Focus

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.

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.

> 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.

Focus on making the world a worse place. Great. Please retire.

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.

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 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.

This guy is the fred durst of tech. Full on backwards-cap energy and he did it all for the cookie.

[2023]

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?

The banality of evil, everyone.

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.

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 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.

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

[dead]

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.