After more than a decade at Meta/Facebook, it’s time for me to move on. So here goes a non-typical badge post, more of a collection of memories. This is about saying goodbye to the past; I’ll post about new things in the future.

This is a bittersweet moment for me. A decade is a long time. This marks my longest tenure at any company.. But then I came to realize that the Meta now is very different from the Facebook I joined. The dramatic shift in the company’s culture over time is shocking, especially in hindsight. I still remember the motivational speaker at my Bootcamp class, who was from Microsoft, who made a lasting impression on me, when he confronted ex-Microsoft employees to stop complaining about Microsoft’s culture and in-fights, that you were there, and you probably chose not to do much about it. Then he argued, YOU WERE PART OF THE PROBLEM. The lesson was clear: THIS (FACEBOOK) IS YOUR COMPANY; think about how you can protect and nurture its culture. Coincidentally, this reminds me of Benjamin Franklin’s answer to what we get in the US Constitution, to which he replied: A republic, if you can keep it. Looking back, I can comfortably say I strove to maintain and grow that original culture, satisfying my conscience.

In 2014, when I looked for a change from Twitter, I didn’t consider many choices, but just wanted to join Facebook. I was particularly enamored by its razor focus and audacity in the evolution of its core products. As a comparison, all I could remember about Twitter’s product innovation was the endless debates of whether a tweet should be 140 characters. Facebook, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have a particular dogma of what Facebook is. Rather, as long as it connects people talking with each other, it’s good. In hindsight, the “connecting world” also connects well with core metrics like daily active users or time spent, so mission and measurement conveniently overlap, which is something probably constructed by design, thus artificial in retrospect. But, still quite the Kool-Aid, and I loved drinking it! Facebook was also the company that set a very high compensation standard for Big Tech. What’s better than being at the epicenter of all that?!

A decade is a long time to learn, and I’ve grown a lot. At Facebook, I finally found management in a non-antagonistic light after observing great managers focus on the larger impact rather than the larger teams. I became a manager myself, abiding by that principle as well. I learnt to design organizations like designed systems and be data-driven, fondly remembering the saying that I’d trust your data or my intuition. Performance reviews, while tough, were pretty well balanced and honest in forging “intersubjective reality”. Managers looked across the company to align performance ratings in the typical ad hoc Facebook way. Bootcamp (where you spend a month picking which team you join after you start at Facebook) and Hackamonth (where you spend a month working on another team’s project, to gauge mutual interest before internal transfer) indulged the engineers in unheard-of internal mobility, which I took advantage of. And Facebook’s hiring process, for the longest time, followed the policy of a general hiring pool. I enjoyed interviewing new folks and conducted more than half a thousand.

Over the decade, I’ve worked in four organizations within the company; the happiest days were my six years at WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s culture is the polar opposite of Facebook’s, a rather fascinating and strange fact, given that WhatsApp is a subsidiary of Facebook. At WhatsApp, engineers could focus on building great software rather than being sidetracked by the next hot new product shutting down the command chain. If you are curious, I wrote more about that experience here.

What was that famous Facebook culture about then? It was captured well in a “Red Culture Book” pamphlet, which was used during my Bootcamp class. The company had long stopped using that book for culture indoctrination, so it’s only found in piles of souvenirs at old timers’ homes. Fortunately, replicas are floating on the Internet (here and here). You see slogans like those:

Focus on Impact
Move Fast and Break Things
Code Wins The Arguments
The Riskiest Thing is to Take No Risk
…

After all, social media was the new thing, the sky was the limit, and only good things could happen in a more connected world. Even the ads business was treated as fundamentally win/win for Facebook, advertisers, and its users. That represented the wonderful and blissful youth of Facebook.

That optimism was cast in doubt with Cambridge Analytica and the following FTC consent order. That was the start of the awakening and realignment of societies regarding online privacy. It also illustrated the many risks a dominant media platform poses, whether social or traditional. Within a year, all the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp left the company, and the company stopped using the Red Culture Book in the Bootcamp. I didn’t register the significance at that point in time. Then comes COVID, a generational shock to the culture of any company.

If Facebook were adolescence, then Meta would be middle-aged. The healthy willingness to explore the unknown morphed into top-down products no one wants to use, to name a few: the message interop (circa 2018), the crypto/NFT (circa 2018), and the Metaverse (circa 2020). While taking risks and having wrong bets is fine, it’s quite another to shrink from responsibility and ride high on one’s muscular energy alone.

I always liked to ask colleagues what their favorite slogan from the Red Culture Book was. For me, it is “What would you do if you were not afraid?” It’s even more fitting as I head back to the “real startup world”, where things would have to be real, or you run out of money! I do believe such constraint creates a necessary antidote to big company ills.

What would YOU do if you were not afraid?

Badge and Faceversaries