Every employee is rated on a scale from 1 to 5, with five being the highest. No one gets a five. If you get a 1 or a 2, you’re quickly shown the door. Related to that are the steady departures of early founders and executives. Two of them, Adam D’Angelo and Dustin Moskovitz, were Zuckerberg’s high-school and college friends, respectively. They weren’t forced out, but they burned out or realized they weren’t right for their jobs.
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.
I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that harshly competitive environments have their value systems straight, but it bears mentioning that at Enron traders and deal makers were on the evaluation boards for the risk assessment group.
So you're saying that "they weren't right for their jobs" is wrong. What about the "burned out" part? What do you know about why they left? Did they just move on the more interesting things, like so many startup people do?
Genuinely curious here, as I don't know, or know much about, any of the people involved.
After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it's refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it's inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs.
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.
This employee-ranking system is common at big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. There are two key difficulties with such a system, and it would be interesting to learn how Facebook grapples with them:
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.
Maybe. These policies can be a double-edged sword. It really depends upon how they are implemented. Most of the ranking systems - and it sounds like Facebook's - rely on the immediate manager to do the ranking and the manager has a lot of leverage. It can become arbitrary. It can often come down to how much your manager likes you (outside of your productivity) or managers protecting turf. Enron had a system like this for dishing out bonuses and it boiled down to nonstop political battles to get better ratings.
I agree with you for the most part but really any business innovation, no matter how smart it is, will be screwed up if you have bad managers. Managers implement business strategy just like construction workers implement home architectural designs. If you have a crappy contractor it doesn't matter how good the blue prints are it's going to screw up your house. Same with bad managers.
So you can't really blame a policy when it gets screwed up by bad management.
Well yes but I think it has more to do with the incentives that are placed before people. As an organization gets larger it gets harder to tell who really contributes what. It also gets harder to socially police people who are attempting to game the system. If some people are successful gaming the system others are incentivized to do so as well. It can be easy to label a sub-optimal outcome as bad management but those managers usually aren't dumb. They usually have perfectly rational reasons for the things they do - it's just not what the policy designers had in mind.
Let me put this another way. Can you think of a system of management that doesn't rely on the judgment of managers? No matter how you slice it corporate America works like this...
+ 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)
oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages.
+ 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.
There's a lot wrong with this statement, so I'll address the thing that sounds the least wrong.
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.
[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.]
someone whose company was acquired in order to get them into Facebook, will most likely have a different experience and quality of projects, than the average drone. + he's been there what...a month? he is still biased by the honeymoon phase.
To be clear, I didn't mean any foul-play. Quite the contrary. I remember reading that it was chill in the HN comments and don't think I'd bothered to read the original article.
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.
With the number of users facebook has, there is no room for shoveling crap in the business model. Everything has to be done efficiently and with focus. The cool projects (according to me anyway) are dealing with the scale and the constant evolution of the site.
It depends on whose morale. I would love to work at a place that made an effort to place only brilliant people around me and that didn't tolerate less. Netflix works in the same way.
I agree. But if the guy next to you, working the same stuff as you, is paper worth 5mill more just b.c he started there 6 months earlier than you, then the equation changes.
Neither did the employees who got kicked out, but it isn't entirely within their or your control. You may simply lack the ability to stay out of the lowest performance bracket.
Or HR's metric for determining who is in that bracket may be a) wrong, as they don't understand the business or b) skewed.
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?
I once heard Enron used a similar strategy, although I can't recall the source. They would annually cut their most "unproductive" employees. It turned out that those who remained knew how to work the system and to win at any cost. Hopefully Facebook will fare better.
Jack Welsh was doing this during his time at GE. The bottom 10% of the workforce would be let go every year.
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.
A lot of places do/did this. IBM sales reps were subject to the 70-20-10 principle. 70% of people are average, 20% are above average and get bonuses and 10% are below average and are fired. It was brutal for morale and hurt productivity in a lot of ways.
How is this brutal on morale? In fact, how is this not what goes on at every company of IBM's size?
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).
You're correct. I think they described this process in the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room" . I remember in interviewers with traders there that this was one pretty motivating factor for a lot of the corners that were cut at the company.
yeah, but new engineers don't have the same amount of stock options that the earlier ones.
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.
It's not like this is revolutionary. Change "Mark Zuckerberg" to "Bill Gates" and "Facebook" to "Microsoft" and what you have is just about every article that was written about Microsoft's business culture in the early to mid-90s (back before everyone hated them)
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.
"That’s reflected by Zuckerberg’s efforts to motivate each person according to what gets them excited: For engineers, that means giving them the best product to build, but for business executives, it means big financial incentives."
Do engineers just need interesting technical problems to remain happy? If the engineers were motivated by big financial incentives, would they get them?
That's a pretty good question. Speaking as an engineer, I would like to have FU money. But the reason I want FU money is so that I can always work on interesting technical problems instead of all the little crap that is also necessary in day-to-day work.
Which is why most engineers are not CEO material. A CEO is someone who wants to provide vision, direction and leadership to a company long after the FU money is in the bank.
Given that Zuck is their first engineer and largest shareholder, I'd say yes.
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'm starting to feel like I won't make what I want, until I'm paying myself. If the owner of the company paid you 100% of the value (which is hard to measure) then he wouldn't have a interest in hiring you... (nothing left for him)
"""Zuckerberg insisted the goal was easily attainable. He took regular breaks throughout the day to do 10-15 pushups, even if he was in the middle of a meeting with visitors. He completed the 5,000."""
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?
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.
This was a great article.
Zuckerberg has the reputation for being a first class prima donna douche-nozzle, with his hired execs stepping in to do damage control and actually run the company.
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.
Except that if his people don't perform they loose their jobs and livelihoods. If he doesn't perform, he'll just stay on. And if he does get booted out somehow, he can just retire to a permanent life in a jacuzzi (my personal dream).
Except that different yardsticks of measurement are required for "owners", "investors", and "employees" since they, by definition, have different areas of responsibility, and economic alignments based on nearly dichotomous ROI models.
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.
> Managers have to force-rank their employees. The more
> Machiavellian managers make a point of telling their
> employees where they stand.
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.
Interesting talk. Usually when people are challenging conventional wisdom, it's not difficult for me to see where they're coming from. In this case, however, I find myself struggling to agree.
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.
Slave labor can accomplish some amazing things. Almost every ancient wonder was created by slaves, and they stand out as colossal (pun intended) compared to other structures of the time.
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.
I am definitely not trying to undermine what he has done. However, the article gist IMO is that when things were not going well, everyone was blaming him and finally when things are falling in place, everyone is giving credit to him. If facebook wont have grown the way it has in the last six months, the same people, who are identifying what he did as remarkable leadership qualities probably would be saying the exact opposite. So, in short, remarkable is proportional to how successful you have been.
I love how he figured out business people require financial incentives to work hard, while engineers just want interesting projects? Man sick of this "engineers don't want money" meme, we always get ripped off.
Are there any Facebook employees/ex-employees here on HN? I've often wondered how many PHP developers they have on staff and how they manage deploying/integrating stuff in PHP for production.
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.
I saw Mark at the FB kitchen, when I was interviewing there back in 2007. I was being given a tour of the place, and was going to get some water.
He was talking to some people, and I guess he noticed I recognized him, and just rolled his eyes.
WTF, I didn't even talk to the guy or say anything. What a prick.
Maybe he has matured some.
I agree. But that was really dismissive.
The only other billionaire I have met, was a lot nicer in public, even to people that he didn't know. But he also is alot older though.
Mark has a reputation for superb arrogance. Have you read the leaked emails he sent to the ConnectU people? They basically read, "It doesn't matter what you wanted, I have a better idea than you, and I won't waste my time trying to make you feel good about yourself."
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?
I used to think exactly like you but I've changed my mind now. I think there's a world of difference between being a jerk and being rude and telling people the truth. Or rather, one doesn't have to be a jerk to call people out on their BS.
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.
I agree with you. (I've moved past loving Ayn Rand and her cult of assholery, rest assured.) At the same time, I don't necessarily mind rude people as long as it's not excessive or dull. I respect people capable of being both forceful and polite something incredible, though, and have been making an effort to learn how to be the same.
I attended a presentation he made some time ago, and came away really impressed. He has a remarkably clear vision, understands what not to do as much as what to do, and seems to know his own strengths and weaknesses. I agree - he is a remarkable CEO.
I attended a presentation by him I think two years ago at Startup Camp. I was rather unimpressed. He arrived and confessed he really hadn't given it much though, he hadn't prepared at all, and so launched into 45 minutes of rambling. Basically all his advice could be summed with, "Just do what I did."
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.
I would even sum up his advice as, "Do exactly the opposite of what these other smart people like Mitch Kapor have been telling you to do today."
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.
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.