The Power of One by Frances Haugen;

Author:Frances Haugen; [HAUGEN, FRANCES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Samidh was a busy person. He had at least twenty people reporting directly to him by the time I was added to that roster, and I met with him for the first time around that same day. I did not have an assigned desk yet, so he told me to look his desk up in the company directory and navigate my way across the building to it. Just as the facade of Facebook’s HQ showed how little they cared about contributing to the aesthetic built environment around the office, the HQ’s interior implicitly reflected what they viewed as the ideal corporate culture. As I walked across the building, I could only be in awe of the scale of it. It was a quarter of a mile long, and the main office space was basically one room at least three stories tall, minus a scattering of conference rooms and bathrooms. A five-thousand-person open-floor office. No one sat above or below anyone else; we were all equal—just some more equal than others.

In orientation it was explained to us that Facebook’s focus on metrics for evaluating everything was grounded in the idea of freedom. Most companies that get to be Facebook’s size ossify because they create more and more layers of management. In most firms, if a frontline worker has a brilliant idea, they have to convince people above them—people who might have vested interests in how the status quo operates—that they should have permission to try out that idea. Facebook understood that social media is a young person’s game—if they wanted to make products that appealed to young people, they had to give freshly graduated workers the ability to meaningfully change the product. Facebook believed that if they set the right goal metrics, they could let everyone run free as long as they pushed those goal metrics up. Everyone, and everyone’s ideas, were equal. The ginormous single story open-floor plan was that corporate culture made manifest.

And it was hard to say it didn’t work. I remember the product manager they brought in to testify about how liberating this philosophy was. Her team had decided they were going to rewrite the payments architecture for Facebook because the one Facebook was using at the time couldn’t adequately scale. They were told not to do it, but they went ahead. A quarter went by and they again were told to stop. Another quarter went by and they were told that at some point they would need to be put on a performance plan. But in the end, they pulled their new payments system out of the fire, and its stability and ability to scale was considered a pivotal piece of what made Facebook Marketplace possible. I don’t know it for certain, but I’m pretty sure she was trotted out every two weeks to explain to us the importance of making big bets and dreaming big. She was proof we could do this too because Facebook was “still a start-up,” where only (measurable) impact mattered.

As I

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