The Boy Kings

Justin drove off to Berkeley while I sat at work with my computer and a design program that I barely knew how to use, but I was in good spirits. Now that I had what Silicon Valley considered to be a real job, I thought, I could turn my attention away from simply getting along at the company to accomplishing something important.
    • • •
    As a member of the tiny platform-marketing team that Chamath assembled, I attended hours-long meetings about marketing strategy and slaved over my sketches for the developer site. The site deployed robotic, techno-style fonts and spoke exclusively in the language of growth and speed, the language of developers, unlike the user support pages that spoke of connecting to friends. The change from serving users to serving developers was interesting: Suddenly, I had switched from telling users what they couldn’t do to telling developers that they could do anything they wanted. Facebook engineers considered the developers to be peers, so they were keen to make sure that we were communicating and on good terms with them, a concern they had never had with the users.
    My career upgrade from dungeon department to quasi-technical role meant, along with a better salary and more respect from the technical echelon of the company, that I was now on engineering time. This meant that while I could come to work later, as late as lunchtime, I was expected to stay up until all hours answering emails and devoting myself even more monastically to our new enterprise. However, even as the respect and pay were higher, which was a huge relief, genuflecting to externalapplication developers, even if I didn’t agree with what they were doing, felt a lot like the eternal reverence we nontechnical employees were all expected to exhibit for Mark and the engineering department.
    We arranged parties for developers on a frequent basis, arranged contests for them to compete with one another, and most important, looked away from the fact that almost all of Face-book users’ data was available to them through the platform. Technically, they were supposed to scrub their servers of the data every twenty-four hours but, if they didn’t, we had no way of knowing. Mark implicitly trusted developers, external and internal, as if programming web applications was a global fraternity to which one gained membership by writing code.
    That December, after I had worked for four straight months without a break on the Developer site, an engineering manager, Kai, asked me in an email, “Would you rather work on Platform or help with the internationalization process?” Kai was an engineering manager who had previously held a pre-IPO position at PayPal and relished his role as Silicon Valley elder, though he was still young, barely thirty. He prided himself as much on his personality as his technical skills, trolling often on the company’s social email list and generally behaving like as much of a character as possible. He had steeped himself in Internet culture since college. When he and his wife began to have children, they nicknamed them after Internet memes like the lolcat holiday, Caturday.
    “Hmm, I’ll have to think for a moment,” I replied.
    “As the Taoist philosopher Lao-Tse said, all decisions can be made in the span of one breath,” Kai wrote back.
    I knew immediately what I wanted to do, but I held back for a day or two just to gut-check my feelings. After thinking it through, the answer was as obvious as on first consideration: I loved traveling, I loved languages, and I had already taken the initiative with Sam to extend Facebook networks to foreign countries before site translation was even a twinkle in Mark’s eye. Internationalization—the process of translating the Face-book site interface into different languages so that anyone in any country could use the site as easily as English speakers currently did—was what a recruiter might call a core competency of mine, even if I didn’t know exactly what the translation process would entail.
    I told Kai that I was game to transfer to the internationalization team and, when I returned from the holiday break in January 2008, I began the process of moving to the brand-new engineering office that had just opened in a building down the street from 156 University. The “i18n Team,” as it was called (“il8n” was shorthand for “internationalization”), was assembled quietly, behind the scenes, by Kai. He embraced the brewing celebritization of Silicon