The Boy Kings

me feel sharpest, most lithe, most radiant for the long term, because I knew that if I was going to pull off this hack, it was going to take a while. In that sense, perhaps it wasn’t a hack, but then neither would his be. We were both going to use Facebook to get what wewanted. We loved Facebook—it had already given us information, power—and we knew it would use us, too, so we felt that it was fair. Hackers, like everyone else, have a morality of sorts.
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    Most of the men in the office, at twenty-three or twenty-four, were too old and too formally educated to qualify as authentic, self-made hackers, but everyone wanted to imagine himself as one. So, that summer, Mark ensured that the new office—now at 156 University Avenue, after we outgrew the first one—was decorated as a kind of shrine to the boy king. The top floor, which was allocated to nonengineers because it was too sunny to suit the tastes of engineers, was plain and relatively clean, lit by large windows that revealed the perennially blue Palo Alto sky.
    The engineering floor below was dim, with blinds drawn, and decorated in cool tones of gray under all the empty drink bottles, shipping boxes, and candy wrappers that collected amid twenty-four-hour coding sessions. Desks were squeezed in like a battalion, from the entrance hallway all the way to the back of the room, where Mark’s desk sat clean and bare, furnished only with his laptop. The other engineers’ desks were piled high with toys and gadgets and screens: At least one thirty-inch monitor and several extra smaller screens just in case (we customer-support reps were each given one twenty-four-inch monitor). A set of TV screens mounted all along one wall displayed graphs depicting various site statistics: egress and active users and the current load on the servers. Occasionally, like in any fraternity house or other place where young men gather, the men on the engineering floorwould play pranks on one another by putting embarrassing photographs of each other on the screens for all to view.
    The floor wasn’t all young men: By the summer of 2006, three women held product manager positions in engineering. All had been friends with at least one of the early engineers before they were hired. To become a product manager, it seemed, you had to be vetted as much for your ability to get along with the guys as for your product management skills, so no women were ever hired cold into this role. The PMs were a welcome, necessary presence on the floor, providing a warmer reception when customer-support employees occasionally went down to the E-floor, as the engineering floor was called, to discuss preparations for upcoming Facebook features. The men were friendly on an individual basis, too, but the overall atmosphere of the engineering floor tended toward the tense and aggressive. One of the Harvard guys was always jokingly threatening other engineers that he would punch them in the face if they displeased him, until even the most combative engineers had had enough of his violent banter and asked him to cut it out. Regardless, humor around the office usually had a warring, masculine bent, which came from the top: “Domination,” Mark was always saying, joking in a way that was also, you knew, serious.
    There were also often moments of levity during the workday in those early months. One afternoon, as we sat on the third floor answering emails, Maryann got an IM from the floor below that said that we needed to come downstairs quickly to see something. “What’s happening,” I wondered, as we got up from our desks and walked down to E. The boys—nineteen-year-old designer Justin, who had been recently convinced to drop out ofcollege and come to work at Facebook, Thrax, and anyone else with hair that was long enough to flip out of his face at the end of a faux runway—were in the midst of doing a fashion walkoff, starting at one end of the office and walking like runway models to the other side as engineers and customer-support team members cheered them on. They pretended to flip blazers over their shoulders like so many GQ models.
    At the far end of the engineering floor were two small rooms that served as the war rooms, where engineers could work intensely together on developing new products. To the left was Mark’s office, a spare white room straight out of a mafia interrogation scene. The room to the right was where the boys would hide out and sometimes build things they