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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
I guess the culture at Facebook was set very early and we’re still seeing the effect of that play out today.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
Or they might say “engagement,” but I think they’d agree on the substance.
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.
> 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.
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.
I never heard of him before reading this article just now.
They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.
That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.
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.
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.
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.
This is harder to do accidentally now, for better or worse.
But I suppose there are lots of other alternatives nowadays.
They certainly hoped that would be the outcome. But they would have been idiots to not know most startups fail.
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