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Facebook Businesses Social Networks The Almighty Buck

How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million 236

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."
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How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million

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  • by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @10:54PM (#41510195)

    What exactly does Facebook _do_ ?

    • by tapspace ( 2368622 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:00PM (#41510215)

      What exactly does Facebook _do_ ?

      They deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They have people skills! They are good at dealing with people!

    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:04PM (#41510243)

      Do you have a Facebook account? If so, YOU are their product. They sell your eyes and ears to people who give them money for the privilege.

      • by GoodNewsJimDotCom ( 2244874 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:09PM (#41510279)
        Facebook took the old adage from the late 90s: Attract eyes and ears then you'll make money somehow.

        Nowadays there are ad networks that you can cash easy with this, but back in Google's time, it was like the underpants gnomes equation.

        The irony is Classmates.com was first on the scene for meeting your fellow highschoolers, but they charged you for the privilege!

        This teaches us one thing: Don't put any barriers in your website for adoption, even if the barrier is a paywall to profit you in the short run.

        I think this is why freemium games are coming into their own. You have more people playing, money from ads and some money from premium good sales, and if your game is good, more people will come play it than a traditional 60$ game.
        • by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:36PM (#41510457)

          typical marketer perspective. things that cater to the masses are the most watered down boring cliche products possible. No one bothers with the niche anymore and that's too bad. That's where the interesting things hide.

          • by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @01:39AM (#41510793)

            There's money in niche products, but things like broad social networks are not built on niches. When you have a social network, you either get as many people on it as possible, or you alternately find a smaller group who is willing to pay and capable of paying. This is not an easy task. And if they pay, you'd better have some first class service and content, preferably service because content these days is pretty easy to copy unless you are marketing something with a short shelf life.

            Something like Facebook was started for college students and spread to everybody. They did what they needed to do, which is market for mass appeal. I can't argue with what they did, although I do wonder how far they can take it. The craptastic IPO was just another signal that FB needs to do something or it may not fare so well in the near future.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            Well, niches are exactly why Facebook and Google want as much data from you as possible. In hindsight their business models should actually encourage all sorts of niches, because a big problem getting in a niche market is not knowing how to find the right customers. They are more likely to seek help from these data-mining advertisers, and they also pay more per click. Niches, both in terms of demand and supply, is probably essential to their business. The problem you state is in the unimaginative that only
          • by am 2k ( 217885 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:48AM (#41511595) Homepage

            No one bothers with the niche anymore and that's too bad.

            Kickstarter takes care of a lot of niche projects and projects that turn out to be not-that-niche-after-all now.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If so, YOU are their product.

        I love that people keep saying this like it's correct. No. They are not in the business of slavery. Grow up.

        They sell advertising space. That's it and that's all. Same as a newspaper, same as a TV show, same as a magazine, same as Slashdot. There's no reason to try to make it sound more evil than it is. They just do it better because they know you're (probably) between 30-40 and like automobiles.

        • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

          they also track your cookie trail.. that's different than being pitched at a grocery store..at least before they started handing out those scanners that track your movements through the store while pretending to be a convenience.

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @08:38AM (#41512109)
            Then don't browse sites with the "like" button. In order for the like button to work on a website, you must first authenticate. To make this transparent, it's done via a cookie and the site must also authenticate.

            From that info, FB gets to see which account you are and which site you've loaded. FB created this feature, end users love it, and web devel are using it. FB does not force this on anyone.
        • by MrLizardo ( 264289 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:44PM (#41510479) Journal

          I think you must be an optimist: They're no *less* evil than television networks, newspapers or Slashdot. (TV shows are sold to TV networks, i.e., the TV show is the product.) When organizations like this are private they (potentially) *can* retain the goals of their founders, but once they're public (and they're founders sell off their stock), they're *required* to try and make the biggest profit possible. They do this by selling certain demographics of eyeballs to certain advertisers. The user's attention is the product.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            "they're *required* to try and make the biggest profit possible"

            Prove it. I keep hearing that this is "the law", until I read something much more intelligent and educated sounding that said that's not true. I don't know.

            All I know is that the one time I was "given" stock options, it ended up as a tax burden for me and a tax right off for the company.

        • by rnswebx ( 473058 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @12:23AM (#41510629)

          That is not all. Facebook also makes a tidy sum from their Facebook "credits" by taking a 30% cut from app transactions on their platform.

        • by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @12:29AM (#41510643)

          They sell advertising space. That's it and that's all. Same as a newspaper, same as a TV show, same as a magazine...

          I don't write the content for the newspaper, TV, or magazines. That little distinction there is important enough that everybody else gets it.

      • by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:52PM (#41510513)
        Sure. And yet they're paying me (in free services I use to interact with my friends and acquaintances) in order to monetize me. If that payment ceases to motivate me to put myself in a position to be monetized then they lose.
      • Technically you are the supplier and your attention the product.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think the scary thing is that there are still so many people who genuinely don't know.

      They provide free time-wasting software to you, and encourage you to tell them all about you. and your friends. Information about you is the product.
      They sell info about you to advertisers and businesses. They are the customers.

      Will they make enough money to become a long-term stable business before Twitter and/or the Next Next Next Big Thing (TM) steals all of their thunder? Will Justin Timberlake resurrect MySpace,

    • Facebook currently harbors "products" that have left MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, ICQ, AOL.. These products will soon migrate further to some new social verticals as the social web matures.
    • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:30PM (#41510417)

      What exactly does Noah Kagan do? Writing blogs is certainly not his superpower. After reading it I felt I knew less than when I started.

      • by Spuffin ( 466692 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @12:12PM (#41514159)

        What exactly does Noah Kagan do? Writing blogs is certainly not his superpower. After reading it I felt I knew less than when I started.

        Here is another of his sites which has more of his experience: http://noahkagan.com/ [noahkagan.com]

        I'll echo some of the same sentiments others are posting here in that I don't know what he really did at FB but given the information on the site above, here are some highlights:

        Internship at MS in 2003 for ~3 months during the summer before his Senior year; the experience definitely looks like he took a few liberties describing his responsibility.
        Bachelor's in business administration and economics from UC Berkeley in 2004
        Moved on to Intel from 2004-2005; again his experience looks a bit exaggerated. I don't doubt there is truth to it but in my opinion, the way it reads gives the reader the impression his responsibilities were much more than they actually were.
        Moved on to Facebook in October 2005 until he was fired in June 2006. For those keeping tabs, that is less than 1 year of experience at FB. Furthermore, the experience he lists has a lot of what I would consider technical in nature yet he does not have a Comp Sci or related degree. Given the liberties I feel he has taken with his other experience, I don't think this one would be any different. If he helped market facebook during its infancy then he should be marketing that (hah) a lot more than "his" experience with these technical items.

        At the end of the day, he joined Facebook with about 1 year of actual work experience under his belt and he got fired from Facebook after having worked there less than 1 year. Did he lose out on $100M other than what he feels he would have eventually worked up to had he been there until the IPO? Not a chance.

    • by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @03:42AM (#41511143)

      What exactly does Facebook _do_ ?

      This is a bit hard to believe but I have heard that its a bit like Slashdot but they talk about things other than tech. Not only that but female posters are not the exception. Strange, but true?

  • by busyqth ( 2566075 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @10:59PM (#41510209)

    Do you hate your job? Are you only still there because you're waiting to vest? I feel your pain, brother. The only thing that kept me from leaving Netscape in 1997 and walking away from a dumptruck full of cash in frustration was this script. I ran this every morning for at least a year: it prints out the following motivational message:

    Today's NSCP price is $__._; your total unsold shares are worth $____. You are __._% vested, for a total of ____ vested unsold shares ($____). But if you quit today, you will walk away from $____.
    Hang in there, little trooper! Only _ years __ months __ days to go!


    It's amazing how this script can put it all back into perspective and keep you from going postal and strangling someone. Fill in your numbers, and let it remind you not to do something you'll regret later.

    http://www.jwz.org/hacks/ [jwz.org]

  • What? (Score:5, Informative)

    by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:02PM (#41510231)

    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.

    • Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)

      by rgbrenner ( 317308 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:32PM (#41510441)

      That, plus.. according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] he worked there for 8 months over 6 years ago.

      At that point, Facebook was already running for nearly two years.

      Get over it already... you didn't lose $100m... you were a momentary employee of facebook, where had you stayed for 10x longer, and your share wasn't diluted, and etc etc etc.. you might have made $100m.

      • Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AchilleTalon ( 540925 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @02:52AM (#41510983) Homepage
        Anyway, the lessons he learned don't worth 100M. Almost everyone learn them for free. Nothing special in this story at my humble opinion. Everyone with about 5 years at the workplace got these lessons. I estimate that 5 years is the average time to be fired these days.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by umghhh ( 965931 )
        So the actual lesson from this may be that marketing people are a waste of bandwidth and the articles about them are that too. TFA confirms this quite nicely.
      • Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Arrepiadd ( 688829 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @10:58AM (#41513381)

        It's pretty funny that he says one of his mistakes was using Facebook to promote himself and that he learned not to do that. That he should help build something and the publicity comes as a consequence of that. And here we are, 6 years after he left Facebook, reading about him and Facebook.

        Clearly he learned all he's preaching

    • I wouldn't say he is an asshole. I'd say he's someone who made some mistakes when he was younger, lost an absolute fucking fortune over it, and then did something unusual (for assholes) - he conducted a brutally honest self-assessment, used it to make himself better, and bared it for the world.

      Sounds like somebody who grew the hell up to me.

      • Yet his "grammer" and writing haven't improved. Just sayin'...

        And I love some inconsistencies in the article. First he says Facebook was first in his life, then he says he was valuing himself more than Facebook. he should really make up his mind.

    • The only lesson he learned was that it's better to be the bigger asshole and let it rain down on the people underneath you. Note that he's now all about being the shitcanner rather than the shitcannee.
  • A lesson (Score:5, Informative)

    by mallyn ( 136041 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:06PM (#41510253) Homepage
    I did read the article.

    The person may be an ******, but that does not mean the article is worthless. It is a lesson to take with you.

  • why do we care? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:06PM (#41510265) Journal
    I don't know why we care about this guy, but he took firing pretty hard. Who doesn't? As he said, Facebook had an important part in his life, from the article:

    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.

    • Re:why do we care? (Score:5, Informative)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:14PM (#41510317)
      The single best take-home message in the post is nothing new, but have you truly internalized it? You are replaceable, and firing you would hurt you much more than the company. I work in research and it's even worse: whenever somebody leaves, nobody even bothers to carry on the work they'd been doing. What does that mean?
      • You are replaceable, and firing you would hurt you much more than the company

        Speak for yourself. As an underpaid squab, I am much more valuable to the company then they are to me! Firing me would only improve my salary! I would be smiling my way out the door!

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          So quit.

          • There are more reasons to stay at a company than just money. I make enough money to satisfy me (more than anyone in my extended family, actually), and there are other things that make me happy. But it won't bother me at all to get fired, because I've been through that and know how to find other work.
      • their research is a dead end

        otherwise, you'd hear about their research again

      • Re:why do we care? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by petsounds ( 593538 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @12:24AM (#41510637)

        The single best take-home message in the post is nothing new, but have you truly internalized it? You are replaceable, and firing you would hurt you much more than the company.

        Generally, no. People are not replaceable. When you try to replace one person with another person who on paper seems to be equivalent, you will end up changing the company. At low-levels, the effect will generally be localized, although even at this level the Butterfly Effect can come into play. As you move up the pay scale, switching personnel can have more and more noticeable effects on the company. What role they are in tends to have different effects -- switching out people in a role of creating value for the company can change the company's value in an extreme way. Replacing middle managers tends more to have a multiplier effect on the value creators. And then there is the social dynamic one brings, which can cause huge problems within the company organism.

        I think an equivalency to your statement would be: you have no job security. And from an employer perspective: you have no security in retaining the people who give your company value. When either of these parties take those statements for granted, one or both parties will hurt from the loss.

        • Yes each person brings something different to the job. Often so different that I am at a loss to say whether one person is "better" or "worse" than another who is at least in some sense their predecessor. And you know what? Maybe Facebook would now be worth $104,001,000,000 instead of $104,000,000,000 if it had not fired Noah Kagan, and firing him was a mistake. Then again maybe not. There is no way of knowing and nobody at Facebook cares. That is what replaceable means.
          • Yes, you're right it's impossible to know because we will never see the alternate timeline where this guy wasn't fired and he continued to be a douchenozzle at FB. His continued presence there might have had no impact, or might have put their efforts to expand in disarray. In a position that was more crucial to the company -- say, the guy in charge of keeping the servers from being crushed as the user base increased -- the What If might be more severe.

  • by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:11PM (#41510287) Homepage Journal
    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?)
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bzipitidoo ( 647217 )

      why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go?

      That's what I was wondering. From the sound of it, things went from hunky dory to gone in 60 seconds. Weren't there any warnings? Don't people communicate at FB? (Extremely ironic, that.) That end run around marketing, a instance in which communication was very badly handled, sounds like the likely reason, and could justify an immediate firing, but we can only guess. Zoning out at meetings is bad too, but not necessarily fatal. If the meetings were just big wastes of time, as too many tend to be, the

    • During a hyper growth phase the important thing about human resources is to bring in and keep superstars and ruthlessly cull anyone who isn't for any position that isn't basically administrative or infrastructure. You don't want someone merely good when you can try for someone who is amazing, especially when you are trying to completely dominate what you imagine to be a huge marketplace.

      Once the company is firmly established then you can take people who are merely good and work on getting them to up their p

  • by Dan667 ( 564390 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:12PM (#41510293)
    to me, that would be the more interesting article now that we know where he ended up.
  • He didnt... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WGFCrafty ( 1062506 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:19PM (#41510347)
    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.
    • Indeed. I have no idea who this person is, yet having read his post, I am now convinced that he missed out on a bigger lesson.

      My take-away thoughts: if I'd lost out on $100 million in stock options, I'd probably be fairly pissed as well. And his arguments are kind of backwards / contradict themselves: what he's really saying is "don't be replaceable -> work on as much of the core product as possible, as opposed to trying to be 'friends' with everyone around the office, as being the company dandy won't sa

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Anyone who trusts Michael Arrington needs to be canned. This guy was a walking social engineering liability.

  • by aNonnyMouseCowered ( 2693969 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:22PM (#41510373)

    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.

  • and its front page on Slashdot 6 years later?

  • Not a healthy topic. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:40PM (#41510467) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Not all startups invent something brilliant, and it certainly doesn't require to be a genius to get big bucks. A decade ago I worked for a startup that developed a better product than its competitors (evolutionary, not revolutionary). It had a slightly better engineering team, more effective sales force, and more nimble org structure than its closest competitors. As a result, it went public in 2000 and got acquired in 2004. Founders and most of early employees got big bucks. Well, certainly not billions, b
      • by fm6 ( 162816 )

        Not all startups invent something brilliant, and it certainly doesn't require to be a genius to get big bucks.

        I didn't say genius was required to get big bugs. I said that genius was required to make it a certainty.

        From your description, that startup you worked for was a well-run company that managed to build some solid value. Now there's no denying that this is the right way to build a good business. And of course well-run companies have a better chance of winning the fat buyout crapshoot. But the crapshoot is still a crapshoot.

        My only point here is that if you focus on winning the crapshoot, you almost certainl

  • wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:43PM (#41510477)
    I don't know the guy from Adam, but Kagan comes across as a bit of a douche. His lessons learned:

    1- Selfish. 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. Lesson learned: The BEST way to get famous is make amazing stuff. That’s it. Not blogging, networking, etc.

    How about this lesson: be a little less superficial and worry about something besides getting famous.

    2- Marketing. The marketing team’s plan was not to do anything and the night before we opened Facebook to the professional market (anyone with a @microsoft.com, @dell.com, etc) I emailed TechCrunch to let Michael Arrington know to publish it in the morning. He ended up publishing it that night (I was at Coachella and will never again attend) before the actual product was released in the morning. I immediately notified the e-team and assumed full responsibility. Lesson learned: I don’t think what I did was that wrong since the marketing team did not do anything to promote our new features. My lesson learned was more I should have involved them instead of just going around them.

    Two lessons not learned: discretion and the ability to abide by someone else's decision when you disagree.

  • Dont Care (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

    about some asshats reflection and regret brought on because he lost money

  • Comments Disabled (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Anyone else notice that the comments on his page are disabled. A whiny asshat bitches that he sucked and got shit-canned, and he ends up afraid of what people might say on his blog about it. Yeah, that's being "brutally honest" and manning up to it.

  • by Sun ( 104778 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @01:42AM (#41510799) Homepage

    From TFA:

    You are NOT special and there is guaranteed someone better than you on this planet.

    First, sure you are special. Everyone, best or otherwise, bring something different to anywhere they work at (unless it's a soul crushing place). Yes, there is guaranteed to be someone better than you on this planet (well, there is a 1:7,000,000,000 chance there isn't). If, however, you are one in a thousand, the company is highly unlikely to find those better people.

    To summarize my comment so far: You are special, and it is possible that the company cannot get any better than you. You are still replaceable.

    Yes, your replacement will not be as good as you are. They might cost more (at least when amortized over the time it takes them to complete a given task). They might not be as organized as you. They might turn out inferior solutions. At the end of the day, however, they will get the job done.

    Shachar

  • 1. First job, not even out of college, I got sucked into a marketing firm that was doing ... okay... And I invested time (a lot) to make things going from ok to profitable. I n exchange I was supposed (no contract... I was naive) to inherit 50% of company. I even worked over 100 hours per week sometime, no overtime charged, only vacation 1/1. All that just above minimum wage.

    2. I changed jobs 10 years after because the first company got bankrupt. But at that point I was exhausted, as in depression exhau

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by raehl ( 609729 )

      I will probably go to work again in couple weeks as labor for a cheese factory,

      Do they have an employee discount? It will come in handy when you'd like something to pair with your whine.

      • by gagol ( 583737 )

        I just opened to the community... and I will have to live it through. Good for me I am stronger now, but no, I will not have an employee discount. Point was, he is probably not that bad in life as I, or many other people, went through. I even have the courage to Slashdot it using my login name...

        Being employed in factory when you are used to have direct access to the big boss is not an easy thing to do. Please, be respecful to those who open up.

    • and no one would employ me around because I have the tag "depression" hangned around my neck

      Can you elaborate (if you don't mind my asking)?

  • The product is strong with this one. Now learn some grammer.

    Now learn some spelling.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01, 2012 @05:11AM (#41511399)

    ...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.

  • by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @05:32AM (#41511461)
    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 presume the $100 million figure comes from stock options, and not from salary or personal investment. However anyone who has been watching the facebook stock (and smart enough to not buy it) knows it has been dropping rapidly; already less than half its IPO price. Being as employees are still not allowed to sell their shares, you can't say the employees have made anything off of the stock values yet.

    We'll see what its worth when employees start to cash out - or if it survives that happening.
  • by VAElynx ( 2001046 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @07:24AM (#41511693)
    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.

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard

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