When you say 40-50 people, are we talking 40-50 employees, or 40-50 "director" level positions? Because 40-50 employees seems incredibly low for reaching bureaucratic mess levels. In my area, there're plenty of small-medium companies with 50-100+ employees that are essentially founder ran with maybe a few higher level leadership under them.

I'd even say if you're reaching bureaucratic mess at such low employee count, then it's strictly a company issue of adding too much management and too many silos so early.

i've worked at a 30-50 person company that was (is?) super inefficient. at some point there were more directors, managers and product people than actual engineers doing the work. i remember specifically that at one point there was a team of 4 people with 1 engineer and 3 different "stakeholders"!

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.

Step 1: Be a multi-billionaire from Harvard

Step 2: Have absolute control of the company

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

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.

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.

"Separately, I just don't understand why this app is so hard to build."

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

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)

Nice theory but Onavo was acquired post Instagram.

They can, if you'd just use k8s in a multiple AWS availability zones. (Or was it lambdas? I get confused...)

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.

He doesn't just say "why is this so hard?". He provides rationale for what he thinks is required and the effort it should take, posits some things he might have missed, and asks for more explanation. If you get a good-faith request like this from a technical manager, you should be able to point them at some docs or give a relatively concise response as to what they're missing. Honestly, you should have already headed this off, because the moment you realized you were in danger of missing deadlines, you should already be raising it as an issue and either explaining your plan or asking advice for how to get back on track.

If you're missing deadlines, you can't both complain a) when there's no accountability and the business is going poorly, and b) when your managers are trying to hold you accountable.

Ultimately your employer has to make money to pay you for your work. Keeping this in mind is one way to help you avoid yak-shaving, bike-shedding, and other weed-entering activities.

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.

I don’t understand what’s so hard about it either. It seems like a pretty simple wrapper around infrastructure that Facebook already had.

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.

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

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.

Probably the implicit threat.

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.

"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.