What I Learned Working for Mark Zuckerberg

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.

>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.

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.

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

    normal to work 12+ hour days

    Fired 9 months later

“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.

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.

> 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