
Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO - tortilla
http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/
======
numair
_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.

~~~
dataman85
Funnily enough, Enron had the same system where if you scored towards the
bottom you were quickly shown the door.
[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,129988,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,129988,00.html)

Of course, most big companies have a employing rating system, but Enron was
different because 10-15 % people were asked to leave every year.

~~~
billjings
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.

~~~
mediaman
Absolutely correct. Much of their demise can be traced back to their refusal
to provide their risk control group any teeth.

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csallen
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.

~~~
brewski
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.

~~~
dtap
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.

~~~
TomOfTTB
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).

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dasil003
Gotta love the quote from the VC:

 _“When I invested, I thought Mark was one in a million. Now I think Mark is
maybe one in a trillion.”_

In other words, he thinks Mark may be the most extraordinary person ever to
have lived.

~~~
etherael
Anyone want to place odds on the chances of the speaker actually intending the
sentence to mean precisely that?

I'll start them at one in a trillion. :)

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heyadayo
"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?

~~~
icey
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.

~~~
gcheong
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.

~~~
icey
Arguably as a CEO, you get a new set of interesting problems the moment you
solve your last set of interesting problems.

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n-named
"""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?

~~~
oakmac
This goal is definitely attainable; it depends on your fitness level.

I would have no problem doing 100 pushups every hour 8 times a day.

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elblanco
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.

~~~
kburn
I don't know about all that. But it appears he's trying to use the same logic
on his own ideas that he uses on his people.

~~~
elblanco
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).

------
preview
> 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.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

[Edit: added link to Dan Pink's TED Talk]

~~~
csallen
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.

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ujjwalg
In short: If you are successful, you are remarkable!!!

and I agree with vaksel completely: it sounds like a slave driven environment.

~~~
unalone
Did you read the article? It mentions how many different things he's tried and
how much he's been criticized for his many failings.

He's remarkable because he was willing to change his company and himself again
and again till it worked.

~~~
ujjwalg
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.

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rocken7
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.

~~~
hackthisthing
Double my salary and I will become an administrative management VB coder.

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mlLK
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.

~~~
leftnode
I do not work for Facebook, nor have I ever, but they do have some pretty neat
things PHP-wise on their open source section of the site.

<http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php>

Particularly, Thrift is what they use to use PHP on the front end of the site
to communicate to servers running C++ and Erlang environments. At least, thats
what I've heard.

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ardit33
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.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
Maybe you misunderstood something; I wouldn't judge someone to be a prick
based upon a such a brief nonverbal exchange.

~~~
ardit33
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.

~~~
unalone
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?

~~~
sriramk
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

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startingup
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.

~~~
Periodic
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.

~~~
mrshoe
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.

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quizzical
I'm sorry this article is silly hype. I think someone from Venture Beat would
like a job at Facebook.

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sscheper
Venturebeat really is a shitty site. They regurgitate Mashable and TC's news

