8 ms·

What I Learned Working for Mark Zuckerberg

77 points by duck 2y ago

billy99k 2y ago
I have a difficult time making something my life, when I know it can and will be taken away at any time.
- freitzkriesler2 2y ago
  You make this mistake when you're young until you're laid off thebfiest time. Then you're bitter and jaded and DGAF. 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.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    I think lifers tend to be pretty high on the “phoning it in” spectrum.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      An exception I've seen is in the US Navy's R&D activities (NRL and NUWC, specifically). 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.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        I think you need to have a special kind of outlook on life to go work in a navy R&D department.
        CoastalCoder 2y ago
        How so?
      - pfannkuchen 2y ago
        I dunno, I've seen this in multiple FAANGs. Ladder climbing lifers don't phone it in. Senior SWE lifers? Phoning it in pretty hard. Other industries are probably different.
        hnbad 2y ago
        Some call it "phoning it in", some call it "working sustainably and avoiding burnout". It's fine to "phone it in" for the daily grind if it helps you maintain your reserves for actual emergencies. As the author point out, early Facebook instead instilled a "sense of urgency" which means everything is treated as an emergency all the time, which just means nothing is.
- dools 2y ago
  I'm reminded of a management adage: 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?"
  - kamaal 2y ago
    >>The other replied "what happens if you don't train them and they stay?" Well the company always has options to fire such people.
- charliebwrites 2y ago
  Wait until you get laid off or your company “optimizes for performance culture” 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
  - Loughla 2y ago
    My employer just went through a reorganization that was intended to improve the experience for students (a college). 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  How can you invest deeply in something when there's a constant awareness that it might not last?
daok 2y ago
>At AppSumo, we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on full-time to ensure they’re the right fit. 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.
- replwoacause 2y ago
  I wouldn’t never work for a company that does this.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    I don't see how it's much different from working at a company for any period of time even as a fully onboarded employee, aside from specific legal obligations that possibly protect your employment. In any place where firing at will is legal, they can toss you at any time for almost any pretext and claim you weren't a correct fit. It applies in general even if you're fully hired, barring some specific contract (that they might anyhow wiggle their way out of).
    - TheDong 2y ago
      Note the phrasing is "we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on". 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.
haolez 2y ago
Why was the author fired? Just curious :)
- hentrep 2y ago
  Covered in 2014: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro...
  - ackbar03 2y ago
    I thought this was interesting > 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.
    - ffhhj 2y ago
      Yup, survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
brigadier132 2y ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro... 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
- rvnx 2y ago
  and this is $185M USD from 2014, now worth 1+ billion USD
- ahahahahah 2y ago
  Wow, I read the op post here I felt the guy seemed kinda scummy. It's worse than I thought.
vlovich123 2y ago
> I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!) > 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.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >Perfection seems a bit incongruous with moving fast and breaking things. 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.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I mean, having mistakes pointed out to you is not incompatible with being allowed to make them in the first place. 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.
  - stackghost 2y ago
    This is the guy that deemed the Nintendo Wii avatar acceptable for his big Metaverse reveal. He also, I suppose, signed off on Meta's also-ran TikTok competitor. 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.
    - paradox242 2y ago
      Aping Steve Jobs without anywhere near the same sense of style. A perfectionist of crafting the mediocre experience. Also the line about caring that they were "humans" and not "users" is particularly rich. I am not doubting he probably said something like this, but I doubt his sincerity knowing everything we do about the man now.
Gualdrapo 2y ago
> Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell. “They’re human beings”, he’d scream. But there's the Cambridge Analytica thing...
- Aeolun 2y ago
  All these people are idiots! Not users, people!
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  This fits way too well with the whole "Mark being an alien" meme.
- igornadj 2y ago
  Myanmar comes to mind
southernplaces7 2y ago
>Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell. “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.
- ffhhj 2y ago
  Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard 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-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/ https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
  - paradox242 2y ago
    He is the same now as he was then. I don't understand all the fawning over the guy (I mean, I do, they want to be him and live his life, which I suppose means they are as morally corrupt as he is).
  - hnbad 2y ago
    But the article says this: > 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
spicyusername 2y ago
normal to work 12+ hour days Fired 9 months later And that's why you'll never catch me working over time...
- ignoramous 2y ago
  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. https://archive.is/PuZwW https://archive.is/PuZwW / https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro...
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    > [Kagan] tried to use his role at Facebook to make a name for himself > frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site about Facebook's business He's still doing it lol
  - hnbad 2y ago
    > Zuckerberg asked [Kagan] to choose between himself and Facebook. I guess that is what Kagan meant by this: > When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
- maxnevermind 2y ago
  I guess he was not a regular employee. If you see the opportunity and growth potential, why not try to put in work if your life circumstances allow it.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Oh man I remember this Noah guy. Doesn't he run a website with a bunch of b grade saas apps sold Groupon style? He has been selling this how to start a business course thing since like 2010 or something. I think what he fails to mention is knowing Tim Ferris and being in silicon valley is what got him where he is at today. All these business gurus don't really share anything meaningful. At least he is better than scammers like Alex Hormozi though.
metadat 2y ago
Lots of candid, good insights in the linked "I got fired from Facebook" piece too: https://noahkagan.com/why-i-got-fired-from-facebook-a-100-million-dollar-lesson 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.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  > constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable 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.
- borroka 2y ago
  "Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired"--- 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.
Lerc 2y ago
>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?” >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.
niels_bom 2y ago
How do y’all filter out survivorship bias in articles like this? I can imagine 50 other people with the exact same experiences but then having worked for companies that ended up fizzling.
elphinstone 2y ago
[dead]
throwawaycar 2y ago
I hate the non tech / culture side of tech and life. Why is it so hard to let people contribute to the best of their abilities give them a way to survive The older I get the more Rockets, space, crazy weapons all seem trivial compared to the underlying human problem
eviks 2y ago
> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. 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
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I also don't know how true these stories are. Is there any proof?
  - ErigmolCt 2y ago
    The article is full of photos pointing to Mark. These could be considered as evidence for the author. But it's actually questionable.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Ya I am sure he was in the same room as Mark but without actual proof that the emails ever existed, he can literally make up any story.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I worked at a place where you'd get 3AM calls from higher-ups. It's often a flex or some grindset thing. The annoying hustle" attitude: "See we all need to be DoingBusiness™ while the competition is sleeping!"
- Jensson 2y ago
  > Yes, this is not about perfection, but one of those effort sinks that can take all your sleep time How? Who wakes up from an email? Phone call sure, but an email?
  - eviks 2y ago
alberth 2y ago
Sounds similar to Bill Gates.
jetti 2y ago
Good lord this is terrible and the things that were learned and seemed to be normalized by Noah are not applicable to 99% of all individuals starting a company. 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.
ramon156 2y ago
Ah yeah, hiring only harvard people for tech support is a "good" thing. Sure.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  Might be seen as an overqualification?
hnbad 2y ago
This article has more red flags than a Chinese embassy. > 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 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-million-dollar-lesson/ 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.
GLORIA90 2y ago
[dead]

77 points by duck 2y ago

billy99k 2y ago

I have a difficult time making something my life, when I know it can and will be taken away at any time.

freitzkriesler2 2y ago
You make this mistake when you're young until you're laid off thebfiest time. Then you're bitter and jaded and DGAF. 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.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  I think lifers tend to be pretty high on the “phoning it in” spectrum.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    An exception I've seen is in the US Navy's R&D activities (NRL and NUWC, specifically). 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.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      I think you need to have a special kind of outlook on life to go work in a navy R&D department.
      - CoastalCoder 2y ago
        How so?
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      I dunno, I've seen this in multiple FAANGs. Ladder climbing lifers don't phone it in. Senior SWE lifers? Phoning it in pretty hard. Other industries are probably different.
      - hnbad 2y ago
        Some call it "phoning it in", some call it "working sustainably and avoiding burnout". It's fine to "phone it in" for the daily grind if it helps you maintain your reserves for actual emergencies. As the author point out, early Facebook instead instilled a "sense of urgency" which means everything is treated as an emergency all the time, which just means nothing is.
dools 2y ago
I'm reminded of a management adage: 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?"
- kamaal 2y ago
  >>The other replied "what happens if you don't train them and they stay?" Well the company always has options to fire such people.
charliebwrites 2y ago
Wait until you get laid off or your company “optimizes for performance culture” 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
- Loughla 2y ago
  My employer just went through a reorganization that was intended to improve the experience for students (a college). 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ErigmolCt 2y ago
How can you invest deeply in something when there's a constant awareness that it might not last?

daok 2y ago

>At AppSumo, we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on full-time to ensure they’re the right fit. 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.

replwoacause 2y ago
I wouldn’t never work for a company that does this.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  I don't see how it's much different from working at a company for any period of time even as a fully onboarded employee, aside from specific legal obligations that possibly protect your employment. In any place where firing at will is legal, they can toss you at any time for almost any pretext and claim you weren't a correct fit. It applies in general even if you're fully hired, barring some specific contract (that they might anyhow wiggle their way out of).
  - TheDong 2y ago
    Note the phrasing is "we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on". 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.

haolez 2y ago

Why was the author fired? Just curious :)

hentrep 2y ago
Covered in 2014: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro...
- ackbar03 2y ago
  I thought this was interesting > 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.
  - ffhhj 2y ago
    Yup, survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

brigadier132 2y ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro... 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

rvnx 2y ago
and this is $185M USD from 2014, now worth 1+ billion USD
ahahahahah 2y ago
Wow, I read the op post here I felt the guy seemed kinda scummy. It's worse than I thought.

vlovich123 2y ago

> I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!) > 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.

southernplaces7 2y ago
>Perfection seems a bit incongruous with moving fast and breaking things. 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.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I mean, having mistakes pointed out to you is not incompatible with being allowed to make them in the first place. 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.
- stackghost 2y ago
  This is the guy that deemed the Nintendo Wii avatar acceptable for his big Metaverse reveal. He also, I suppose, signed off on Meta's also-ran TikTok competitor. 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.
  - paradox242 2y ago
    Aping Steve Jobs without anywhere near the same sense of style. A perfectionist of crafting the mediocre experience. Also the line about caring that they were "humans" and not "users" is particularly rich. I am not doubting he probably said something like this, but I doubt his sincerity knowing everything we do about the man now.

Gualdrapo 2y ago

> Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell. “They’re human beings”, he’d scream. But there's the Cambridge Analytica thing...

Aeolun 2y ago
All these people are idiots! Not users, people!
candiddevmike 2y ago
This fits way too well with the whole "Mark being an alien" meme.
igornadj 2y ago
Myanmar comes to mind

southernplaces7 2y ago

>Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell. “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.

ffhhj 2y ago
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard 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-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/ https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
- paradox242 2y ago
  He is the same now as he was then. I don't understand all the fawning over the guy (I mean, I do, they want to be him and live his life, which I suppose means they are as morally corrupt as he is).
- hnbad 2y ago
  But the article says this: > 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.
deleted 2y ago
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spicyusername 2y ago

normal to work 12+ hour days Fired 9 months later And that's why you'll never catch me working over time...

ignoramous 2y ago
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. https://archive.is/PuZwW https://archive.is/PuZwW / https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-from-facebook-and-lost-185-million-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-noah-kagan-got-fired-fro...
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  > [Kagan] tried to use his role at Facebook to make a name for himself > frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site about Facebook's business He's still doing it lol
- hnbad 2y ago
  > Zuckerberg asked [Kagan] to choose between himself and Facebook. I guess that is what Kagan meant by this: > When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
maxnevermind 2y ago
I guess he was not a regular employee. If you see the opportunity and growth potential, why not try to put in work if your life circumstances allow it.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Oh man I remember this Noah guy. Doesn't he run a website with a bunch of b grade saas apps sold Groupon style? He has been selling this how to start a business course thing since like 2010 or something. I think what he fails to mention is knowing Tim Ferris and being in silicon valley is what got him where he is at today. All these business gurus don't really share anything meaningful. At least he is better than scammers like Alex Hormozi though.

metadat 2y ago

Lots of candid, good insights in the linked "I got fired from Facebook" piece too: https://noahkagan.com/why-i-got-fired-from-facebook-a-100-million-dollar-lesson 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.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
> constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable 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.
borroka 2y ago
"Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired"--- 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.

Lerc 2y ago

>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?” >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.

niels_bom 2y ago

How do y’all filter out survivorship bias in articles like this? I can imagine 50 other people with the exact same experiences but then having worked for companies that ended up fizzling.

elphinstone 2y ago

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throwawaycar 2y ago

I hate the non tech / culture side of tech and life. Why is it so hard to let people contribute to the best of their abilities give them a way to survive The older I get the more Rockets, space, crazy weapons all seem trivial compared to the underlying human problem

eviks 2y ago

> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. 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

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I also don't know how true these stories are. Is there any proof?
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  The article is full of photos pointing to Mark. These could be considered as evidence for the author. But it's actually questionable.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Ya I am sure he was in the same room as Mark but without actual proof that the emails ever existed, he can literally make up any story.
ryandrake 2y ago
I worked at a place where you'd get 3AM calls from higher-ups. It's often a flex or some grindset thing. The annoying hustle" attitude: "See we all need to be DoingBusiness™ while the competition is sleeping!"
Jensson 2y ago
> Yes, this is not about perfection, but one of those effort sinks that can take all your sleep time How? Who wakes up from an email? Phone call sure, but an email?
- eviks 2y ago

alberth 2y ago

Sounds similar to Bill Gates.

jetti 2y ago

Good lord this is terrible and the things that were learned and seemed to be normalized by Noah are not applicable to 99% of all individuals starting a company. 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.

ramon156 2y ago

Ah yeah, hiring only harvard people for tech support is a "good" thing. Sure.

ErigmolCt 2y ago
Might be seen as an overqualification?

hnbad 2y ago

This article has more red flags than a Chinese embassy. > 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 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-million-dollar-lesson/ 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.

GLORIA90 2y ago

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