What Employee Lock-In Means At Facebook 391
theodp writes "In the early days of Facebook, the company would go into what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called lockdown, where no one is supposed to leave until the task at hand is done. Speaking on Saturday at Startup School 2013, CNET reports, Mark Zuckerberg remarked that the practice persists to this day. Facebook doesn't lock people in the office, but it comes "as close to that as we can legally get," Zuckerberg said to an eruption from the crowd. The lockdown isn't the first at-home-in-a-Bangladesh-garment-factory management technique Zuck's touted at Startup School. Back in 2007, Zuckerberg drew fire for advising company founders "you should only hire young people with technical expertise" if they want to be successful. And while there are no reports of Facebook hiring 9-year-old bosses yet, the LA Times reports that only young undocumented immigrants are welcome at the hackathon hosted by Zuckerberg's FWD.us next month where "tech CEO's like Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Drew Houston and Andrew Mason will be sitting side-by-side with undocumented youth [with technical expertise] creating tech products to help the immigration reform movement" (invitation to 'day (and night) of working')."
Bad summary (Score:5, Interesting)
tl;dr (Score:5, Interesting)
tl;dr - if you want to be a huge success in business, you need to be an a**hole
Zuckerberg (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Illegal, Not Undocumented. (Score:4, Interesting)
Who''s stupid? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not stupid, but desperate. Getting a well-paid job isn't easy these times, you know.
Well paid?
If you consider all the hours, stress, and bullshit one has to put up with from billionaires who got real lucky, the pay in software development sucks.
I have a relative who is an electrician for a utility. He works less annual hours but with the storm overtime and shift differentials, he pulls in over $100K (after union dues) - AND he has a pension.
AND his job can't get off-shored.
Sure there are some late nights freezing his ass off, but at least he's PAID for it. Oh, and at 50+, he (and everyone else his age or older) hasn't "aged out" like many of us do in this industry.
We call them "Cannonball Run" (Score:5, Interesting)
We have Cannonball Runs, where our developers and engineers work long days, enjoy company-provided, catered meals, and concierge services to help in their absence at home, and of course preems, which are financial incentives for accelerating the schedule.
It's about as far from what this asshole is doing as you can get, but we get fantastic results, and the work product is very high quality. That's why I spend the money to do it. It does cost money - about $5k/day for a team of 10 people (I refuse to call them "resources").
Re:Because "Illegal" is a stand-in for racial slur (Score:4, Interesting)
A few points. First, I don't consider our right to control who enters our borders to be tyrannical. (I do agree that there are cases where enforcing the law is immoral, as with the examples you gave.)
I'd also be more accepting of having unenforced laws on the books if it was for very brief periods. But instead what we seem to end up with is a legal code that monotonically grows. I see that as incompatible with the doctrine that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". Our legal code is so large now that we basically have ex post facto laws: the government can always find something to arrest anyone for, if they really care to. To me this is a great evil.
Re:Illegal, Not Undocumented. (Score:4, Interesting)
Having accidentally been born somewhere shouldn't give you special privileges.
Good idea. Let's get rid of the birthright citizenship that ensured that former slaves were citizens, and also ensures that the children of illegal aliens who were born here are US citizens. Do you prefer that we abandon jus soli in favor of jus sanguinis, so that people whose families have been in this country for generations are not citizens? Or should everyone just be stateless until such time as some country decides to grant them citizenship?
Re:Illegal, Not Undocumented. (Score:5, Interesting)
The anti-Latino prejudices of today are no different than the anti-Asian, anti-Jew, anti-Irish, and anti-German prejudices of the past.
Except for, you know, that part where the Asians, Jews, Irish, Germans, etc. did their paperwork to get in. If they didn't, they weren't let in. Apparently Spanish-speaking immigrants are "more special" and don't have to immigrate properly.
Re:Young stupid people (Score:4, Interesting)
This was a new thing to me, because I was used to being in college where I had to stay up all night if my project/homework wasn't done. If I hadn't worked with him, I would have stayed with the 'all-nighter' attitude for a long time, because I didn't know anything better.