I really hope people don't take this article at face value. This reporter/blogger/whatever he calls himself is obviously trying to prime the pump for scoops and leaks, or to get someone to show up at his shitty conference, or something like that.
Of course, most big companies have a employing rating system, but Enron was different because 10-15 % people were asked to leave every year.
Genuinely curious here, as I don't know, or know much about, any of the people involved.
I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook's internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing individual incentives? Sounds like a really good (though scary) environment for ensuring that people do their best work.
It's well-known that big companies are much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, but this seems like a step in the right direction for closing that gap.
1 - It's imperative that the criteria for ranking employees is well-aligned with company goals. At Microsoft for example, on most teams you are ranked mostly on what features you ship. That sounds great but it can lead to extreme feature bloat in products. It's hard to take a stand for simplicity and elegant design in a meeting when the other guy's job depends on shipping the feature, and your job depends on getting the other guy to agree to include your feature.
2 - AMZN and MSFT both merge each manager's ranked list of direct reports with the lists created by other managers who report to the same Director or Senior Manager. This process can often be much more political than meritocratic, since other managers usually don't know much about an individual engineer's performance. If a team is flat-out better than other team and all of their engineers deserved to be ranked higher, that can be very difficult to defend in a meeting in front of a VP.
So you can't really blame a policy when it gets screwed up by bad management.
+ Executive Staff gives an assignment to a certain manager.
+ Manager divides that assignment up and gives it to his team members
+ Team members complete the assignment
+ Manager submits the completed assignment back to the Executive Staff
Given that scenario there's no way anyone other than the manager can know who accomplished what meaning no matter what system you implement it's always going to come down to the judgment of managers.
(which is why hiring good managers that don't try to game the system is so very important)
+ with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.
Have you seen how in-depth the translations on Facebook are? I used Facebook Pirate for three or four months because I was so delighted at how many variable phrases they introduced regarding every small item on the page. It was as thorough a translation as I've ever seen online. (As an unrelated aside, Facebook supports the Konami code, which makes it the most mainstream geek site on the planet, and their Konami code triggers something wholly unexpected and hilarious.)
I don't know Facebook's employee breakdown, but remember that Facebook offers multiple products, each of which is a fairly complex offering. I can see their Photo app being worthy of a large interesting team; ditto Events, Notes, Video, their link sharing, their search (and doing search for Facebook sounds much more interesting than doing search for Google, because you get to play with so many concrete variables), their public pages offering, their iPhone application, and who knows what else they're cooking up. They've also got a unique graphic style that I'm sure a handful of people work on, and there's the usual stuff of marketing and advertising that's fun no matter where it is.
It doesn't seem completely insane to me that working for Facebook might be really fun, even as a grunt. Unlike Google, which always sounds like working there is 90% backend, Facebook has a lot of stuff that's immediately noticed by its users. It's one of the few big companies that I'd actively like to work for after graduation.
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-pirate/
http://www.google.com/intl/la/
We have Klingon too -
With 20,000 engineers now, Google is as "cool" as HP or IBM.
[Edit for obscure reference: In film Annie Hall, someone criticises Marshall McLuhan in a line at the cinema, and he pops out from nowhere and says 'You know nothing of my work'. It's quite a famous scene.]
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/22/facebook-hires-tipjoy-c...
Basically I thought you might have gotten a better than average contract there as a devel since you had a background doing cool stuff and was clarifying that Tipjoy wasn't actually acquired.
Let's say at a large company the HR department worked out an "objective" means of ranking employees, but when they ran it it turned out that the bottom 10% were overwhelmingly women/an ethnic minority/whatever. They're going to tweak it until it delivers the result they want, in which case how confident can anyone by that it was "objective" to start with?
It's simply an alternative employment strategy to Google's attempts at early optimization (making it hard as hell to get in) which they even concede produces a lot of false negatives.
The reality is a company the size of IBM is always going to have a turnover of 10% or more so the "lower 10% rule" is just a way of getting rid of those people who can't do the job. The 70% might feel a little demoralized but if they're good employees they'll use that to make themselves better. The upper 20% are the best of the best and deserve to be treated as such.
So to me the 70-20-10 principle just seems like IBM being honest with employees about where they stand and giving them a chance to recognize it and do better if they so choose (some people are happy with average).
I have been in a startup, where the company had matured some, and the options given to new people were almost irrevelant, while the people that had higher positions, had been there longer, and would push people to work hard, b/c they had the incentive to do so.
People realized this, that they were working startup hours, but not getting options, or a big corp pay either, and getting the shaft. A lot of employees and managers just left. I went through 6 different managers in one year. It got ridiculous, and damaging to the morale.
Meritocracy, relative performance, individual incentives...these are all Microsoft innovations from decades ago. Kudos to Zuckerberg for taking note of a successful formula but credit still should go to Gates an co.
“When I invested, I thought Mark was one in a million. Now I think Mark is maybe one in a trillion.”
In other words, he thinks Mark may be the most extraordinary person ever to have lived.
I'll start them at one in a trillion. :)
Do engineers just need interesting technical problems to remain happy? If the engineers were motivated by big financial incentives, would they get them?
The point wasn't that you don't have to pay engineers well -- just that technical challenges are a good way to inspire the right people. (Business people might be inspired by the chance to make big deals, but not so much by the chance to make difficult deals).
It's also harder to measure the positive financial effects of smart engineering. If somebody saves a million dollars worth of hardware through some clever optimization, that's easy to calculate; if they reduce the time it takes to display a photo by 10%, that's important, but harder to calculate.
I landed a programming gig working on robotics projects, and working on interesting problems makes up for a world of sins :)
5000 push-ups, one week = 715/day assuming 7 day week. That means 48 breaks per day of 15 push-ups. So assuming 12 hour days, 4 breaks per hour.
So every 15 minutes he did 15 push-ups for a week?
I would have no problem doing 100 pushups every hour 8 times a day.
If we assume he's awake 16 hours of the day, at 48 breaks a day, that's only 3 breaks an hour. With 10-15 pushups taking a minute or less to do, that's only 5 minutes or so an hour.
For someone who possesses a great deal of drive in the rest of his life, this does not seem impossible.
But what impressed me in the article was that it showed he wasn't the simple tyrant who accidentally hit a gold mine his reputation makes him out to be, but is thoughtfully (though ruthlessly) trying to adapt and run his company.
I came away colored impressed. I wouldn't want to work there, but I was still impressed.
Total "compensation" should be based on salary relative to their areas of expertise cross-industry & the current strike price of any option grants relative to current valuations & vesting schedules.
Based on the article, it not at all clear that Facebook is doing any of this.
FWIW, those maxims apply to compensation strategies irregardless of company size, business model, or public/private status. I refer you to Warren Buffett's many communications on such matters over the years.
Additionally, if anyone had similar access to the wealth, privilege, and social contacts as Mr. Zukerberg did during their childhood & adolescence, they'd better damn well be changing the world.
Haven't other articles (and other research) shown that force ranking is not an effective strategy? And if my manager regaled me with daily "ranking updates," I'd go insane.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
[Edit: added link to Dan Pink's TED Talk]
Yes, there are benefits to autonomy, mastery, and purpose... but c'mon, isn't that blatantly obvious? Is anyone actually surprised that employees are more engaged when they're working on their own projects?
Regarding the "candle problem" that Pink brings up, I'm not sure if easy-candle-problem vs hard-candle-problem is analogous to mundane-career vs challenging-career. The candle problem takes minutes or even seconds to solve: It's not difficult to see why those under pressure may jump into action prematurely, before considering multiple possibilities. The correct solution is non-obvious, so those who act the fastest actually perform the worst. In other words, the people with the higher incentives are actually working harder, but it's backfiring because this is a special case. I doubt employees at big companies run into this issue when offered incentives, as their projects take months/years to complete, not seconds.
I haven't seen anything to suggest that incentives are ineffective. The "old" wisdom isn't wrong: people are willing to work harder for higher returns. If anything, incentives work too well. When poorly designed, they can actually go against the best interests of a company. If you tell ProgrammerJoe he'll get a raise for working quickly, then he's going to write craptastic code as fast as possible. If you tell him he'll get a raise for every new feature, then he's going to create a barrage of unnecessary and poorly-designed featured.
By all means, dangle carrots in front of your rabbits. Just make sure you're leading them in the right direction.
and I agree with vaksel completely: it sounds like a slave driven environment.
Some people are slaves by force, others by addiction, others by ambition. Some people thrive under that sort of pressure, others break down. I'm not sure where I'd stand.
Also, there does tend to be a huge survivor bias in talking about startups. I suppose it's much easier to talk about the few successes than the many many failures.
He's remarkable because he was willing to change his company and himself again and again till it worked.
http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php
Particularly, Thrift is what they use to use PHP on the front end of the site to communicate to servers running C++ and Erlang environments. At least, thats what I've heard.
when i left in march, facebook had about 100 engineers writing primarily PHP code. the engineering team has continued to grow rapidly over the past few months so the number is probably close to 200 now.
WTF, I didn't even talk to the guy or say anything. What a prick. Maybe he has matured some.
I actually recently interviewed a bestselling author in the middle of promoting his new movie, and he acted the same way. Perhaps I'm in the minority of people who really enjoy people like that. It takes courage to call somebody out on their shit, and when you do it makes life more pleasant for everybody else involved.
However, as was said above: How do you know he wasn't rolling his eyes at what somebody said, and just happened to be looking around at the same time?
For example, Don Box (of SOAP, XML, etc fame) is the nicest guy you can meet. And he is super nice even when he is shredding people's arguments and seeing through their BS.
I have no idea how Zuckerberg is in person though and wouldn't judge him from articles. But in general, there is no reason to be unpleasant just to be brutally honest.
Obviously, the company has come a long way since then, and I doubt someone as smart as him wouldn't have learned a lot during that time.
I hope that sometime soon I can see him again so I can change my impression.
Of course, as you mentioned, he arrived just in time for his talk, so he didn't even know that he was directly contradicting the advice of previous speakers.
He also scoffed at any form of testing when an audience member asked.
I was beyond unimpressed. Hopefully he redeems himself this year.