

Dissent Is Dead At Facebook, Employees Complain - gamache
http://www.businessinsider.com/dissent-is-dead-at-faceboook-employees-complain-2009-4

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scottdw2
I can't comment specifically about Facebook, because I don't know much about
its internals.

But, there is one thing I can comment on. The role of any Software Company CEO
is to create a system that translates brain waves into dollars.

That's what software companies do. Creating software isn't like creating a
car. It's about generating "abstract ideas" that can be understood by a
computer and are useful to humans.

You take smart people, give them the environment they need to do great work,
and say "ok, now think me up some software".

Discouraging dissent, in general, is equivalent to turning off brain waves.

The thing about smart people is that they have ideas. A lot of them. By
definition, thinking is what smart people do best. In a software company those
are the kind of people you want, because that's what you are selling: re-
packaged thoughts.

When you say "this is the way we are going to do things, because I'm the boss
and I know best, so please don't come to me with reasons why this might not be
good, instead just shut up and do what I so, or else go away" you are
explicitly encouraging people to not think.

Encouraging people in your software company not to think is stupid. It's
encouraging them not to produce the one thing you need them to produce in
order to make money.

I'm not saying you want a democracy. The CEO, at the end of the day, is
responsible for the company's performance. He's the one who makes the
decisions. But, being responsible for the company's performance means the
"burden of greatness" is on you. If you hear a voice of dissent, it's not the
dissenter's responsibility to prove her case. It's your responsibility to
listen to what she has to say, and figure out if there's any hidden merit to
it.

The goal is to build a profitable business, not to be a powerful executive.
Leave your ego at the door. If the person who is suggesting "maybe there is a
better way" had a perfect, well crafted message, that seemed obvious and
completely brilliant, why on earth would she bring it to you. She could just
take her perfectly formed product to the market and wipe the floor with you.

You are the boss precisely for one reason: because you can take other people's
brain waves and convert them into money. Because of this, your goal should be
to get the people who work with you to generate as much brain wave activity as
possible. That means encouraging dissent.

If you aren't doing that, then you are not leading.

So, if this is happening at Facebook, then it's a shame.

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dtap
To me, this seems like the start of the decline of facebook. Gideon Yu's work
has been stellar with Youtube and getting that $15B valuation. The reason may
be the board and not Mark. That being said he doesn't have the it factor I see
in a lot of successful CEOs.

~~~
mingdingo
I would strongly disagree with this. I used to feel this way about Mark
Zuckerberg, but not anymore. Just consider these observations about facebook:

1) When it started, there were already many social networks

2) Because it positioned itself as a social network for college students, it
got the early growth and adoption any "social" website needs to survive

3) They've grown REALLY fast since then, and have started to really lock in
the users

4) It's not unthinkable for them to have a billion users. Once they have all
the users they want, they can pick and choose their business model.

5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds
more than 20% of the company

6) Facebook is hiring top talent, on par with Google and probably better than
Microsoft.

These things don't just happen out of the blue. For someone who has
consolidated power in a company that could rival Google, I don't think
Zuckerberg gets enough credit. If I were pg, I would have put him in my top 5.

~~~
brandonkm
> For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google

I think you may be getting ahead of yourself on that one.

~~~
kennyroo
Facebook/Google comparisons always strike me as way off base. It's like
comparing a Central Park (busy, no money) with Disneyland (busy, big money).

~~~
mingdingo
Central park isn't a business. If it were a for-profit venture, it would be
fairly easy to monetize, purely because it's so popular.

~~~
Frazzydee
> it would be fairly easy to monetize, purely because it's so popular.

Why? Popularity as a free service doesn't necessarily imply that said
popularity will be retained upon introduction of a monetary fee.

~~~
mingdingo
The monetization need not be direct (i.e. charging people to use the site). It
could be better ad placement, a search engine that knows more about you than
google does, monetary transactions (auctions, payments), as well as other
stuff...

Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people
are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.

~~~
gaius
What I'm surprised they haven't done already is extend their event planning
mechanism to partner with ticket agents, train companies/airlines, cinema
chains, restaurant booking systems, pizza delivery, etc etc.

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jskopek
Acting as devil's advocate here, there isn't much evidence behind these
'explanations'. It's quite possible that Zuckerberg is loosing his edge, but
this article paints him in a way that's damn close to slander.

~~~
Alex3917
Sounds plausible given Zuck's talk at startup school.

~~~
unalone
Is there a video/notes of that talk? What did he talk about?

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banned_man
His 2007 talk was awful. He basically said: hire young people only.

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bigboote
It was a little more nuanced than that. The point was that young people were
willing to take risks because they had little to lose and no responsibilities.
He mentioned that (at the time) he slept on a mattress on the floor, so he
wouldn't be trapped by possessions and paralyzed by fear of losing everything.
People with mortgages and retirement plans are (rationally) conservative, and
they won't take big gambles with the company. You have to admire his
commitment.

~~~
palish
I was there for Zuck's talk in 2006. It was pretty terrible. He came off
sounding like an arrogant jerk.

What you are saying is true. But it is unrelated to what is being said. What
we're saying is, Zuck needs to drink less of his own kool-aid and start caring
about people other than himself. I admire his commitment, but it's a shame
that he doesn't recognize, or isn't thankful for, the large amount of luck
that played a role in Facebook's success. If he had attacked the problem of
"MySpace, but better" at a different school, or in a different way, or any
number of things, then Facebook wouldn't be what it is today.

If he's acting like Jobs, he's premature. At least Jobs' company was very
profitable in the early days. Also, I just left a company run by a
Jobs/Zuckerberg type; good sense of design, but very controlling, and
needlessly so. I don't envy Facebook employees. There is more to life than
working for the arrogant.

~~~
unalone
_At least Jobs' company was very profitable in the early days._

Brush up on your Apple history. Jobs was fired because he was running his
company into a financial mire thanks to his over-the-top idealism.

 _I don't envy Facebook employees. There is more to life than working for the
arrogant._

They chose where to work. Just like Apple employees chose. If you're not the
sort of person who works well under a very brilliant, very arrogant man,
you're allowed to find other places to work.

~~~
TweedHeads
Zuckerberg is neither very briliant nor very arrogant, just plain arrogant and
lucky.

~~~
banned_man
\+ _annoying_

------
bbuffone
Contention brings integrity to the design process.

It's not the positive or critical things that are said in meetings that will
harm a company. It's the things that aren't said that will eat away the core
of a company.

When things that should be said aren't; there are typically a few reasons. 1.)
the person isn't capable of leading 2.) the person is passive aggressive and
will use there dissenting opinion in a private and undermine way. 3.) they
already said the same thing many times and have had no luck in getting their
opinion across.

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zandorg
I saw a Zuckerberg video from Dec 2007, and contrasted that with his recent
Oprah interview.

He's gone from cool tech head to some kind of semi-comedian (to whom owning a
credit card is big news) in just over a year.

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wolfish
I'm not an avid reader of businessinsider.com. Anyone have any insight into
whether that title is meant to be a joke?

~~~
tigerthink
No. The story is about how Mark Zuckerberg suppresses dissent.

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banned_man
This, uhh, has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but does anyone know if
there's a way (synthetically, perhaps) to short an IPO?

I repeat this has, umm, nothing to do with any particular company. Yeah. Just
so you don't try to copy my trading strategy. I repeat: nothing to do with,
um, any particular stock. I'm just asking a technical question about shorting
IPOs, now or in the future. Yeah...

~~~
patio11
_short an IPO_

Buy put options on the underlying stock. This gives you the right, but not the
obligation, to force a sale of stock at the strike price.

Say you have a hot Internet IPO which debuts at $10. People assume it will
follow the Google trajectory and be worth hundreds within a few years. You can
buy puts at $10 for a year from now -- this would entitle you to sell any
shares you held at $10, regardless of what the price is. If a hypothetical
counterparty believes that the price is going to increase, writing this option
(promising to buy X shares from you at the price of $10 from you a year from
now if you ask for it, in return for cash money today) is like printing free
money: you'll probably let the option expire without acting on it, and
otherwise they get the stock they want anyhow.

Now examine what happens if the stock tanks to, say, $2 over the year: your
options entitled you to sell X shares at $10 apiece, regardless of the market
price of the stock. You can thus buy the stock on the open market ($2 per
share) and exercise the option (selling at $10 per share), netting $8 a share
minus commissions minus the premium you paid for the option in the first
place. (In actual practice, since you can SELL the put option and it has high
"intrinsic value" near expiration in that scenario, you don't actually have to
ever become an owner of the underlying stock.)

But what if the price balloons to $20? Clearly, you don't want to buy at $20
and then sell the same day at $10. That's the beauty of puts, though: you
don't have to. You just walk away from your options, which expire worthless.
You are never at risk, in this strategy, of losing more money than you spent
on acquiring the puts in the first place. This contrasts favorably to the
standard short sale, which has unlimited downside risk.

~~~
banned_man
Can you buy puts on a pre-IPO stock? I didn't think you could.

~~~
lisper
Nope. Options don't become available for several weeks after an IPO. There
needs to be some historical price data to feed the black-scholes formula in
order to price the options.

~~~
banned_man
A real trader would start trading anyway. Volatility? Just a number computed
from a mound of stale data. Kurtosis? Sounds like a disease. Too much thinking
for a game as simple as "buy" and "sell"!

