The Boy Kings (19 page)

Now, two years in, I wasn’t sure what was really happening with the burgeoning social media craze and its associated new forms of instant, distant interaction. What I was seeing was that social websites were playing upon the biggest open and unsolved wound in our society: the need to be known, the need to be loved. It was unclear if they were meeting this need. This need is so naked, so huge: In a society in which we are wage workers and paying customers more than we are members of a community, we yearn to be understood and loved for who we really are. We
want people to see us, to care, to need us as we need them, to be there. But, more often than not, in our scattered communities of strip malls and subdivisions, they don’t and they aren’t. We move too much, and even when we are near, we are easily estranged, whether by work or leisure or now, technology, making it ever more possible to communicate without laying eyes on each other.

As Facebook and the social Internet grew ever bigger, I wondered whether what we were building was fixing our loneliness, or just becoming another addiction, like the social games that would soon begin to be pumped out by Zynga and others, that dull or distract us from deeper feeling. I was not sure if we were enabling love or its illusion.

• • •

In summer 2007, the launch and overnight success of the Facebook Platform, and the influx of cheap, viral applications it created, wasn’t the only thing that was changing. By this point, the company had grown to almost three hundred employees. Most of these were engineers, in keeping with the site’s philosophy of technical primacy, along with larger and larger numbers of customer-support employees hired to keep up with user growth. In June 2007, I was promoted to a customer-support training and quality manager, which meant that I was responsible for bringing new employees on board and teaching them all the ways of Facebook site administration. My promotion yielded me a raise to a salary that was about half what engineers were making on average, and a shiny new Facebook-purchased BlackBerry, which Andreas brought into my one-on-one meeting and pushed
dramatically toward me across the desk, as if bestowing upon me some mystical, valuable gift direct from the king himself. I tried to act appropriately excited about the BlackBerry, but Andreas didn’t know that Sam and I had been making skeptical fun of technologies and their talismanic quality in Silicon Valley for months. Skeptical or not, I would now have my own technology to consult at any moment.

Being on salary meant that I could be asked to work longer hours, so Andreas began scheduling me to come in on Saturdays to conduct intense training sessions with rookie customer-support representatives. At one of these Saturday morning sessions that summer, I was teaching the reps how to repair a Facebook account problem and I had my laptop projected onto the wall so everyone could see what I was doing on my screen. My instant-message client was on, and Thrax began a conversation, which, as they often tended to do, veered toward the topic of his penis. This was one of his favorite topics, in addition to anything digital, to discuss on Facebook and off with friends and coworkers. I quickly minimized the chat window and, after letting the reps out on a scheduled break, typed to Thrax, “I can’t talk right now. I’m at work and this conversation is being projected.” Only at Facebook, I thought, hoping the rookie reps hadn’t read the conversation, but not feeling that bad about it if they did. They would get used to the work environment’s weird and seamless mixing of personal and professional soon enough, I figured. At Facebook, to repurpose the old feminist saying, the personal was professional: You were neither expected nor allowed to leave your personal life at the door.

While I had become inured to (and sometimes enjoyed)
the antics that went on at work, I was still worried about what would become of me at the company. Teaching customer support wasn’t the worst job, but it was far from a passion, and it continued to be frustrating to watch the engineers celebrate themselves and their increasing stature in the valley when I was still part of the lower caste, barely making ends meet. The dissonance that I felt daily flew in the face of what Silicon Valley says about itself—that it is a meritocracy, that it values intelligence and creativity, that everyone has a fair shot if they just work hard enough. This was true only if you were technical, and even that may not always be enough: In the age of the social network, who you knew and who your friends were became increasingly important, too. I decided to give myself a late August deadline: If there wasn’t any movement in my career by that point, I would take my vested Facebook stock and strike a new path elsewhere, however difficult that might be.

I said as much to Thrax as we sat in the parking lot of Fry’s Electronics on a Sunday morning. We had stayed up all night watching movies at Sam’s house and then, after a walk around Palo Alto where we passed a church and toyed with the idea of going inside for the service (we decided against it, since we were dressed in jeans), decided to drive around. Driving around with engineers in Palo Alto almost always involved a trip to Fry’s Electronics, so they could check out any new technical products that might have been released in the past week. I never minded going, because the store itself is a strange and fantastic monument to the Wild West. The aisles are decorated with bales of hay and statues of figures like Annie Oakley, who poses with a gun on a bale piled with Linux manuals. I could entertain myself
for a good hour observing the Western decor while engineers poked around at newly released televisions and video games.

Back in the car, a Justin Timberlake song came on the radio and Thrax confessed that he liked it. Pale indie guys weren’t supposed to like Justin Timberlake in 2007. “That’s cool, I like Justin Timberlake, too,” I said. In the same confessional spirit after our sleepless night, I added, “I applied to new jobs this week. I can’t keep going in CS forever.”

“Oh, no,” Thrax said gravely, going silent for a minute as the Timberlake song finished on the radio. “You should be a product manager,” he mused.

“Yeah, I know, but Mark doesn’t want anyone who isn’t technical to be in engineering anymore.”

“Oh, right,” he replied, knowing as I did that this decision, like anything else at Facebook, was only really up to Mark. In that sense, we were all just along for the ride.

“Whatever, let’s go to In-N-Out,” I said. When all else failed, in California, you could count on a good animal-style, protein-style grilled cheese (my usual In-N-Out order) to make things feel, at least momentarily, better.

• • •

“I tell everyone I meet that I can read their entire lives in one minute,” Chamath Palihapitaya said by way of introducing himself to Facebook employees when he was hired as vice president of product marketing and operations in July 2007. He was a high-stakes poker player and ex-AOL Instant Message executive Mark was bringing on board, it was surmised by the tech press, to
inject some much-needed business savvy into the organization. Chamath was young, brash, and masculine in style but, unlike most Facebook engineers, he had experience managing a company.

For his first couple of months, Chamath observed operations and interviewed employees to find out how things worked. My meeting with him came in early August. We met at Coupa Café on Palo Alto’s Emerson Street, where laptops sat on every table and startups were the topic of most every conversation. Over cappuccino, Chamath asked me to tell him everything about my department. I told him who I thought did the bulk of the management work (certain members of the staff), and who didn’t (our boss), and what I thought the issues in the department and the company were.

“We need to get you out of the department as soon as possible,” he told me. “I think I have an idea of where you will fit,” he said, but he didn’t tell me where. I was elated; perhaps the technical purge was ending and Mark was finally open to the idea of creating meaningful roles for nontechnical employees.

The next week, Chamath asked me and my management colleagues in customer support to do an evaluation exercise in which we ranked everyone on the Customer Support Team from highest to lowest. Sitting up late that night in the office, I assigned a score to each person on the team. Some were easy to score: They were either spectacularly hard workers or rather lazy, preferring to play company-sponsored Beirut games to the alternately hard and tedious work of solving user problems, but for most it was a queasy and difficult process of comparing apples to oranges, which, in this case, might be one person’s quickness at answering emails versus another’s thoroughness and accuracy.

When the results were in, Chamath came back to deliver a speech. “Look around you,” he told us. “In a few weeks, some of the people in this room won’t be here. They will be moved to other departments, because they’ve worked hard and have made themselves valuable to the company. Other people in this room won’t be here, because they haven’t worked hard enough. I’m telling you this because you need to understand that this is how it works: You are always being ranked, and it’s your job to perform. How you do here is up to you, but no one’s going to let you get away with not pulling your weight.”

One of the subtexts of Chamath’s speech was that he and the powers that be had finally figured out that Andreas wasn’t doing much at all and, though it took some months, he was eventually let go, to most of the customer-support employees’ great relief. By then, I was no longer a member of customer support, so Andreas’ departure was of only symbolic consequence.

Chamath had created a small platform product marketing team to promote the Facebook Platform to developers. The team was headed by Dave, a marketing guy who had come to Facebook in late 2006 from Apple, and a classmate of the early Harvard engineers, Eila, who had worked with some of them at Microsoft. She had a stunning command of business jargon: “Leverage, fire drill, best practices, deliverables” were a few of the words she used often and that I had to learn quickly. I was assigned to work with her on various projects, like redesigning the developer site (where external developers obtained technical updates about the platform) and reaching out to developers and encouraging them to build Facebook applications.

My first week in the job I was working at my new desk in
a cramped wing on the third floor of the 156 University office, where a jumble of database engineers and platform-marketing people sat, when I received an AIM from Thrax.

“Do you want to go to a show in Berkeley with us?”

“I can’t, I have to work on a sketch for what the new developer site will look like,” I typed back.

“Huh? Why? That’s not part of CS,” came his quick response.

“Chamath is my new boss,” I typed.

“Chamath is? What happened to Andreas? Are you still going to deal with CS?”

“No.”

“Oh, man. So you finally got what you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“Without resorting to quitting.”

“Uh huh,” I replied, waiting to be congratulated on my promotion.

“So, you’re going to sit on our floor now? Lame.”

“You’re lame.”

“Well nobody likes u so . . .” he typed, trolling. One of the engineering managers had once said to me, apropos of nothing, “Everyone likes you,” with a kind of curious envy, as if this was the
ne plus ultra
of life for the Facebook employee. Facebook did not have the like button yet, but given that we soon would, being liked by everyone was maybe a form of ultimate Face-book victory. I was nonplussed by all this, still accustomed to the academic world in which being liked was suspect: It meant you might be pandering to people for their affection. But I figured that if being liked by everyone was an asset at Facebook, I might as well claim it.

Thrax and Sam and Justin drove off to Berkeley while I sat at work with my computer and a design program that I barely knew how to use, but I was in good spirits. Now that I had what Silicon Valley considered to be a real job, I thought, I could turn my attention away from simply getting along at the company to accomplishing something important.

• • •

As a member of the tiny platform-marketing team that Chamath assembled, I attended hours-long meetings about marketing strategy and slaved over my sketches for the developer site. The site deployed robotic, techno-style fonts and spoke exclusively in the language of growth and speed, the language of developers, unlike the user support pages that spoke of connecting to friends. The change from serving users to serving developers was interesting: Suddenly, I had switched from telling users what they couldn’t do to telling developers that they could do anything they wanted. Facebook engineers considered the developers to be peers, so they were keen to make sure that we were communicating and on good terms with them, a concern they had never had with the users.

My career upgrade from dungeon department to quasi-technical role meant, along with a better salary and more respect from the technical echelon of the company, that I was now on engineering time. This meant that while I could come to work later, as late as lunchtime, I was expected to stay up until all hours answering emails and devoting myself even more monastically to our new enterprise. However, even as the respect and pay were higher, which was a huge relief, genuflecting to external
application developers, even if I didn’t agree with what they were doing, felt a lot like the eternal reverence we nontechnical employees were all expected to exhibit for Mark and the engineering department.

We arranged parties for developers on a frequent basis, arranged contests for them to compete with one another, and most important, looked away from the fact that almost all of Face-book users’ data was available to them through the platform. Technically, they were supposed to scrub their servers of the data every twenty-four hours but, if they didn’t, we had no way of knowing. Mark implicitly trusted developers, external and internal, as if programming web applications was a global fraternity to which one gained membership by writing code.

That December, after I had worked for four straight months without a break on the Developer site, an engineering manager, Kai, asked me in an email, “Would you rather work on Platform or help with the internationalization process?” Kai was an engineering manager who had previously held a pre-IPO position at PayPal and relished his role as Silicon Valley elder, though he was still young, barely thirty. He prided himself as much on his personality as his technical skills, trolling often on the company’s social email list and generally behaving like as much of a character as possible. He had steeped himself in Internet culture since college. When he and his wife began to have children, they nicknamed them after Internet memes like the lolcat holiday, Caturday.