The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett

Author:Gillian Tett [Tett, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

(RE)WRITING SOCIAL CODE

How to Keep Silos Fluid

“We want to be the anti-Sony, the anti-Microsoft—we look at companies like that and see what we don’t want to become.”

—Senior Facebook executive

JOCELYN GOLDFEIN SAT AT HER desk in a scruffy, open-plan office at the Palo Alto headquarters of Facebook, and felt a flush of shame wash over her. She stared with horror at her computer. A voice in her head asked: How could I be so stupid?

Five weeks earlier in the summer of 2010, Goldfein, thirty-nine, had joined the fast-growing social media giant, hoping to build a new chapter in her career. The move had seemed wildly exciting. A no-nonsense woman with sleek brown hair and cheerful, dimpled face, Goldfein was a rare creature by Silicon Valley standards: a female computer scientist from the hallowed ranks of Stanford University who held a top management role. Before joining Facebook, she had worked for seven years at VMware, a group that made cloud computing technology. She started as a computer engineer who loved to write code; she was particularly passionate about “triaging bugs,” as she liked to say (computer jargon for fixing glitches in code). “At VMware, I built a name for myself by being like this monstrous triager of bugs! I, like, triaged one thousand bugs in my first month at VMware!” she later recounted. But by the time she left VWware in 2010, she had been promoted to general manager of engineering, a role that put her in charge of hundreds of engineers.1 That made her a prime catch for a fast-growing company such as Facebook. And though Goldfein did not initially have much interest in the social media group, since she hated working for big, bureaucratic companies, she was converted to the Facebook dream after she met its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.2 “There was no question after I met him that Mark was by far the most impressive founder of all the founders I met. It’s sort of a trite thing to say, in hindsight, that’s like, ‘duh.’ But he was amazing.”

So in July 2010, she turned up at Facebook’s trendy “warehouse” style offices in Palo Alto. But then events took an unusual twist: instead of being thrown into a management job, she was told to join an “onboarding” induction course known as “Boot-camp,” a six-week training program for new recruits.3 This request was unusual, particularly given that she had already been deputy head of engineering of a vast company. But everybody joining Facebook got hazed together, no matter their age and rank; it was a company rule that all new entrants should experience a joint introduction process, like recruits joining an army—or Goldstein joining the Chicago police.

So the new recruits were all pulled together into a room and asked to start working on some beginner projects, sitting side by side at a desk. Goldfein was treated just like the rookies, and given a humdrum task: triaging five bugs in the system. She was thrilled; fixing bugs was her speciality. Like most computer

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