Do people on social media believe that all employees should freely share confidential internal information? Or is it that this is an email from a frustrated person and no one should ever share "bad feelings"? Or is it that CEOs should never be aggressive and "how dare he punish someone who broke the rules"?
Am I crazy for thinking that this is completely reasonable in context?
I worked there at the time and got this email when it went out. It was completely reasonable in context. I assume these days, everyone just knows that you can't openly share something within a tech company without it getting leaked, but that change was just starting to happen in 2010 (at least at FB), and everyone could tell something nice was getting lost. C'est la vie.
The email reads like a tantrum, mostly because of one unneeded paragraph. The employee should be fired but the CEO sending a company wide email blast that boils down to "Quit or we'll find you and fire you" is just....bizarre and immature?
If you change the subject line and cut the 3rd paragraph it comes across as pointless but standard corporate nonsense where they feel the need to reiterate common sense stuff and ignore the fact that most people work for money not ideals, but having such a petty line reeks of playground bullshit.
It wasn't really "Quit or we'll find you and fire you."
The real threat went unmentioned because it's illegal. It was "Quit or we'll find you and fire you and every other company/startup in SV will know why we fired you."
Why would that be illegal in the USA? It's not slander or libel if it's true.
There are plenty of good reasons for companies to not honestly describe bad behavior of former employees, but I don't see that one of them is that it's illegal.
I think a number of people misunderstand that the reason why a lot of companies have a "Don't talk about why someone left" de-facto policy is because if there's any ambiguity it's probably not worth the cost of having to defend yourself from a possible libel lawsuit, and not that it's against any law.
The cost/benefit of that changes if there's no ambiguity, evidence of truth is after all a good defense against libel charges (in most sane jurisdictions...), and if the reason is "big" enough they may feel obliged to make it known.
Defamation that questions someone's ability to do their profession is in a special class. You don't want to be the slightest bit wrong about anything in that, i.e. were they misquoted or overheard instead of talking directly to a reporter? Might some employer somewhere who would hire them view any such distinction as different?
Similarly, they leaked data but didn't or he lied and they were entering the phone market? Details wrong could be a long civil case, all the details right could still be a long case.. The only reason to engage in that kind of behavior is to sabotage yourself.
The sentiment is totally ok to think and feel. But it makes you look like an insecure loser to blast the entire directory with you latest grievance.
If you want to project power as a ceo you have the communication task delegated to someone who specializes in company communications and information security.
Honestly I cannot express how much I don't understand this idea.
He has some extremely important message to pass to entire company (failed projects due to lost trust in mobile sector can easily shake company).
Why on earth delegate that and have yet another canned corporate email that will be forgotten 20 minutes later? You can always run content by someone experienced if you want to round up the edges, but if you have something to say to people usually it's best to just say it.
Agree 100%. When I read this sentence "If you want to project power as a ceo you have the communication task delegated to someone who specializes in company communications and information security" I literally had to read it like three times because it seemed so obviously backwards to me I thought I must be missing a negative somewhere.
I hear on HN 99% of the time how folks don't like corporate speak and that they wish leaders were more forthcoming and honest, and here someone is arguing that they just want the corporate-speak version of it. It is completely baffling to me.
Corporate leaks are pretty serious, and maintaining a culture of no leaks is a CEO-level priority.
Handling these at the CEO level feels far more appropriate and effective than delegating it to a security specialist nobody's heard of before and whose e-mail will mostly just be ignored.
I don't see "insecure loser" at all, I see a CEO acting correctly to nip a problem in the bud.
Except for the "please resign" subject line which is a bit hyperbolic.
Corporations aren't the only non-individual entity you can sue, and the ability to sue could be extended separately from other person-like rights or responsibilities (see, for instance, that corporations can't vote).
I was at Facebook shortly after this. Zuck was very present in internal comms, regularly posting on the internal Facebook and holding a weekly Q&A. To me it felt transparent and authentic, and I felt aligned with company strategy.
This email was famous, the clickbait subject gave some people a fright, but overwhelmingly people were strongly aligned with the sentiment and spoke about it in a positive way.
Now at another big tech co and I hear from my CEO and CVPs via mainstream news instead of internal channels. I feel very little connection to the culture and have no idea what our strategic direction is.
Yeah. The head of corporate comms or someone in that chain of command would be very justified in sending something along of the lines of:
This was shared externally from our internal company meeting. I'd like to remind everyone that keeping the information shared in these meetings confidential allows us to be more open with all our employees. etc.
There may be times for the CEO to send the message but, especially at a high visibility company, it's probably inevitable it will become more of a personal thing.
No decent mobile app, no groups, no Messenger, no Instagram, no WhatsApp, no real advertising product. It isn't 35x better, but there is no way the product offering is worse.
The Facebook experience feels worse, but that's because the novelty wore off and people don't share anywhere as much as they did back in the heyday.
The timeline changed into the monster we experience today. We had pokes, games that interacted with our profiles, pictures and albums that all displayed. We still have the network concept where if I went to MIT I was part of that group. This is golden age facebook peaking around facebook graph 2012.
WhatApp came with 55 employees, instagram had 13. They introduced groups October 2010. No messenger or mobile app.
People have stopped sharing but many shares are suppressed and ads appear every 3rd post. Things haven't improved.. but I see they are selling verified profiles now I guess some people were looking forward to that product offering
I don't even use WhatsApp or Instagram so I judge Facebook on the basis of Facebook alone. I still use it but there are literally only maybe a dozen people I know who use it with any regularity. I certainly won't pay Facebook to use it.
We could discuss whether it is reasonable for an actual leak: information which is accurate in its details, so as for to be vanishingly improbable that it's anything but a leak.
Information that is false isn't a leak; it's rumor anyone could have started, pretending to be a Facebook insider. Someone could have forged an e-mail, which someone else believed and so it goes.
You can't simultaneously say that it's a fabrication, and imply that it's a real leak by calling for someone to be let go.
Everyone who received the e-mail would have first seen the subject line "Please Resign" and that it's from Zuckerberg, before seeing that it has many recipients. That doesn't seem very reasonable, even in case of an actual leak.
My line is drawn at bona fide business concerns. Sharing details about an upcoming product is a hard no in my book, unless that product is illegal to the point that whistleblower protections would apply. But this response where Zuck is flipping out (and sent everybody an email with the heart-stopping subject line of "please resign")? It's borderline, in my mind -- I wouldn't share it, personally, but it doesn't seem particularly wrong that it was shared.
It makes sense to address information leaks in an a cc:all email. And it makes sense to give the leaker a polite way out of an awkward and difficult position by suggesting they resign quietly. The email tries to command the employee to leave or face consequences. Offering the employee the option to leave (as a way to avoid implied consequence) is better.
The CEO calling it 'an act of betrayal', appealing to the social good and appealing to building a company culture, is an admission to my ears that company structure and his authority is not his primary concern.
The CEO already has the authority to remove someone/everyone for this behaviour, so the appeals to the good and to not betray a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg himself or cultural connection that Mark wants, just ring hollow. If the leaker-employee sees benefit in revealing secrets to the public, losing the relationship to a billionaire he's never going to meet, or cutting down a company culture he is willing to lose, is not a deterrent.
Setting up a tone and example for future leakers, is better done by establishing the reaction authority will have to the behaviour in the future.
You're using a lot of absolutes ("all", "ever", "never"). You're implying there are a few absolute positions, but, as commenters have pointed out, that's not the case (it never really is).
You're not crazy for thinking it's reasonable in context, but it's also not crazy to disagree with you.
> Let's commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions. If you can't handle that, then just leave.
It's like a teacher dressing down the entire class for something one student did. A single person at the company made this fireable offense. Why is he treating the rest of them like naughty children? Especially since he's so sure he'll be able to catch the guilty party. Catch the person who did it, send a professional email to the rest of the company reminding them that leaking confidential info will get you fired. Treat the adults in your company like adults.
It’s reasonable to not want your employees to share internal information. It’s perhaps less reasonable to put an entire company on blast because one person violated that expectation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. It's only the subject line the parent is referring to. There are practically infinite possible choices for a relevant subject line on any topic, with varying degrees of specificity and tone. Zuckerberg chose super-low-specificity, super-high-negativity. It reads to varying degrees as impetuous, petty, vindictive, ominous, drunk on power, and emotionally retarded (in my personal opinion). It's also unfortunately not terribly surprising/rare in situations like these.
Even something as crap as "to the leaker: please resign" would be infinitely better. At least that won't give the entire recipient list a heart attack.
General population/society has become soft and promotes freely sharing confidential internal information to solicit outrage and/or support. Back then this wasn't the case
Just because certain behaviors are common among CEOs, doesn't mean those behaviors have no elements that can be criticized (i.e. "everybody does it" does not equate to "good"). Also, "snowflake" is pretty meaningless by now. In most cases, it's simply used as a synonym for, "people I hate."
We're not talking here about being overly critical in a code review, or even criticizing someone who pushed bugs to prod. This is someone who intentionally violated company policy in a way that harms everyone who works there. It is not business as usual. Getting mad about this sort of thing is like getting mad about somebody keying your car or spreading false rumors about you: entirely reasonable and justified and not an interaction where professionalism is expected.
Sometimes corporations face tough intense competition, where margins are pressured and products need to be shipped or media/government/bad actors go on a propaganda. If you can't handle that please join a steady, stable electric company or join the government.
This leak wasn't about violating labor laws. It was a leak about a potential future product which they were no longer considering pursuing. This wasn't sharing something bad being done by the company. It was leaking internal information that simply damaged the company with no societal benefit.
Having worked at a different FAANG (and more recently than 2010), I'm kind of on Mark's side with this one. It got to the point where I worked that anything that executives said would be leaked pretty much immediately, so we hardly ever got any information ahead of when the general public did. From what people with longer tenures said, there used to be more information shared with the company at large, but they had to curtail it due to the constant leaks.
Obviously I don't mind people leaking things that are cause for serious concern (i.e. whistleblowers), but yeah it results in kind of a crappy company culture when the people setting the direction for the company are afraid to share their plans with the people actually doing the work. Maybe that's just inevitable for a company with a hundred thousand employees, though.
Leaks happen because the personnel conveying the information believe it to be an indication of bad intent. This means that ill intent on the part of leadership was assumed.
An atmosphere of lack of trust is built. It can be through neglect, or through evidence, but it doesn't occur spontaneously. It is a failure of upper management.
This isn't about a whistleblower exposing something bad. This is about someone going to the press about a (fake) upcoming product.
Don't be naive. You don't leak a fake story to the press because of a lack of trust (???). You do it because you like gossiping. In this case, management would be right to not trust the leakers.
Sure, but also could be a human nature desire to spread news. Knowledge is power after all. Furthermore, upper management trusting important news to employees isn't a failure of upper management, but rather, placing trust in employees.
> the personnel conveying the information believe it to be an indication of bad intent
Oh man do we have a generation w/ communication problems. News is a spectrum, and the whole point of sharing internally is to learn more so when shared externally the information is _useful_.
But your GP comment implies that if the management fires them, then somehow "it is due to a lack of trust, which is management's fault". That's.... some circular reasoning there.
I assume that they are suggesting that free and open dialogue is shared "resource" that is exploited via the choice of individual actors to engage in leaks, thereby contributing to the depletion of a resource that they themselves would benefit from.
However, it's only applicable at an extremely general level, and if you wanted to you could draw a connection between this kind of article and any number of new stories, if you're willing to stretch the terms enough. If it were up to me, comment section etiquette would discourage links to generic Wikipedia articles like logical fallacies, Dunning Kruger effect, or more or less familiar economic concepts unless they had some strong connection to the article.
I agree on the etiquette suggestion, with the addition that linking such topics is fine as long as there is relevant discourse along with the link. Drive by linking isn’t very insightful or communicative.
> Drive by linking isn’t very insightful or communicative.
I figured folks would be able to make the obvious connection between a very important Systems Design concept and what OP was commenting on. I guess I assumed wrong.
huh. I always figured it was the companies pr department doing leaks to drum up interest ahead of release or asses market demand for the products/build anticipation, or maybe executives trying artificially/deniably juice the stock price just before selling stock's.
I was an intern in FB in 2010 and I distinctly remember getting this email. My full-time buddies, some of which included very senior engineers who often work with Mark, mentioned the got the shivers when they saw the title and thought they just got booted :)
You are absolutely correct that during this time, they (accurately) predicted that targeted advertising would give them a tremendous advantage and become lucrative.
However, folks there also sincerely believed that authentic identities would curb some of the toxicity that was being seen on the anonymous internet. That being exposed to diverse perspectives from friends could be an Avenue for increased tolerances. That giving common people a platform would be a net benefit to the world (Arab Spring was around this time).
In hindsight, much of that was wrong, but that doesn’t change the sincerity of the belief in that moment.
Even with the tag, this feels click-bait-y given the current layoff trend in tech. This article is about a leaked, false story, not about people quitting as a result of economic issues.
With language models I won’t be surprised if it’s possible to create semantically equivalent but syntactically different text such that you can uniquely identify leakers.
Then you could send these out in a coordinated fashion to identify which group, if not person, is leaking.
The message says that they will find the leaker, but I doubt it (of course this is from 2010, so if they were found they have been for a while now).
> we watermark all the model outputs using the method described in Kirchenbauer et al. 2023, so that others can detect (with some probability) whether an output comes from Alpaca 7B
> We propose a watermarking framework for proprietary language models. The watermark can be embedded with negligible impact on text quality, and can be detected using an efficient open-source algorithm without access to the language model API or parameters. The watermark works by selecting a randomized set of "green" tokens before a word is generated, and then softly promoting use of green tokens during sampling. We propose a statistical test for detecting the watermark with interpretable p-values
There is no reason this couldn't be watermarked with the individual user, though the if it detects them probabilisticly then it could be difficult to make the case to take action on inferences made.
If they start doing that, leakers will do the same - Take their leaked version, run it through ChatGPT, get something that's similar but not the same for the leak.
Post-truth is the era where nothing is attributable to a human because of AI interventions, and liability is shielded at every level because of it. It's insane.
As I recall they did fire at least one person over this. Google had done something similar with the person (who turned out to be a contractor vs a full time employee) who leaked photos of the first Android phone.
Everything happening within a corporate network is tracked, so yeah unless the leaker was going through extraordinary lengths to cover their tracks it's only ever a question of how much effort you are willing to put in to find them.
He runs a network that basically builds a East German style profile on people. Wouldn’t doubt in the least he has best in class capabilities to track this down.
False - today none of these companies can even accurately track granular performance metrics in a way that correlates it with the company’s bottom line.
Hence if they can’t do that, he’s gotta send an email about it. Tesla even had to send encoded spaces in letters to get leakers.
If you can’t measure what’s going right, you sure as hell can’t measure what’s going wrong.
Calling something "world class" reminds me of "military grade". They've invested millions (billions?) at it and are probably better then most organizations outside maybe intelligence agencies (intelligence agencies sometimes being an oxy-moron in their own right) - overall I hate that facebooks internal data policies are referenced as a laurel that can be slept on.
Usually I join in on the hatred for someone like Zuck, but this was a well articulated email that addressed the issue directly. I hope if someone did leak information intentionally that they did resign. Can't feel good to be called out amongst tens of thousands of others and know it was you.
> If you believe that it's ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. ( ... ) We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook.
"Ever" is an exceptionally poor word choice in Zuckerberg's email. Imagining a scenario where something bad is being done (intentionally or not) isn't that difficult. I believe there are circumstances that NOT whistleblowing would be a moral failing.
"But no realistic situation would require you to leak" is not a good strawman defense for Zuck's word choices. There is a broad history of whistleblowing in America being the necessary first step to unravel bad things. You don't even have to leave Silicon Valley to find Theranos, the Google/Apple/Facebook no-poach collusion, etc.
He’s saying that the company is internally open and transparent. But does not share confidential information to the outside world. There is no contradiction here.
That's... exactly what he was going for? He wanted this email to have a lasting impact and to make people afraid of ever sharing confidential information. The subject was perfect.
You can have a lasting impact without doing something that makes you also look like you don't give a shit about your employees. If I see my employer purposefully try to make me feel for a moment that he was demanding I resign, my opinion of him would immediately shift to "he's either immoral or has a more concrete psychological issue." I think most people probably would feel that way, but there are social politics at play in this case causing people to be unwilling or unable to make an honest attempt to put themselves in the situation.
It's literally not a phone. Facebook didn't build or design any hardware. It's exactly what Mark said, an interface layer (Launcher) for Android, and it came bundled with this HTC phone.
Half the commenters in here are saying this a completely reasonable thing for him to say, and the other half are saying this is completely unacceptable for a CEO to send out
Honestly people just have different values. And that’s totally okay. There’s lot of places to work and live and we don’t all have to homogeneous aspire to a single model or culture or behavior.
I like this kind of direct messaging and dislike the weak corporate messaging of today’s landscape. “Moving on to a bright future..” and then 2 paragraphs of meaningless fluff before finally finding out that there’s a product line being shut down or there was a security breach.
Summary: someone in the world spread a false rumor about Facebook, and Zuckerberg stupidly called it a leak, assuming someone one the inside is responsible, and should be let go.
Well, looking back, would they have been better off had they built a phone?
Tough to say, Mark doesn’t know how to build a device. However may be he could have made the device free in exchange for reaping all of user’s data. May be not. It would cost a lot of money and probably put google at a crossroads because apple and Facebook would then be positioned on either end of the spectrum with google not knowing what to do. I would have loved to see mark try to make a phone instead of Bezos.
Around the same time, summer of 2010, TechCrunch also reported that Google was making a ChromeOS tablet, which was going to be released in the next few weeks.
I was interning on the team building the first ever touch screen for ChromeOS, in Waterloo, ON. We had barely gotten anything working yet. It was all super early days stuff.
We all laughed at the article and thought nothing more of it.
I think TechCrunch was just basically throwing darts and seeing what hit.
> We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook. That's culturally important to us and I'm committed to keeping it. But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally.
That's quite hypocritical. "We make our money spying on people. Spying will not be tolerated."
I can't help but thinking whenever I see Facebook about the change that we could see in the world if the platform were able to prioritize connection and social cohesion. Enabling people to see things from new perspectives and discuss things freely and openly.
There's so much power for good in the platform, which is being held back by the need to return a profit.
> If we don't, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world.
I work at a non-profit and wouldn't dare to utter these words to any employee. I understand believing what you preach, but actually saying you work on "changing the world" in an internal email seems very problematic? Is it just me?
> Actually saying you work on “changing the world” in an internal email seems very problematic? Is it just me?
Yes it’s problematic.
No, it was the usual thing to say back in 2010, it was normal.
My unicorn adopted the value “We advance humanity, through the power of software” in 2013 and that triggered me quitting and relinquishing half my stock options. I was a problematic employee so it was a winwin for them, but nonetheless it was a fucking gross thing to say, especially with the videoclip of a girl limping in Africa, for which we made the software that helped the developer that helped the doctor that helped the little girl getting stilts. We don’t advance humanity, we get overpaid from large corporation margins for outputting good software, with a sidenote of donating 1% for the greater good. It’s not even open-source.
That’s fucking extremely gross and inappropriate to say that’s advancing humanity. It lacks humility.
To their credit, they didn’t prolong the campaign and I’ve never heard them say it ever since 2013. I still have this ad in my new startup. In the toilet. To remind people to take care of their family before the corporation. Social fabric is what ties humans together, not our software.
Right, it's hardly seems problematic. Just the usual cliche. I mean besides changing the world, I'm sure his employees are giving 110% and thinking outside the box and totally being transformational.
Facebook most certainly changed the world. The result was not good from my perspective. You can justify phrases like "social good" in a lot of different ways. Which is why you should always be skeptical of such claims.
Honestly think this is quite common at the CEO level. I swear it's like a requirement, founders have to be a little bit deluded into thinking they're changing the world and not just... starting a business.
There’s a survival selection process. The ceo founders who did not believe it in their bones failed very early on. Because honestly you have to be a little bit insane to take on that much risk and uncertainty (not to say it’s a good thing, the other 999/1000 who also believed don’t go anywhere)
Building a phone would actually be a good move. There is just too little competition in this space and the only two players are hiding behind the duopoly so they don't have to deal with competition laws. And for Facebook it means that they don't have to comply with AppStore rules.
Zuck dabbled in a phone platform, saw Microsoft’s $10B+ failure at building the third smartphone ecosystem despite deep pockets and a product that critics liked, and decided he would drop the phone and instead get a head start on the next revolution.
Ten years in, the company has been renamed, numerous variations of hardware and software have been tried, and all the pieces for a platform are theoretically in place. Yet users seem to only show up for occasional fitness and horror games. But Apple is entering the headset market this year, which could be a turning point eventually.
Can Quest 3 be like Windows 3.0? Seems unlikely, but at least it’s interesting to see these giant companies push so hard for a new interaction paradigm.
Microsoft only has itself to blame. They reset the ecosystem 3 times. First with Windows Phone 7 (no backwards-compatibility with Windows Mobile 6 and prior), then with Windows Phone 8, and finally with Windows 10.
If you're already struggling to get developer mindshare, the last thing you should be doing is making backwards-incompatible changes every other year and force everyone to start from scratch.
A Facebook phone would have many problems, but I'm sure they would at least not be as stupid as Microsoft was.
Nicely put email. I hope folks don't disregard that when you're in a leadership position this is one of the better moves to make especially as an "initial" move.
Different positions mean different contexts mean different actions.
Well, I mean in a sense it's a laughable game that companies and their executives (and their employees) play, isn't it? There's a constant battle going on, and not just a little because of the company's own choices, don't you think?
Company X wants to keep plans and products confidential and internal, yet at the same time, wants to achieve world domination and penetration of its products to all the world's users. Somewhat inevitable to be in conflict, these goals, especially when you start to have on the order of 100,000 people you hire to be able to take over the world.
And I get the frustration, but not the outrage of executives. You created this human-based organization to power your capitalist (in the best sense) ambitions -- don't imagine that you have full control over it, especially if your past actions have created a culture that doesn't trust your publicly stated intentions fully.
And just to caricature even more, boo-hoo, my problem is that the media got told my huge company is building a phone, but we're not. Cry me a river. It's the greatest injustice humanity has ever experienced.
Isn't this publicity good? I think whoever leaked that to press gave Facebook a favor. He could've twitted, "Fake news, we're not building a phone" and that's it.
> Even now, we're in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because they now think we're competitors. They think we're building a phone to compete with them rather than building integrations to make their phones better.
However, it mentions lesking internal communications - which indicates that the leaked information was actually legit at the time, even if nothing came out of it.
Am I crazy for thinking that this is completely reasonable in context?