Parent already provided you an example. I feel like your question is begging for a political argument, and there's multiple places on the internet (that's not Hacker News) where you can have those.
People here are not obliged to do research for you and rephrase it in language you can understand. There is a lot of clearly written source material out there if you look for it.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know how the current administration has been running things. You are free to have a positive of negative opinions of their actions, but you are clearly aware of what other people might characterize as failings.
You might think you're being the calm and reasonable one here, but you're not asking this question in good faith. It's clear you just want to pick a political fight on hacker news. While we are not above politics here, there is a time and a place for that. And it's not here or now.
It would be easier to list a success. Seriously. The failures jump off the page. Maybe it's not PC enough for you because it looks partisan, but frankly, they've proven rank incompetence over and over again.
The best compliment I could give Tillerson is he probably WANTS the State Department to collapse which is why he's utterly under-managing and under-staffing it. By any other metric, of course, he's an abject failure.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm, so why do you think Sheryl Sandberg would be a good candidate? I personally feel like I cannot trust any Facebook leadership as Commander in Chief.
If the democrats run Zuckerberg, Sandberg, or Eric Schmidt, they'll once again be losing my vote. I don't even want to imagine what the future would look like under an administration run by someone from the surveillance capitalism world.
Mark and others designed the total free for all that is Facebook data policy, I wouldn’t vote for him or (especially) Schmidt, who loves surveillance. Yes I’d want to hear what she has to say about that.
I know a few earlyish employees at Facebook, and they are easily the happiest people I've met at any company. In some respects this can be credited to joining the right company at the right time: they got in early at a company that makes insane amounts of money and has a huge influence on the world. But this seems to be the icing on the cake to them. Everyone I know at Facebook who got in before 2010 credits Mark Zuckerberg ("Zuck", ugh). They call him a friend and say he never wavers in his passion or mission. They seriously look up to the guy and won't work anywhere else, even though they have built up generational wealth.
Honestly I don't care much for Facebook's methods and I think they are a net negative on the world, but I still really look up to Mark Zuckerberg as a leader.
If so, I'm not sure how you could possibly consider him someone worth looking up to as a leader.
If you take everything he said and every question he dodged during his testimony at face value, it would indicate that he knows next to nothing about his own company.
If you don't take it at face value, option two is that he's a liar.
Those aren't the kind of qualities I consider worth looking up to.
It's really easy to blame everything wrong with Facebook on Zuck. I can't fault him for doing his best to protect the company he built. I don't endorse or commend the shady business practices that happen over there, but I also can't fault him 100%. If you were put on the stand for a company you built, would you throw it under the bus for your principles? I don't know if I can say I would - especially in a high pressure situation like that. Let alone the amount of whispering in his ear from everyone his "team".
I think part of the issue is that his company, the one he's supposed to be leading and is fully responsible for, got to a point where he would be pressured to throw it under the bus for his principles. If he was a good leader, it shouldn't have gotten that far (unless, of course, what happened with Facebook was actually in line with his principles).
He answered the questions the only way you can when lying to congress is illegal - only answer things you know 100% for sure are true, don't volunteer any more information than asked. Not to mention, the people asking the questions weren't seeking the truth for the most part, they were seeking soundbites and "gotchas" for political gain.
If you have to dodge questions and lie to avoid making your company look bad, it's probably a sign that you're doing something you shouldn't be doing.
This looks even worse coming from someone who runs a company that seeks to destroy the concept of privacy for the entire population (or, at least, the portion of the population that can't afford to buy the houses around their own and build 6 foot walls around 750 acre Hawaiian retreats for themselves like Zuckerberg has). The hypocrisy is incredible.
It's quite easy to make anyone look bad by questioning.
"Sir, do you know how fast you were driving. Were you aware that the speed limit is 55 mph? Do you know that hundreds of children die every year from drivers like yourself who value their own time over the lives of others?"
Just interested, what's impressive about Zuck as a leader?
Money will make people do crazy things. I think he's shown time and time again in his handling of situations that he's been pretty ineffective and his primary strategy is to say "we're sorry we have to do better". It's lots of excuses, that's not good leadership material in my book.
There's also crazy stories like the time he gave a speech proclaiming "Carthago delenda est", casting Facebook as Rome and Google as Carthage. Then everyone went into lockdown over the weekend so they could dig through Google+ and copy whatever they could. According to the same book (Chaos Monkeys), Zuck's inner circle is basically a bunch of sycophants (aka Friend of Zuck). It also repeatedly refers to Facebook as a cult. Why do you think they had major failures like the most recent one? Sycophancy is not a working strategy.
Surely he's made some great choices (Instagram acquisition), but how can you begin to separate his actual ability with the power/wealth he can bestow on anyone, biasing their view of him? The guy could fail 1,000 times over at this point and still be a billionaire.
> his primary strategy is to say "we're sorry we have to do better". It's lots of excuses, that's not good leadership material in my book.
Actually, to me, that is incredibly powerful. I can't really evaluate Zuckerberg's effectiveness, but you can't fix problems if you can't admit fault, and many in leadership positions never admit fault.
It is true that many people do not readily apologize or admit to their mistakes, but California tech culture has managed to flip this around on its head by publishing deep, heartfelt apologies on corporate blogs for everything and anything, making it lose most of its weight. The ultimate goodwill hack.
It's still powerful if it impacts people. Manipulation, is still powerful if it works.
Which is where you might be confused, you can be incredibly insincere and abusive (seems common in business) but still a great leader (great in this context not meaning just), as they've shown they can a) get out of sticky situations b) continue making money and c) have a relatively happy team. So in this scenario what would actually back up your argument would be demonstrations of the apologies having zero impact, the team hating the apologies and thus being less productive, and/or a general loss of revenue.
Admitting fault and a need for change is also the only way to actually start a change that does happen. I agree though that you should also hold people to account for the follow through to real changes.
> he's been pretty ineffective and his primary strategy is to say "we're sorry we have to do better". It's lots of excuses, that's not good leadership material in my book.
That is incredible leadership from a capitalistic perspective. Look at other business leaders like Tony Hayward of BP or John Stumpf of Wells Fargo. Getting away with atrocities under the banner of "We're sorry" is not easy. It takes years of practice and a highly orchestrated performance on Capitol Hill and other places.
Oh come on. Have you worked at a large company? It's just politics. You support the people you work for until you switch jobs. Honesty is not common in corporations. Zuck is a dousche and so are his friends.
I remember one pseudohappy cult leader named David Weekly. Dude adds little value bc he doesn’t do actual work (dilettante in PHP whom skated through ivy league CS), just delegates everything by abdication, absence and mission statements like “empowerment.”
TBH I’m glad Facebook keeps its cult of happy-clappy technoposers from infecting anything that matters.
A lot of people don't think much of him, and I completely disagree with his ultimate stated vision, but it's one hell of an accomplishment to take a company from $0-531 Billion in your 20's and early 30's, do it while retaining talent and growing and have people as committed now as they were 10 years ago. Doing that requires a very special person.
I agree that the things you said happened, but I believe that the success of the company is incidental to who ran it. There are millions and millions of factors involved in Facebook's success and to drop all the accolades at the feet of the CEO seems insane.
> I believe that the success of the company is incidental to who ran it
This is usually not true for successful companies, but it's especially not true in facebook's case. Mark Zuckerberg has kept incredibly strong control of facebook, holding more than 50% of voting control even as it's grown to a half trillion dollar company - so he definitely deserves credit for what his company has become.
Also, he has made some strong, unintuitive decisions along the way (no advertising in the first several years, real name policy, dropping out of college, moving to silicon valley, hiring experienced tech executives, buying a dead-simple photo filter app for 1 billion dollars) that can directly be attributed to facebook's success today. It's hard to remember today, but in the first ~5 years of Facebook it was very far from obvious that facebook would dominate the social space.
I think his biggest decision might have been to go mobile first. I used to have a Nokia S40 series phone and Facebook worked really well on that both from the default web browser and from Opera Mini. Add that to the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and he seems to be making really good business decisions. I do disagree with the overall fb direction today but I don't doubt he is a very capable business man.
> to drop all the accolades at the feet of the CEO seems insane.
Seems fair. The public drops all of Facebook's failures at Zuckerburg's feet, too. Nobody ever said, "Damn that third-tier middle manager in the reporting department who ordered the database change that made me unable to find my cousin's best friend's uncle's dog's page!"
How did we get to the point where we so easily separated leaders actions from their public image?
It's the logical equivalent of saying "I condemn what the Nazis did, but I respect Hitler's oratory ability to inspire a country", as if his abilities as a leader in no way influenced the Holocaust.
It's crazy to me how people logically isolate a leader's words and actions from the consequences of the institutions they lead in this case.
>They call him a friend and say he never wavers in his passion or mission. They seriously look up to the guy and won't work anywhere else, even though they have built up generational wealth.
Of course they like the guy. He essentially wrote them a free winning lottery ticket. I'd like him too. Try asking literally anyone else on earth how they feel about "Zuck", though.
What's interesting though, is that these people actually know him. Anyone else on earth most likely doesn't know him, but has formed a negative opinion of him via his own actions and those of his company.
Rarely are you friends with your cult leader. Father figure, representive of some alien power or direct connection to God rarely makes a good platform for a friendship.
That has been the opposite of my experience. There's a sweet spot around $90-$110k where life is pretty good; below that, financial constraints are distracting, while above it, the sacrifices you have to make in terms of freedom, responsibility, etc. will rapidly drain away whatever satisfaction you might have been able to buy with the extra money.
I hope you’re not talking about living in SV or SF with those numbers. Anything less than $120K salary out here usually means roommates, which, unless you are very good at figuring out good ones from bad ones, can lead to severe work performance issues due to lack of sleep from incompatible habits and schedules.
Seattle, actually. It's not so much the specific numbers I was talking about - that's just the range which works for me - but the idea that more money can be less valuable, because the time and energy cost of acquiring the money diminishes your ability to make use of it.
I have typically chosen to live with housemates regardless of salary, because otherwise home just feels sort of empty and dead, and it's a lot of work trying to organize all one's own social hosting single-handed.
"Impact" is the new buzzword of the creative class, aka the knowledge worker. Also, it might be noted, someone else cleans the toilets, that comment from the social good person was just argument by example, and a strange example coming from the person whose title kind of most closely resembles advocating for working people. Because the people who actually clean their toilets don't likely talk much about 'impact'. For folks who are worried about groupthink and feedback loops at FB look no further than comments like these.
Genuinely curious... What is wrong in craving impact? Why does it feel like a buzzword to you? I like to think my impact drives me. I doubt I would have cared about it as much if I wasn't financially comfortable. But I am not rich by any measure. But 'impact', quality of work and the people I work with is still what I prioritize while looking for a job.
> Be less concerned about being a CEO and more concerned about creating things of value.
Isn't that basically how the article is representing these people? That they don't care about being CEO and just want to be where they can create things of the most value?
Snap, Twitter and Uber have all had unprecedented amount of turmoil in the executive ranks of the company. Snap and Twitter's stock are both trading below IPO. Uber is not public yet.
It makes me wonder about the deeper causality. Do execs stay because of the mission and that causes stock appreciation? Or do execs stick around because of stock appreciation and then explain it through the mission?
If money is no longer a driving force and FB is a happy place to work at then power / influence / impact is what is left. Perhaps the execs simply believe that they will have more of this by remaining than starting a new company. Power can be a good or bad thing depending on perspective.
I recently interviewed there, and I definitely got this sense. Everyone in management had been there at least 3 years, and the directors / VPs had been there 8+. When I asked one person where people go if they leave Facebook, he didn't answer. He just said Facebook works hard to retain employees, and that if he ever felt bored he would leave.
The campus is idyllic, designed apparently by the same person who designed Disneyland. Free food, arcades, ice cream, movies, etc.
I think they try very hard to make you comfortable (no "stick") and keep presenting you with opportunities to have more impact ("carrot"). To the point where people don't appear to think as much about the bigger picture and who they want to be / where they want to go. I often heard that phrase "as long as I'm challenged and having impact, I'll stay here".
Compare this to Amazon, which has constant turnover, without free food, arcades, ice cream, movies or celebrities with the added benefit of lower-than-average pay.
Most of us sadly don't have the privilege of "leaving" anytime we want because we can't pass every interview.
Your comment reads like you expect software dev or other entry level employee nagging he does not have a shot at C suite position right after joining.
You know that how life works, you hire people who you trust and you trust friends, colleagues you worked for couple years.
Sometimes you do not have option but bring in C level employee from outside, but that is huge thing. Probably that person will also be from network of biggest share holders, not person from the street.
> “When we learned our platform was abused and interfered with, that was super shocking to all of us,” said Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan in a recent interview with Recode. “[I was] shocked that we were abused. Angry that our platform was abused, manipulated.”
Really? I am genuinely confused about how this would come as a surprise.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadTillerson, for example, found that the State Department is a very, very different beast than Exxon.
"Tillerson was “one of the worst secretaries of state” in modern history, according to experts from across the political spectrum."
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/13/16029526/rex-tillerson-f...
If you want more, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/16/us/politics/a...
You might think you're being the calm and reasonable one here, but you're not asking this question in good faith. It's clear you just want to pick a political fight on hacker news. While we are not above politics here, there is a time and a place for that. And it's not here or now.
The best compliment I could give Tillerson is he probably WANTS the State Department to collapse which is why he's utterly under-managing and under-staffing it. By any other metric, of course, he's an abject failure.
Honestly I don't care much for Facebook's methods and I think they are a net negative on the world, but I still really look up to Mark Zuckerberg as a leader.
If so, I'm not sure how you could possibly consider him someone worth looking up to as a leader.
If you take everything he said and every question he dodged during his testimony at face value, it would indicate that he knows next to nothing about his own company.
If you don't take it at face value, option two is that he's a liar.
Those aren't the kind of qualities I consider worth looking up to.
This looks even worse coming from someone who runs a company that seeks to destroy the concept of privacy for the entire population (or, at least, the portion of the population that can't afford to buy the houses around their own and build 6 foot walls around 750 acre Hawaiian retreats for themselves like Zuckerberg has). The hypocrisy is incredible.
"Sir, do you know how fast you were driving. Were you aware that the speed limit is 55 mph? Do you know that hundreds of children die every year from drivers like yourself who value their own time over the lives of others?"
Money will make people do crazy things. I think he's shown time and time again in his handling of situations that he's been pretty ineffective and his primary strategy is to say "we're sorry we have to do better". It's lots of excuses, that's not good leadership material in my book.
There's also crazy stories like the time he gave a speech proclaiming "Carthago delenda est", casting Facebook as Rome and Google as Carthage. Then everyone went into lockdown over the weekend so they could dig through Google+ and copy whatever they could. According to the same book (Chaos Monkeys), Zuck's inner circle is basically a bunch of sycophants (aka Friend of Zuck). It also repeatedly refers to Facebook as a cult. Why do you think they had major failures like the most recent one? Sycophancy is not a working strategy.
Surely he's made some great choices (Instagram acquisition), but how can you begin to separate his actual ability with the power/wealth he can bestow on anyone, biasing their view of him? The guy could fail 1,000 times over at this point and still be a billionaire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/facebo...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/16/facebook-...
The stuff that happens there is kind of comical. Would effective leaders really run an org like that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Actually, to me, that is incredibly powerful. I can't really evaluate Zuckerberg's effectiveness, but you can't fix problems if you can't admit fault, and many in leadership positions never admit fault.
"I'm sorry, it won't happen this time" is what abusive relationships are made of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4zd7X98eOs
Do people find this sincere? It seems fake/manipulative and too convenient. Facebook has been doing this for a decade+.
Which is where you might be confused, you can be incredibly insincere and abusive (seems common in business) but still a great leader (great in this context not meaning just), as they've shown they can a) get out of sticky situations b) continue making money and c) have a relatively happy team. So in this scenario what would actually back up your argument would be demonstrations of the apologies having zero impact, the team hating the apologies and thus being less productive, and/or a general loss of revenue.
I'd be more inclined to agree if it wasn't working so well for him.
That is incredible leadership from a capitalistic perspective. Look at other business leaders like Tony Hayward of BP or John Stumpf of Wells Fargo. Getting away with atrocities under the banner of "We're sorry" is not easy. It takes years of practice and a highly orchestrated performance on Capitol Hill and other places.
But do they... agree with that "mission" -- or more specifically, what has become of it in 2018?
That's the question you should be asking them.
TBH I’m glad Facebook keeps its cult of happy-clappy technoposers from infecting anything that matters.
This is usually not true for successful companies, but it's especially not true in facebook's case. Mark Zuckerberg has kept incredibly strong control of facebook, holding more than 50% of voting control even as it's grown to a half trillion dollar company - so he definitely deserves credit for what his company has become.
Also, he has made some strong, unintuitive decisions along the way (no advertising in the first several years, real name policy, dropping out of college, moving to silicon valley, hiring experienced tech executives, buying a dead-simple photo filter app for 1 billion dollars) that can directly be attributed to facebook's success today. It's hard to remember today, but in the first ~5 years of Facebook it was very far from obvious that facebook would dominate the social space.
> no advertising in the first several years,
Standard VC funded startup
> real name policy
This may be the one non-obvious choice.
> dropping out of college
Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
> moving to silicon valley
ahem, document.location == "ycombinator.com"
> hiring experienced tech executives
How is hiring experienced tech executives unintuitive for a tech company? Google hired Eric Schmidt. Microsoft hired Steve Ballmer.
> buying a dead-simple photo filter app for 1 billion dollars
Paying a fortune for apps with eyeballs was the m.o. of the first dotcom era, and hasn't subsided.
Seems fair. The public drops all of Facebook's failures at Zuckerburg's feet, too. Nobody ever said, "Damn that third-tier middle manager in the reporting department who ordered the database change that made me unable to find my cousin's best friend's uncle's dog's page!"
Why does Facebook even exist? Zuckerberg fought off several cofounders. Do you think Facebook would be what is it if the Winklevoss brothers ran it?
>I still really look up to Mark Zuckerberg as a leader.
these statements are incompatible.
who do you think dictates the methods? who do you think decides the ends for which those methods are directed?
who do you think is the one who baldly avoided answering up and down over and over in front of a congressional panel?
hint: it's zuck.
How did we get to the point where we so easily separated leaders actions from their public image?
It's the logical equivalent of saying "I condemn what the Nazis did, but I respect Hitler's oratory ability to inspire a country", as if his abilities as a leader in no way influenced the Holocaust.
It's crazy to me how people logically isolate a leader's words and actions from the consequences of the institutions they lead in this case.
Of course they like the guy. He essentially wrote them a free winning lottery ticket. I'd like him too. Try asking literally anyone else on earth how they feel about "Zuck", though.
Does anybody have any suggestions about how to become like this?
Those don't seem like traits of people who work at Facebook, perhaps this is the reason they don't leave.
The point is that the people who do join and have enough money to break out on their own are not doing so.
I have typically chosen to live with housemates regardless of salary, because otherwise home just feels sort of empty and dead, and it's a lot of work trying to organize all one's own social hosting single-handed.
This is such a meaningless non-statement.
“There are more could-be Picasso’s at Facebook than any other company”. Wow. #inspired. If only they picked up the brush.
Be less concerned about being a CEO and more concerned about creating things of value.
Isn't that basically how the article is representing these people? That they don't care about being CEO and just want to be where they can create things of the most value?
It makes me wonder about the deeper causality. Do execs stay because of the mission and that causes stock appreciation? Or do execs stick around because of stock appreciation and then explain it through the mission?
Most of us sadly don't have the privilege of "leaving" anytime we want because we can't pass every interview.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/technology/03facebook.htm...
"But a number of Facebook’s early employees are giving up their stable jobs..."
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-former-employees-are...
You know that how life works, you hire people who you trust and you trust friends, colleagues you worked for couple years.
Sometimes you do not have option but bring in C level employee from outside, but that is huge thing. Probably that person will also be from network of biggest share holders, not person from the street.
Really? I am genuinely confused about how this would come as a surprise.
"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
Nowadays, s/Man/Person/. Women of course have equal right to be hypocrites.