Slashdot Mirror
How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million
First time accepted submitter abhi2012 writes "Noah Kagan, a former Facebook product manager, has written a brutally honest article about how and why he got fired from Facebook in 2006 and what he learned from it. The experience must be particularly painful, given that it eventually cost Kagan a $100 million fortune."
What exactly does Facebook _do_ ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/
I actually mostly read TFA. This guy sounds like an asshole, but at least he does a decent job admitting it. For those of you too impatient to slog through it, he basically says "I was a product manager but I wasn't very good at product managing" and "I used the brand more than I added to it" (w.r.t holding parties at the office, self-aggrandizing on his blog about working at FB). Not to mention going behind people's backs, like all of Marketing, on a new feature.
Short version: I was a liability, and they fired me for it. At least I learned something.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The person may be an ******, but that does not mean the article is worthless. It is a lesson to take with you.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
At that time, here’s the order of what was important in my life:
1- Facebook
2- Myself
3- Food / Shelter
OK, it sucks the get fired, but he lied in that list above, in reality he actually put himself above everything, and really abused his relationship with Facebook. As he later admits:
I wanted attention, I put myself before Facebook. I hosted events at the office, published things on this blog to get attention and used the brand more than I added to it.
Add to that he wasn't paying attention at all in meetings (well, I don't blame him for that but sometimes meetings are important), he didn't work well with others, and eventually he just annoyed the wrong people too much.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There isn't really a how here—just (rather gamy) reflections on possible "why"s. The piece is not really very good at generating sympathy, either; the author comes across as erratic, impatient, and insecure—more than a little like a stereotypical teenage girl in disguise. Perhaps the true lesson is that marketing is a strange, shallow world. (And more importantly, why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go? Do they just randomly axe underperformers at FB, or was that another critical part of the coherent thinking process left out of the story?)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
to me, that would be the more interesting article now that we know where he ended up.
He didn't lose the money when he got fired, I would say he lost it by not having a golden parachute.
And he wasn't very insightful, I mean, he named 3 specific events and a SINGLE reason he thinks contributed to why he was fired.
His reason is stupid. He's was a show-er (rigid non adapting thinker) and not a grow-er (some one who adapts and 'grows the brand') or a veteran (some one who grows a bunch).
Completely arbitrary and meaningless stuff. He sounds like he was working in an environment where hyperbole sold, just apparently not for too long.
it teaches humility
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The guy's basically a marketing manager. You might be the smartest person in company, but if a glorified salesman is all you are, you can easily be cloned. The exception is if you developed enough good connections OUTSIDE the company that you can take a shitload of the client base if they fire you. I don't think this is the case with Facebook users, fake or otherwise.
Of course, marketing types get paid more than the typical engineer if the product is successful. But if you want a more stable job, it's better to be the craftsman working at the product, than the pretty face selling it at the counter.
It's a familiar story. I worked with a guy who interviewed at a certain small software company back in 1982, and refused their offer because he thought their CEO was an insufferable dork. And of course that dork's name was Bill Gates.
Another bunch I worked with on a skunkworks startup had been with a certain other Big Name back when (this one I have to keep to myself) and just barely missed out at cashing in when they got bought out. The whole point of the startup they had brought me in on was to try and recreate that magic moment they had missed the first time. And of course the startup's product was hopeless, since all it's motivations were the wrong ones.
Which kind of demonstrates the stupidity of the whole approach. I don't mean the obsession with might-have-beens (though that's pretty unhealthy). I mean the obsession with getting rich by being part of The Next Big Thing. Unless you're a fucking genius (and trust me, you're probably not), you're not going to invent something really brilliant, and that's the only sure way of cashing in. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice. OK, you roll the dice every time you start a business. But to have any hope of succeeding, you have to be focused on the the basics of making your company work, not crapshoot aspects, which are simply beyond your control.
I'm not saying that nobody ever lucks out and gets big bucks. But it's just not something you can plan. If you want to gamble, buy a lottery ticket: the odds in your favor are just as good, and it'll screw up your career a lot less.
How about this lesson: be a little less superficial and worry about something besides getting famous.
Two lessons not learned: discretion and the ability to abide by someone else's decision when you disagree.
One of his lessons learned is that "everyone is replaceable", which is the sort of things action movie villains say when they're pointing a gun at the hero's head.
What do you think the letter section is?
Oh and what are you doing when you create a post on slashdot which generates revenue from advertising?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...and not whether the guy is an asshole, but (a) he is an asshole and (b) what the hell WAS the lesson? This dipshit can't put together a coherent thought. To wit:
Lesson 1 is not only wrong, it's uninformative. A company gets famous by making a fabulous product? No s**t. Or was it that a person gets famous by making a fabulous product? But he's a manager, not a creator. Did he mean he figured HE could get famous by... managing... a fabulous... product? F**k it, I'm done with that one.
Lesson 2 insists in two consecutive sentences that he shouldn't have gone around the marketing guys, but what he did (i.e., go around the marketing guys) wasn't wrong. So, it's not wrong. But he shouldn't have done it. F**k it, I'm done with this one, too.
Lesson 3 is that you need to see if your weaknesses are hindering your ability to do the job. That's... a lesson he needed to learn? Did he also learn that he needed to put on pants when he left the house in the morning? Who IS this idiot?
The guy actually admits that he thought the company missed him after firing him, like Facebook (even in its early days) was some high school s.o., pining away for him. You're kidding, right? Who the hell has that kind of sense of self importance, especially a guy who, by his own admission, wasn't one of the driving forces at the company? I love that he actually follows this up with the insight that "everyone is replaceable." In fact, most people (but not all) are replaceable. Most of the people who are replaceable are business types who specialize in bureaucratic process control... like this dope. The creative types... less replaceable, depending on their skill and originality.
Seriously, he talks about how he just wants to focus on the job instead of, you know, self-promotion, but here is bloviating on the internet about his "insights," all of which would be old news to anyone with emotional and intellectual maturity of a sixteen year old.
Ooh, that's truly heartbreaking. I feel so sorry for this lad missing out on a completely disproportional lump of money.
Back to important things. I wonder what's on the menu in the cafeteria.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
He is showing regret that he should have learned these lessons before he screwed himself out of this kind of money. I didn't see anything in that blog post that suggested he was "cheated out of the money" and indeed suggested that he really wasn't fit to be getting that kind of money... at least with the skill sets that he had at the time he was fired. In fact, he even goes so far as to express that if the him of here and now was in charge of the him of then and when, that he would have fired himself in nearly the same way (perhaps more diplomatically, but it would have still happened).
I've been in some of the same position more than a couple of times, where I made the wrong decision in my career where had I been able to take the skills I have today and have been in the position I was at elsewhen, I would have been a multi-millionaire myself. No real regrets, and I've learned those lessons over time. My hope is that other opportunities will arise that I can take advantage of and hopefully not screw up if it comes up again.
I suspect that /. might be selling him slightly short - after all, he says he was promoted a while before that.
What I suspect happened is that he was a fine worker where he was, and someone up thought of promoting him. What resulted was him peacocking as he admits, and not being of particular use at his new place, even creating fuckups. Well, they couldn't quite demote him again because he'd read it as being a stop to his career and would leave anyways, not doing much in the meantime - the logical, if nasty option was to show him the door as unexpectedly as possible.
The actual lesson is: getting promoted doesn't mean you have everyone in your pocket yet.