As someone who's startup got bought out by facebook, many years ago, its not surprising to read.
The politics surrounding zuck is wild. Cox left then came back, mainly because hes not actually that good, and has terrible judgement when it comes to features and how to shape effective teams (just throw people at it, features should be purely metric based, or a straight copy of competitors products. There is no cohesive vision of what a meta product should be. Just churn out microchanges until something sticks)
Zuck also has pretty bad people instincts. He is surrounded by egomangics, and Boz is probably the sanest out of all of them. Its a shame he doesn't lead engineering that well (ie getting into fights with plebs in the comments about food and shuttle timings)
He also is very keen on flashy new toys, and features, but has no instinct for making a product. He still thinks that incremental slightly broken features, but rapidly released is better than a product that works well, is integrated and has a simple well tested UI pathway for everything. Common UI language? Pah, thats for android/apple. I want that new shiny feature, I want it now. What do you mean its buggy? just pull people off that other project to fix it. No, the other one.
Schrep also was an in insightful and good leader.
Sheryl is a brilliant actor that helped shape the culture of the place. However there was always a tinge of poison, which was mostly kept in check until about 2021. She went full politician and started building her own brand, and generally left a massive mess.
Zuck went full bro and decided that empathy made shit products and decided that he like the taste of engineer's tears.
but back to TBD.
The problem for them is that they have to work collaboratively with other teams in facebook to get the stuff the need. The problem is, the teams/orgs they are fighting against have survived by competing against others ruthlessly. TBD doesn't have the experience to fight the old timers, they also don't really have experience in making frontier models.
They are also being swamped by non-ML engineers looking to ride the wave of empire building. this generates lots of alignment meetings and no progress.
All facts in this post. FB management always had such a shockingly different tone than other big tech companies. It felt like a bunch of friends who’d been there from the start and were in a bit over their heads with way too much confidence.
I have a higher opinion of zuck than this though. He nailed a couple of really important big picture calls - mobile, ads, instagram - and built a really effective organization.
The metaverse always felt like the beginning of the end to me though. The whole company kinda lived or died by Zuck’s judgement and that was where it just went off the rails, I guess boz was just whispering in his ear too much.
Computer scientists spending a career building advertising inventory and private data lakes while at the same time desperate to never be perceived in this light. It must make for an interesting "culture."
I mean yeah, booo facebook.
The problem with that assessment is that only really the monetisation team were the ones abusing the data. They are an organisation that were very much apart from the rest, different culture and different rules.
For the longest while you could be actually making things better, of thinking you were.
When problems popped up, we _could_ apply pressure and get things fixed. The blatant content discrimination in india, instagram kids, and a load of other changes were forced by employees.
However, in 2023 there were some rule changes aimed at stopping "social justice warrior-ing" internally. It was repeatedly tightened until questioning the leaders is considered against the rules.
Its no coincidence that product decisions are getting worse.
It’s both sad and believable when I hear that Boz is the most sane of them all.
Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion publicly.
My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing amongst them.
A CEO with terrible judgement? Egomaniac executives? Products that a/b test and stick with what works? Chasing trends? Internal competition?
Sounds like every company.