[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg: "Ship the App" (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Zuckerberg: "Ship the App" (2011)
Author : rurp
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-09-28 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techemails.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techemails.com)
| pensatoio wrote:
| That was a surprisingly direct and non-hostile directive. Wish my
| company communicated like this.
| K0balt wrote:
| Yeah, I thought it was A pretty good example of how to say
| something strongly and directly without being hostile.
| fivre wrote:
| being politely hostile isn't not being hostile, it's just
| being hostile while maintaining decorum. there aren't
| meaningful consequences for a CEO breaking decorum in
| negotiations with those under them; maintaining it is just a
| nicety
|
| while prior context is absent, at least in this email zuck
| isn't offering assistance or asking what he could do assist,
| it's just a politely-worded "get it done, fucker"
|
| i find a servant leadership approach far more effective, and
| better able to acknowledge that said team problems were quite
| likely caused by previous "stop complaining and get it done"
| leadership whose only skill is cracking the whip
| K0balt wrote:
| I mean, it's a bit beyond polite I think, and in the lack
| of proper context we have, get it done seems like enough to
| me. (I'm assuming he is speaking to someone who is supposed
| to have a capacity for management and leadership)
|
| If the PM needs resources, she should just ask for them, in
| this situation. If a PM needs handholding or niceties to do
| their job, they probably shouldn't be a PM.
|
| Making sure priorities are clearly aligned seems like an
| appropriate conversation.
| Oarch wrote:
| I feel this every time I read an internal Zuck email.
|
| I hope to be this clear and concise some day.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Step 1: Be a multi-billionaire from Harvard
|
| Step 2: Have absolute control of the company
| wilg wrote:
| damn thats crazy he was a multibillionaire before creating
| facebook?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| No but he was when he wrote the memo they're commenting
| about.
| malfist wrote:
| Did you read the headline or the actual email? This is
| definitely not non-hostile. He flat out says "I don't care
| about the team"
| exe34 wrote:
| no, he said it wasn't his priority. his business isn't in
| building teams, it's in advertising.
|
| I don't generally like people like him, but I don't think
| he's done anything wrong here . he was actually very clear
| about what he wanted, a great feature in a boss.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| He said he doesn't care about fixing the team as a stand
| alone objective. Which is fine by me, because it's probably a
| bullshit excuse for them not getting things done anyway.
| aag wrote:
| "Separately, I just don't understand why this app is so hard
| to build."
| neilv wrote:
| Overall, the clarity and rationale of the email improves my
| impression of Zuckerberg.
|
| I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but this sounds like he might be
| better to work with than the average tech industry executive.
|
| Not knowing how they usually talk, I agree it's probably "non-
| hostile", but it might be a bit confrontational. And maybe
| that's appropriate for the situation.
| ellis0n wrote:
| In 2012, I created a photo app for the VK social network in 2
| weeks. The app quickly gained 30k users and I was planning to
| adapt it for Facebook, but my partner disappeared. Later, it
| turned out that he sold the app to move to Thailand. If I had
| known back then, I would have sold the app to Mark Zuckerberg and
| become incredibly wealthy
| keyle wrote:
| Wow that's quite the story
| ellis0n wrote:
| Yeah, this wasn't the first missed project. The most
| interesting story came from my music app for iOS in 2010,
| which I developed for a year and which was in the top 10
| music apps in the App Store. But the managers killed it
| because they didn't listen to advice and tried to sell it to
| footballers (the boss just had a sports channel)
| ENGNR wrote:
| I'm not close to these deals, but my understanding is you have
| to have some existing connection to the CEO or at least very
| senior VP's for it to be an actual reality. So I wouldn't feel
| too bad!
| ellis0n wrote:
| As I remember, there weren't good photo apps back then, and
| there were just a few good apps on Facebook, which was
| concerning, while Instagram was just becoming popular.
| Apparently, the managers were siphoning money from Facebook
| and sabotaging the work. My app was called InstaGo and
| offered filters like Instagram. I think it would have quickly
| become popular and reached the top and I would have met a lot
| of interesting people. Of course, the Facebook managers could
| have just copied it if there were no connections with the
| leadership. But I believe that in those days, it was still
| possible to reach out to someone in Facebook's leadership
| through Facebook
| realjohng wrote:
| Starts with the business reasoning. Then, shouldn't be hard.
| Finally, get it done.
|
| That last line gets bodies moving
| testmasterflex wrote:
| How so?
| vundercind wrote:
| Probably the implicit threat.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Interesting to see these companies before they became "infinite
| money generators". I'm sure Zuck today could call upon 500
| engineers if he had something that urgent he wanted done.
| abc-1 wrote:
| Nine women cannot give birth in one month.
| senko wrote:
| They can, if you'd just use k8s in a multiple AWS
| availability zones. (Or was it lambdas? I get confused...)
| dplgk wrote:
| That's because only one women can build a baby at a time.
| Whereas multiple people cann work on an app at the same time
| and ship it faster than one person.
| occz wrote:
| The point you seem to be missing is that some work is quite
| simply not parallelizable, which is what people try to
| convey when talking about multiple women not being able to
| give birth to a single baby in less than 9 months.
|
| You can staff up bigger teams to accomplish bigger goals,
| but this is far from linearly scalable, with different
| categories of problems showing up in larger organisations.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I have, many many times, seen a large organization "crash"
| a project, that is to say put a bunch of new developers
| into it. It almost never works. The first thing that
| happens is that everything stops, while the existing devs
| tell the new ones what is going on and what needs to be
| done.
|
| The second reason it doesn't work is that splitting the app
| into separate parts that can be worked on in parallel, is
| essentially determining the software architecture. If you
| haven't sorted that out then the different parts will get
| built, not work together, and then there will be a
| sh*%storm of blaming each other for why they don't work
| together.
|
| There are cases where new devs can help, but if you don't
| have the overall architecture sorted out yet, then they
| will not, and if you do then there is a finite pace at
| which new devs can be integrated and brought up to speed.
|
| The old analogy to pregnancy is, in fact, spot on.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| But Zuck has learnt his lesson and doesn't call for 500
| engineers when he needs something quickly, e.g Thread was built
| with a much smaller team.
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't know what folks are finding inspiring about this. Mark
| rants about how they need to copy Instagram, and as history
| points out, they failed to do so and just ended up acquiring
| them. This is reactive management, the worst kind of leadership
| where quick, hasty decisions are made.
|
| Was Mark already trying to court Instagram founders when he sent
| this email out?
| tired_and_awake wrote:
| "ship it now, it's easy to ship, I don't care about the team"
|
| Heh and people wonder why we have such toxic managers in the
| valley.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Hard disagree, and I don't think your quote accurately
| summarizes what the email says. On the contrary, when I've
| seen teams in large companies focus on nebulous goals like
| "fixing the team", it usually ends up being a sad, sad
| exercise it futility. What I've seen be much more effective
| is to give teams a very clear, concise business objective
| that they can all drive towards.
|
| Zuckerberg didn't say "go on a death march and burn the team
| out". In my view he gave clear instructions on which features
| should be paramount, which can be immensely helpful for a
| team building a product.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Giving teams clear objectives is a huge part of getting
| them to function. Most teams I've been on that experienced
| any kind of dysfunction were suffering from a lack of
| leadership. We needed something to work towards, not just
| work to do.
| iwontberude wrote:
| You clearly haven't met many people who worked close to
| Mark or for a long time at Facebook. Mark is not an
| engineer and he does not understand team based development.
| The company he created is Kafkaesque with a bureaucracy
| which uses data to make personel decisions but in the most
| comically short-sighted ways. Like using LOC to justify
| compensation rather than impact. Mark created this idiot
| company that succeeds in spite of itself thanks to social
| dynamics and savvy acquisitions.
|
| You can downvote me but it's the reason they can't make
| anything good themselves and why Mark's email is actually
| hilarious. Google is captive to a similar handicap.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Yeah in my experience in large companies, nebulous goals
| just get gamed to the hilt by bad actors.
| freejazz wrote:
| > Zuckerberg didn't say "go on a death march and burn the
| team out".
|
| Is our standard going to be people like Zuck writing the
| literal equivalent? That's never going to happen
| groestl wrote:
| "I think we need to do both"
|
| "Getting the team to a good state is not a milestone _by
| itself_ that I care about" [emphasis mine]
|
| I don't like Mark, but it seems you read his note
| selectively.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why you feel this is a rant? I'm not a big
| Mark fan but generally it sounds like "hey you're not hitting
| your goals and you claim it's team issues and I need you
| balance the two" which seems like a reasonable ask especially
| when he explains why that's the case?
| The28thDuck wrote:
| So I'm more junior so I don't understand why this letter is
| controversial. Is it not important to meet your business goals in
| a crunch and address systemic issues in some sort of post mortem
| or retro? I do understand that there exists "management debt" for
| intra team issues, similar to technical debt, but I don't see how
| it's problematic to ask to prioritize finishing a project that's
| been signed and on for and deal with the issues later, especially
| with the state of the business at that time.
| malfist wrote:
| Maybe because all too often "management debt" get balanced on
| the backs of the engineers. We're always being led to one
| "don't care about the costs, get it done" situation to the
| next.
| blueboo wrote:
| You can theoretically ship at any time. But it might be broken,
| slow, harmful, or fail some critical objective.
|
| Team dysfunction is inseparable from tech dysfunction. Imagine
| one team owns three quarters of this service as another owns
| half of it. Or more likely, one owns a tenth of a problem space
| and another owns a fifth. Suddenly you need a fully realized
| solution. Who will step up? Well, you're the one who actually
| needs it...but surely you don't have to start from scratch?
| Surely...?
|
| Then there's just the fear of showing your ass. The day after
| it launches, who will be in hot water? Will it be you, because
| you agreed with the PM that your substandard code could ship?
| Why didn't you flag the problem earlier? Get more help? Tell
| someone you weren't already a superstar at this infra or that
| architecture?...
|
| And then recall they did ship, it sucked, they bought
| Instagram. Then WhatsApp. And dozens of others
|
| I guess the lesson is: yelling "go faster!" at a blocked-up
| engine is only gonna go so far. Mark's (and many others') move
| is to apply money to replace or get additional engines. Or roll
| up your sleeves and fix the org and culture...doesn't have
| exactly "founder mode" romance to it tho, and there's scarcely
| a harder task out there.
| dplgk wrote:
| Multiple times he mentions the most obnoxious manager-level
| thing "I don't understand why this is so hard".
| Chance-Device wrote:
| I don't understand what's so hard about it either. It seems
| like a pretty simple wrapper around infrastructure that
| Facebook already had.
| abraae wrote:
| That can be a good position to start from when trying to
| break a logjam.
|
| Of course it must be coupled with genuine flexibility to
| change your mind when someone points out actual, real
| difficulties.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's one of those things that sounds really obnoxious until
| you've been on the other side of the table. There's lots of
| things that can go wrong to make an easy problem hard, and
| some of them are only really detectable when you think about
| it from first principles. I've personally seen multiple
| designs that split a moderately hard problem into a set of
| extremely hard tasks, often in such a way that no individual
| task could be simplified on its own.
| MrDresden wrote:
| I am no fan of Zuckerberg nor a user of any of the things his
| company makes.
|
| But he is an engineer, more so than most managers. He would
| know what goes into making an application like this, and so
| know that things are moving slower than they should.
|
| I see nothing obnoxious about asking this very valid question
| under those circumstances.
| fivre wrote:
| chatgpt grant me an AI demon that can transform any manager
| saying this into a pixie trapped in a cage, attached to each
| of their ICs' heads for duration of the project, or something
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Depends on the business goals and why it's being perceived or
| presented as a crunch. A lot of it is just to make someone feel
| important rather than produce value in the market.
| fivre wrote:
| zuck is the founder of the company and has been at the helm
| since its inception
|
| consider where that management debt may have come from, and
| whether accepting the current crunch will somehow alleviate it,
| or signal that crunch will solve all problems and should be
| used, likely more aggressively, in the future
| jeduan wrote:
| I believe this is the app they were talking about. So after this
| email it still took some 8 months to ship Facebook Camera
| https://about.fb.com/news/2012/05/introducing-facebook-camer...
| joshdavham wrote:
| Thanks for finding this! I was wondering what 'app' they were
| talking about
| Mistletoe wrote:
| >As soon as we launch a compelling product a lot of people will
| use ours more and future Instagram users will find no reason to
| use them.
|
| It's so fun to watch after the history happened and see what
| worked and what didn't and how they ended up just having to pay
| $1 billion for their competitor. I'm dreaming of a world where
| companies can't just buy their monopoly, crazy I know.
| bmitc wrote:
| Pretty easy to say when you got an app that prints money by
| stealing data.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's interesting that Threads was built in only about 5
| months, and from my understanding did well in the initial flood
| of traffic it received.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Threads was built intentionally with a very small team I think,
| for this exact reason.
| ein0p wrote:
| Aside from llama I haven't used any of what they're "shipping" in
| a very, very long time. Is FB still a thing? Why?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| FB is still a big thing in various circles.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| There are so many other people than yourself.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Does anyone know to whom this email was directed? It's not on the
| techemails.com site, nor could I find it on the linked twitter
| thread, but I'm assuming it's not redacted in the discovery
| materials on the lawsuit.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| This mail is so very spot on. In large companies there are so
| many people trying very hard to sidetrack the company goals and
| would come up with a lot of excuses of why it should or could not
| be done. In a large company, adding a form field to an internal
| UI (yes internal UI which has much much less constraints than
| user facing) with an optional field takes so much back and forth
| and multiple committee meetings that the feature itself becomes
| secondary (Note that this doesn't happen if there is external
| pressure on the company for the feature, like competition or
| government mandates). I don't think this is a solvable problem
| easily other than keeping hiring very very selective and keeping
| the company as small as possible.
|
| One example of this is the Bill Gates mail about MovieMaker where
| he points extremely obvious issues and in response none of the
| VPs says "This is unacceptable. We will take care of it". The
| response mail is just all of them saying not my scope.
| gr3ml1n wrote:
| I've definitely seen the same at other big companies.
|
| I've wondered where the line is; what's the point at which the
| company grows too much and regresses to this sort of mess of
| needing to get bureaucratic consensus? Purely experientially,
| it seems to be at around the 40-50 people person mark.
|
| I used to think it was an active founder/CEO that couldn't
| direct things anymore, but that happens at maybe 20-30 people,
| so that's not it.
| achillesheels wrote:
| What is the point where the company is eyed as stable for
| retirement goals? That's where the subjective interests
| override the companies objectives and the growth of the
| company changes towards preservative rather than dangerous;
| wherein capital risk intrinsically is.
| divbzero wrote:
| I see how the urgency of this email can be appropriate or even
| admirable, especially in social media where the fastest growing
| apps tend to dominate. I just wish they shared the same urgency
| when it comes to protecting their users-- _e.g._ , the latest
| case of password storage negligence that hit the news earlier
| this week.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678840
| romanhn wrote:
| Multiple comments here talking about how Zuck doesn't care about
| the team. That is not my read at all. He specifically says that
| he wants to both fix the team _and_ ship the product. What he
| does have a problem with is the sole focus on the team (aka
| fixing the team as the milestone on its own) while the company is
| losing its competitive advantage. That feels like a pretty
| reasonable stance from a "wartime" CEO [0]. A healthy team in a
| failing company is not an outcome to strive for.
|
| [0] https://a16z.com/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/
| jarjoura wrote:
| The more interesting question I have is how he knew the speed
| that IG user base was growing. The threat that Google may acquire
| IG when IG was barely a year old seemed quite paranoid,
| especially when Google had almost certainly ceded its Google+
| effort by then.
|
| If anything, the rumors in startup land at the time had Twitter
| as the likely buyer and IG was quickly integrating with them. It
| was a product that, to this day, never felt at home with the FB
| News Feed. Threads is the proof that it really should have been a
| Twitter product.
|
| Zuck does make fair points, and his direct reports calling out
| "team issues" seems like excuses. If anything, the "efficient"
| mono corporate culture of Facebook makes launching a whole new
| product that isn't just a feature of a bigger product almost
| impossible. I was on a couple zero-to-one efforts that never made
| it past the prototype stage because it couldn't really find a
| home in the bigger orgs. Camera was no different.
| einszwei wrote:
| > The more interesting question I have is how he knew the speed
| that IG user base was growing.
|
| See the acquisition of Onavo by Meta/FB [1]. Onavo was a
| Spyware which allegedly provided the data to FB on which Apps
| they were loosing ground to. This very likely played a part in
| Meta/FB deciding to acquire Instagram and Whatsapp.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Nice theory but Onavo was acquired post Instagram.
| meiraleal wrote:
| We can't have a real understanding of it without knowing what
| "fix the team" means. If this team that is in a broken state is
| responsible for shipping an app, not fixing it means not shipping
| the app, that's seem very basic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-28 23:02 UTC)