Boz, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you had become the CTO at Facebook after joining as the 10,010th engineer, not the 10th. Pretty much everyone on this forum would have become the CTO at Facebook if they had been employee #10.
Focus
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Re: Focus
#32I don't think it was thought of that Facebook would be worth $1.5T some day, but I'm positive what was on the 10th employees mind while getting paged at the middle of night was "I'm in the process of getting filthy rich". That certainly would help me focus.
Facebook was a networking site for a handful of college campuses at the time. It had some great traction, sure, but I doubt "filthy rich" was a serious expectation among employees.
Re: Focus
#33What good has Meta even done? They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.
Anecdote, I know plenty of people who use FB exclusively for private and secret groups. The ability to require approval before approving (tied to looking up the profiles of people applying) while still allowing members to ask questions anonymously within the group (like maybe for health advice), moderation, some basic administrative roles, event invites / rsvp, discoverability by location (new mom club around me).
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.
Re: Focus
#34This needs 2023
Re: Focus
#35The Ugly.
Re: Focus
#36What good has Meta even done? They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.
Anecdote, I know plenty of people who use FB exclusively for private and secret groups. The ability to require approval before approving (tied to looking up the profiles of people applying) while still allowing members to ask questions anonymously within the group (like maybe for health advice), moderation, some basic administrative roles, event invites / rsvp, discoverability by location (new mom club around me). No…
I use Facebook mostly for groups.
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.
Re: Focus
#37> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively. I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
Addiction.
Or they might say “engagement,” but I think they’d agree on the substance.
Re: Focus
#38You know what's going to happen is some budding CEO will come along and read this and conclude, "I know the solution: my company won't give to charity." It will become enshrined as this principle in their company lore, that nothing can detract from The Work. Managers will parrot it, HR may even add it to onboarding. But it will be an empty gesture, because as the company grows it will become more and more multifacted, or 'distracted' if you will.
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.
Re: Focus
#39It is not a coincidence that the author's nickname, Boz, is so close to Bozo the Clown, only a clown could write this.
Re: Focus
#40The thing I found most offensive about this take is that it basically blames the cogs for the lack of focus:
> 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.