Slashdot Mirror
Working at Facebook Sounds Like Joining a Cult (gizmodo.com)
Vanity Fair has run some excerpts from an upcoming book by a former employee that gives insight on how things work at the social network. The chapter, among other things, details Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's actions when Google launched its own social networking service Google Plus. The extract finds Zuckerberg's behaviour so intense that it calls it "bordered on the psychopathic." It reads: [...] hit Facebook like a bomb. Google Plus was the great enemy's sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared "Lockdown," the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook's earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.â [...] Rounding off another beaded string of platitudes, he changed gears and erupted with a burst of rhetoric referencing one of the ancient classics he had studied at Harvard and before. "You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. 'Carthage must be destroyed.' For some reason I think of that now."
Facebook is being led by a leader who promptly reacts to challenges facing his company. If this was supposed to paint Facebook/Zuck in some sort of negative light... it managed to do the completely opposite.
It's "summary".
But you're right. I was kind of upset when I got halfway through the article and realized it's nothing about a cult-like environment at Facebook. It's about the showdown between Facebook and Google Plus. Anything cult-like about Facebook gets a little bit of mention in passing and it sticks out as kind of awkward.
And then we find out it's just a selection from an upcoming book. It's not a stand-alone article, at all, and that probably explains its bewildering constant change of tone.
The headline should have read something more along the lines of "Zuckerberg's weird behaviour gets strong mention in this promotional article trying hard to sell an upcoming book about Silicon Valley culture in general." Which would have instantly bored the piss out of anybody and nobody would have wanted to read it.
Maybe whoever posted it works for Vanity Fair or the book's publisher, or something?