The Boy Kings

female video game characters. It seemed juvenile, but I wasn’t very bothered—it just seemed like the kind of thing suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool.
    “We had to move the really graphic painting to the men’s bathroom because someone complained,” an engineer told me as he gave me a tour of the tiny office. He said this with the slight mocking disapproval that was my new colleagues’ default tone in response to anything that resisted their power. I got it: Just because a few women might be let into their Palo Alto clubhouse, we weren’t supposed to complain about things like sexy images of women on the walls. This was their kingdom and their idea of cool, and we shouldn’t mess with it. I could see that it was, in a sense, a test: If you couldn’t handle the graffiti, or the unrepentantly boyish company culture it represented, the job wasn’t going to work out. Easy, I thought, and anyway, given the absence of women around, I figured they would need me for something. You can’t run a successful company with boys alone. The office was small but the stakes, I could tell, were already high. The cold, outsized confidence in the air—a sense of grim determination that accompanied the graffiti and the graphs and the scrawled in-jokes about quails on the whiteboards—said that they wanted to win it all.
    Rochester eventually emerged from taking a phone call inthe kitchen. He was an august man with gray hair and an untucked faded polo, whose gaze would only ever seem to fully focus when he was talking animatedly to other engineers in the office about scaling, or keeping the site up in the face of increasing users and page views. Scaling, I would soon find out, was the fetish of the valley, something that engineers could and did talk about for hours. Things were either scalable, which meant they could help the site grow fast indefinitely, or unscalable, which meant that the offending feature had to be quickly excised or cancelled, because it would not lead to great, automated speed and size. Unscalable usually meant something, like personal contact with customers, that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era, of human labor that couldn’t be programmed away.
    Though I didn’t quite realize it on this first day at Facebook, I was in possession of a skill set—that of the English major—that was woefully unscalable as far as Facebook was concerned, more of a liability than an asset. When I perused Mark’s profile on Facebook after we had become virtual friends, I noticed that in the Favorite Books field he wrote, “I don’t read.” Okay, I thought, gearing up for a long battle to be appreciated in my new role, this job might work out in the end but it is not going to be as easy as I had first thought.
    Rochester’s mature appearance made me think that perhaps this wasn’t just the nerdiest fraternity house in Silicon Valley and that there might be some adults at the helm who understood the importance of having employees with different skill sets. He gathered me and Oliver, a blond Stanford poly-sci grad, into the conference room to give us a polite but rushed descriptionof our new position. “You’ll basically be answering emails from users. Jake will teach you how to do everything,” he said, handing us off to Jake, another Stanford grad who had started as the first customer-support rep three weeks before. Now that we were here, he was our de facto manager, at least until the official customer support manager could be hired. I sensed from the glowing, familiar way that Rochester said Jake’s name that they already considered him an old hand. When Jake walked into the room a few minutes later wearing a Stanford T-shirt and cargo shorts over a wiry, athletic frame, I guessed that their acceptance of him had to do with his classically preppy looks, like an Abercrombie model come to life. Facebook, it seemed, wanted to have it all: to be the new and scrappy kid on the block and also have the feel of an old boys’ club that had been around forever.
    “What email address do you want?” said a blond IT guy with a goofy smile that put me at ease, as he set me up on my new, work-supplied iBook. “[email protected],” I said immediately. He pushed the laptop over me so I could set my password. “It has to be strong,” he said with a French accent, “that means it can’t be an obvious word, and it needs special characters.” I typed in a strong