Update: Mark Zuckerberg vs. his Employees

When will he cave in?

“GLOBAL NUCLEAR DOMINATION”

- chant Mark Zuckerberg used to lead at the end of every all hands meeting at Facebook

Two days ago I wrote about some of my raw feelings about Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve gotten more comments from this than anything I’ve posted in a long time. Positive and negative comments. Also, the story hasn’t gone away. Zuck is doubling down, or for those who agree with him, “protecting free speech”.

So first I’ll explain my venom, then revisit his current conundrum, and include a post from someone who quit Facebook over this. Let’s start with the latter…

This is a clip from a post from one of Facebooks top engineers who is walking away from a mid six-figure salary:

I'm resigning from my job at Facebook.

For years, President Trump has enjoyed an exception to Facebook’s Community Standards; over and over he posts abhorrent, targeted messages that would get any other Facebook user suspended from the platform. He’s permitted to break the rules, since his political speech is “newsworthy.”

“when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence. He showed us on Friday that this was a lie. Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates, finding excuse after excuse not to act on increasingly dangerous rhetoric. Since Friday, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and process the decision not to remove the racist, violent post Trump made Thursday night, but Facebook, complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred, is on the wrong side of history.

Now I’ll try to explain. A lot of people saw my post as an anti_trump and/or anti_zuck statement, a political statement; it was neither. What I was trying to highlight was Zucks inability to lead in a crisis, to make the moral, compassionate decision instead of a financial decision. It was a statement about greed and arrogance.

On a larger scale, I’m upset about the overall change in the level of kindness and meritocracy in Silicon Valley. I worked in Silicon Valley off and on for the past 3o years, mostly I the 1990s. The history of Silicon Valley is that the companies there are more fair, evolved and generous than in other places.

I learned a lot about how to be a better, more honest, generous leader and owner during my stints there. Everyone was given stock options. I used to brag about admins who made six figure salaries and bought new houses from their earnings.

Generosity and fairness were part of the structure there, part of the algorithm of success in Silicon Valley. These norms were set by Hewlett and Packard before my time there. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were acerbic and rude, often, but they didn’t break the creed.

Then people like Zuckerberg came along. He actually moved his company from the east coast just to be a part of the Silicon Valley scene and scoop up some of the magic. It worked, too well.

His new style had an enormous impact on the culture in Silicon Valley. His rude, snotty, ageist, misogynistic attitude that got him through his prep schools took on a new life in California. Because Facebook was growing so fast and raising more money than ever seen before, young men everywhere tried to imitate him. Hoodies, flip-flops, hubris got real popular.

The movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK really poured gas on the fire. Sorkin inadvertently created a giant poster when he showed us the inner workings of Zucks brain and how he got away with his petulant style.

From 2008 to about 2016 Facebooks new model was copied by thousands of companies, the culture seeped into every nook and cranny of Silicon Valley. Zuck single handedly changed the culture into one similar to THE HUNGER GAMES than the old collaborative, magical style before his time. As I said, it worked too well, and nobody stopped him.

Now he’s finally facing a possible reckoning. He tricks his employees, as does Uber and several other companies in the “new Silicon Valley”. His employees are openly calling him a liar. He won’t give in (yet). All this could finally possibly course correct Facebook, break it up or something similar.

Facebook was already burning out employees at a pretty high rate, over 20% a year! Now they’ll lose another 10-20% in one month. I was always taught that that was a bad thing, for a lot of reasons. But Zuck says it’s OK, he had automated his company so much that replacing people doesn’t have the impact it used to. And it’s easy to monitor their work output minute by minute. Really?

However, there are always people who need jobs, especially now of course. And they can work from home for awhile.

Bottom line for me is that I am happy to see Mark being forced to consider being a good leader.

He taught a new creed –– crush the competition, it’s all about the money, employees are disposable. Let’s see how that works for him now.

Just today, over 30 of his earliest employees called for him to label Trump’s tweets “threatening”. So the pressure builds to do the right thing.

Because for him it really is only about the money, in the end he probably will cave, which will really make him look stupid for not doing it in the first place.