Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.
This is a guy who famously said “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people.“[1]
If that was the case then he wouldn't have continued doubling and tripling down on these same product decisions for many more years.
Ask anyone at Meta and they will readily agree that Boz is among the most incompetent and unserious leaders in tech. His only qualification is being Zuck's friend, and that shields him from all criticism. At a more "focused" company he would have been fired a decade ago. As it stands he lost the shareholders $150B+ (and counting), dipped from the metaverse org, and got rewarded with a new role overseeing the shiny new thing - AI.
Boz, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you had become the CTO at Facebook after joining as the 10,010th engineer, not the 10th. Pretty much everyone on this forum would have become the CTO at Facebook if they had been employee #10.
Yeah, clear example of survivorship bias... not to sound negative, but if Facebook had become nothing, odds are Boz would be nothing more than another engineer. It's all too common a tale to hear people spout their nonsense and think they got to where they are because of some inherent talent or skill, but at the end of the day, getting to somewhere like Boz these days is just luck. Does anyone really think you could start as an L4 at something like Amazon these days and end up as a CTO? Nope.
> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
It’s astonishing how quickly attitudes have shifted on this forum since engineers have been reminded which side of the labor/capital divide they’re really on. I can scarcely believe some of the comments I’m seeing on here these days.
The thing I found most offensive about this take is that it basically blames the cogs for the lack of focus:
> To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the company Q&A’s he now hosts) people would sometimes ask about having the company support this nonprofit or that cause. Mark would always say no.
> Over time, this principle slowly eroded. More and more employees asked. At some point we had enough money to do it without making an immediate trade-off. And if so many employees wanted it, maybe it was more cost effective just to do it.
The problem with that is that it seems pretty obvious that Meta's "lack of focus" is 100% a leadership problem. Excuse my French, but they fucking renamed the entire company for a product vision that was just Zuckerberg's halcyon dream. It wasn't like Bob in Accounting was clamoring to reposition the entire company to something that had nothing to do with their core competency. Everyone knows the problem with Meta is that Zuckerberg has majority voting rights and thus can't be fired regardless of the outcome of his decisions.
You know what's going to happen is some budding CEO will come along and read this and conclude, "I know the solution: my company won't give to charity." It will become enshrined as this principle in their company lore, that nothing can detract from The Work. Managers will parrot it, HR may even add it to onboarding. But it will be an empty gesture, because as the company grows it will become more and more multifacted, or 'distracted' if you will.
I'm not sure the process can even be stopped, if the company is successful and the new changes appear to be, and probably are, profitable.
I don’t know who Boz is, so perhaps it makes me more receptive to his message, but I agree with what he says. Steve Jobs said the exact same thing about saying no and staying on target.
I am learning the same lessons at my far smaller and less evil endeavour. There is so much good you can do, and some many low-hanging fruit, but eventually these small detours that each come with small obligations pile up and make every next move harder. There comes a point where your main task is delayed by a yak shaving expedition that started as a small favour to a single user.
I never got good at it, but I see the value in ruthless prioritisation.
Boz, really? This is the guy who messed up Meta's "Metaverse" biz first, then introduced privacy invading tracking to all employees and now messing up their AI biz big time. Where is the Focus?
This is an article about bloat, in the broadest possible sense. Psychological bloat.
Attention is the scarcest resource, and complexity eats away at attention.
There's lot of other threats to attention, the relevant one here is cognitive load. Your mind keeps track of things even if they're not in conscious awareness. Every item has a "handle" on you.
If you take inventory, you may find many are not worth the cost! Worth doing, every now and then.
What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?
It's the world that has changed. Back in the day that I assume you are remembering, it was easy to look at tech as a force for good. But soon Google and Facebook became ad machines first and foremost, consolidated untold wealth towards the top, and discarded any burned out employees they no longer had a use for, while raking in ever more profits.
Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).
The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (hot springs) because of it. That core value still exists behind all the evil.
Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.
The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.
nothing wrong with the concept of making money, sure. let's look at the specific method that meta uses to make money. meta onsells private information about their platform users, to more accurately program those same platform users, according to commands of those supplying money. this can effectively be seen as slavery coercion (because slaves have no privacy, slaves obey their masters command, and nobody truly wants to be a slave). personally I don't agree with slavery and I don't agree with coercion, so I see plenty wrong with the way that meta makes money by middlemanning slavery. therefore I see your generalization as insidious because it downplays other viewpoints without adding anything.
Fcb for me it's ads, ads ads and even more ads. The newsfeed is complete slop from news outlets. It's just extremely noisy. The only thing that I use there is the Messenger because my older friends aren't too savvy with Whatsapp.
And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.
Anecdote, I know plenty of people who use FB exclusively for private and secret groups. The ability to require approval before approving (tied to looking up the profiles of people applying) while still allowing members to ask questions anonymously within the group (like maybe for health advice), moderation, some basic administrative roles, event invites / rsvp, discoverability by location (new mom club around me).
Not like any of these features are particularly good, but the combination beats anything else out there, which is surprising because usage of groups seems to be huge.
Discord comes close, but the complaint I see from FB group users is they don't like the real-time chat stream.
I don't think it was thought of that Facebook would be worth $1.5T some day, but I'm positive what was on the 10th employees mind while getting paged at the middle of night was "I'm in the process of getting filthy rich". That certainly would help me focus.
Facebook was a networking site for a handful of college campuses at the time. It had some great traction, sure, but I doubt "filthy rich" was a serious expectation among employees.
Boz joined in 2006. In 2005 their valuation was $100M. In 2006 their valuation was $500M. Literally all the people he sat next to when he joined all knew they were filthy rich already.
I like that this is gibberish. “Giving money to charity makes products worse”, “It’s good but I bet that it’s bad”, “I’m using ‘giving to charity’ as a stand-in for anything else bad that I can imagine”
Every now and then it really looks like the hot new drug in Silicon Valley is MPPP and the tech bros got hit with a bad batch
I really liked this article. FWIW, I didn’t know he is the CTO of Facebook until just now.
But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.
I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.
Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.
Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.
This is a guy who famously said “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people.“[1]
I don’t think self-awareness is really his thing.
[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/read-the-con...
Christ sake, really? I dont want to say it since it is against the rules but common…
I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the Metaverse in mind but found it less offensive to his colleagues to use charity as the example.
Did you read the whole thing? he is clearly talking about having lost focus which is directly in agreement with your take on the Metaverse.
If that was the case then he wouldn't have continued doubling and tripling down on these same product decisions for many more years.
Ask anyone at Meta and they will readily agree that Boz is among the most incompetent and unserious leaders in tech. His only qualification is being Zuck's friend, and that shields him from all criticism. At a more "focused" company he would have been fired a decade ago. As it stands he lost the shareholders $150B+ (and counting), dipped from the metaverse org, and got rewarded with a new role overseeing the shiny new thing - AI.
> As it stands he lost the shareholders $150B+ (and counting)
When you put it like that, I kinda warm to the guy
Could this standpoint be any more unsympathetic?
I guess the culture at Facebook was set very early and we’re still seeing the effect of that play out today.
Boz, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you had become the CTO at Facebook after joining as the 10,010th engineer, not the 10th. Pretty much everyone on this forum would have become the CTO at Facebook if they had been employee #10.
Yeah, clear example of survivorship bias... not to sound negative, but if Facebook had become nothing, odds are Boz would be nothing more than another engineer. It's all too common a tale to hear people spout their nonsense and think they got to where they are because of some inherent talent or skill, but at the end of the day, getting to somewhere like Boz these days is just luck. Does anyone really think you could start as an L4 at something like Amazon these days and end up as a CTO? Nope.
> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
Whatever Zuck is feeling on any given day. At the moment it seems to be prediction markets.
Addiction.
Or they might say “engagement,” but I think they’d agree on the substance.
Focus on making the world a worse place. Great. Please retire.
I am quite glad to see that the tide towards these people has turned even here on HN
It’s astonishing how quickly attitudes have shifted on this forum since engineers have been reminded which side of the labor/capital divide they’re really on. I can scarcely believe some of the comments I’m seeing on here these days.
Absolutely spot on, I also think that's the reason why.
The thing I found most offensive about this take is that it basically blames the cogs for the lack of focus:
> To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the company Q&A’s he now hosts) people would sometimes ask about having the company support this nonprofit or that cause. Mark would always say no.
> Over time, this principle slowly eroded. More and more employees asked. At some point we had enough money to do it without making an immediate trade-off. And if so many employees wanted it, maybe it was more cost effective just to do it.
The problem with that is that it seems pretty obvious that Meta's "lack of focus" is 100% a leadership problem. Excuse my French, but they fucking renamed the entire company for a product vision that was just Zuckerberg's halcyon dream. It wasn't like Bob in Accounting was clamoring to reposition the entire company to something that had nothing to do with their core competency. Everyone knows the problem with Meta is that Zuckerberg has majority voting rights and thus can't be fired regardless of the outcome of his decisions.
It’s time to pull yourself out of your tunnel vision and look at the wasteland left behind by the ruthless machine you are building.
what are you talking about ?
You know what's going to happen is some budding CEO will come along and read this and conclude, "I know the solution: my company won't give to charity." It will become enshrined as this principle in their company lore, that nothing can detract from The Work. Managers will parrot it, HR may even add it to onboarding. But it will be an empty gesture, because as the company grows it will become more and more multifacted, or 'distracted' if you will.
I'm not sure the process can even be stopped, if the company is successful and the new changes appear to be, and probably are, profitable.
This guy is the fred durst of tech. Full on backwards-cap energy and he did it all for the cookie.
[2023]
Right, that changes the reading
I don’t know who Boz is, so perhaps it makes me more receptive to his message, but I agree with what he says. Steve Jobs said the exact same thing about saying no and staying on target.
I am learning the same lessons at my far smaller and less evil endeavour. There is so much good you can do, and some many low-hanging fruit, but eventually these small detours that each come with small obligations pile up and make every next move harder. There comes a point where your main task is delayed by a yak shaving expedition that started as a small favour to a single user.
I never got good at it, but I see the value in ruthless prioritisation.
Boz, really? This is the guy who messed up Meta's "Metaverse" biz first, then introduced privacy invading tracking to all employees and now messing up their AI biz big time. Where is the Focus?
I didn’t know that. Box was responsible for all those things?
I never heard of him before reading this article just now.
They don't care. Messing up is cheap for Meta.
This is an article about bloat, in the broadest possible sense. Psychological bloat.
Attention is the scarcest resource, and complexity eats away at attention.
There's lot of other threats to attention, the relevant one here is cognitive load. Your mind keeps track of things even if they're not in conscious awareness. Every item has a "handle" on you.
If you take inventory, you may find many are not worth the cost! Worth doing, every now and then.
The banality of evil, everyone.
What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?
It's the world that has changed. Back in the day that I assume you are remembering, it was easy to look at tech as a force for good. But soon Google and Facebook became ad machines first and foremost, consolidated untold wealth towards the top, and discarded any burned out employees they no longer had a use for, while raking in ever more profits.
Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).
One of the worst people doing anything anywhere. Fuck you, boz.
Focus, or, Where Humanity Went Wrong. Imagine being proud of this essay.
What good has Meta even done?
They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.
The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (hot springs) because of it. That core value still exists behind all the evil.
Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.
The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.
I’m sure a lot of early employees convinced themselves Facebook had positive social value in addition to making them rich.
That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.
nothing wrong with the concept of making money, sure. let's look at the specific method that meta uses to make money. meta onsells private information about their platform users, to more accurately program those same platform users, according to commands of those supplying money. this can effectively be seen as slavery coercion (because slaves have no privacy, slaves obey their masters command, and nobody truly wants to be a slave). personally I don't agree with slavery and I don't agree with coercion, so I see plenty wrong with the way that meta makes money by middlemanning slavery. therefore I see your generalization as insidious because it downplays other viewpoints without adding anything.
Fcb for me it's ads, ads ads and even more ads. The newsfeed is complete slop from news outlets. It's just extremely noisy. The only thing that I use there is the Messenger because my older friends aren't too savvy with Whatsapp.
And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.
98% of newsfeed is recommendation slop.
Before Facebook, after people lost touch with their high school or college friends, they often didn't have a good way to get back in touch again.
This is harder to do accidentally now, for better or worse.
But I suppose there are lots of other alternatives nowadays.
Anecdote, I know plenty of people who use FB exclusively for private and secret groups. The ability to require approval before approving (tied to looking up the profiles of people applying) while still allowing members to ask questions anonymously within the group (like maybe for health advice), moderation, some basic administrative roles, event invites / rsvp, discoverability by location (new mom club around me).
Not like any of these features are particularly good, but the combination beats anything else out there, which is surprising because usage of groups seems to be huge.
Discord comes close, but the complaint I see from FB group users is they don't like the real-time chat stream.
I use Facebook mostly for groups.
Facebook groups have destroyed online forums and with that killed long discussions on the internet.
But sure,somehow Facebook doesanage to suck you in and wate time on bullshit. For that it's awesome.
The Ugly.
This needs 2023
It is not a coincidence that the author's nickname, Boz, is so close to Bozo the Clown, only a clown could write this.
I don't think it was thought of that Facebook would be worth $1.5T some day, but I'm positive what was on the 10th employees mind while getting paged at the middle of night was "I'm in the process of getting filthy rich". That certainly would help me focus.
Facebook was a networking site for a handful of college campuses at the time. It had some great traction, sure, but I doubt "filthy rich" was a serious expectation among employees.
Boz joined in 2006. In 2005 their valuation was $100M. In 2006 their valuation was $500M. Literally all the people he sat next to when he joined all knew they were filthy rich already.
They didn’t know if they would get rich.
They certainly hoped that would be the outcome. But they would have been idiots to not know most startups fail.
Wish I had some KY lube nearby so I could stroke my cock along with the author. Flagged. What garbage nonsense.
I wish I had 1/1000th of the ability to disassociate myself from my actions that these horrible hypocrites have. This one is a quite slimy example
I like that this is gibberish. “Giving money to charity makes products worse”, “It’s good but I bet that it’s bad”, “I’m using ‘giving to charity’ as a stand-in for anything else bad that I can imagine”
Every now and then it really looks like the hot new drug in Silicon Valley is MPPP and the tech bros got hit with a bad batch
I really liked this article. FWIW, I didn’t know he is the CTO of Facebook until just now.
But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.
I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.
Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.