The Boy Kings

asked me to tell him everything about my department. I told him who I thought did the bulk of the management work (certain members of the staff), and who didn’t (our boss), and what I thought the issues in the department and the company were.
    “We need to get you out of the department as soon as possible,” he told me. “I think I have an idea of where you will fit,” he said, but he didn’t tell me where. I was elated; perhaps the technical purge was ending and Mark was finally open to the idea of creating meaningful roles for nontechnical employees.
    The next week, Chamath asked me and my management colleagues in customer support to do an evaluation exercise in which we ranked everyone on the Customer Support Team from highest to lowest. Sitting up late that night in the office, I assigned a score to each person on the team. Some were easy to score: They were either spectacularly hard workers or rather lazy, preferring to play company-sponsored Beirut games to the alternately hard and tedious work of solving user problems, but for most it was a queasy and difficult process of comparing apples to oranges, which, in this case, might be one person’s quickness at answering emails versus another’s thoroughness and accuracy.
    When the results were in, Chamath came back to deliver a speech. “Look around you,” he told us. “In a few weeks, some of the people in this room won’t be here. They will be moved to other departments, because they’ve worked hard and have made themselves valuable to the company. Other people in this room won’t be here, because they haven’t worked hard enough. I’m telling you this because you need to understand that this is how it works: You are always being ranked, and it’s your job to perform. How you do here is up to you, but no one’s going to let you get away with not pulling your weight.”
    One of the subtexts of Chamath’s speech was that he and the powers that be had finally figured out that Andreas wasn’t doing much at all and, though it took some months, he was eventually let go, to most of the customer-support employees’ great relief. By then, I was no longer a member of customer support, so Andreas’ departure was of only symbolic consequence.
    Chamath had created a small platform product marketing team to promote the Facebook Platform to developers. The team was headed by Dave, a marketing guy who had come to Facebook in late 2006 from Apple, and a classmate of the early Harvard engineers, Eila, who had worked with some of them at Microsoft. She had a stunning command of business jargon: “Leverage, fire drill, best practices, deliverables” were a few of the words she used often and that I had to learn quickly. I was assigned to work with her on various projects, like redesigning the developer site (where external developers obtained technical updates about the platform) and reaching out to developers and encouraging them to build Facebook applications.
    My first week in the job I was working at my new desk ina cramped wing on the third floor of the 156 University office, where a jumble of database engineers and platform-marketing people sat, when I received an AIM from Thrax.
    “Do you want to go to a show in Berkeley with us?”
    “I can’t, I have to work on a sketch for what the new developer site will look like,” I typed back.
    “Huh? Why? That’s not part of CS,” came his quick response.
    “Chamath is my new boss,” I typed.
    “Chamath is? What happened to Andreas? Are you still going to deal with CS?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, man. So you finally got what you wanted.”
    “Yes.”
    “Without resorting to quitting.”
    “Uh huh,” I replied, waiting to be congratulated on my promotion.
    “So, you’re going to sit on our floor now? Lame.”
    “You’re lame.”
    “Well nobody likes u so . . .” he typed, trolling. One of the engineering managers had once said to me, apropos of nothing, “Everyone likes you,” with a kind of curious envy, as if this was the ne plus ultra of life for the Facebook employee. Facebook did not have the like button yet, but given that we soon would, being liked by everyone was maybe a form of ultimate Face-book victory. I was nonplussed by all this, still accustomed to the academic world in which being liked was suspect: It meant you might be pandering to people for their affection. But I figured that if being liked by everyone was an asset at Facebook, I might as well claim it.
    Thrax and Sam and