{"id":12336,"date":"2016-09-10T13:20:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T17:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=12336"},"modified":"2016-09-10T13:20:01","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T17:20:01","slug":"more-from-chaos-monkeys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/10\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\/","title":{"rendered":"More from Chaos Monkeys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains some reading list advice for engineers:<\/p>\n

On the last hour of the last day, McEachen [superstar programmer], saint that he was, went to Murthy\u2019s [Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, Martinez’s previous employer] office to say good-bye. He had invested over four years of his life in the company, watching it grow from a small shared space to the expansive floor of a high-end office tower. I waited impatiently by the emergency exit staircase, to avoid running into any other employees. After ten minutes or so, he emerged, looking astonished, or maybe shell-shocked. \u201cHe barely even looked up from the screen.\u201d His voice cracked as he said it. He looked at me imploringly. For a moment I thought he might actually cry. \u201cHe didn\u2019t say anything, and didn\u2019t shake my hand.”<\/p>\n

Matt McEachen, Adchemy\u2019s best, most productive engineer, until the day he left the author of the biggest chunk of Adchemy\u2019s codebase, was treated worse than a contract janitor on the way out. I marveled at a world in which well-meaning, industrious, but naive engineers are routinely manipulated by the glib entrepreneurs who seduce them into joining their startups, then relinquish them when they are no longer useful. Every Jobs has his Wozniak. I couldn\u2019t exactly claim I wasn\u2019t, to some degree, doing the same to him right then. He was merely trading Murthy for me.<\/p>\n

Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They\u2019d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Following a moderately successful seed phase in a Y Combinator<\/a> startup, Martinez has to choose between Facebook and Twitter for his next act:<\/p>\n

In December 2010, Zynga launched a FarmVille clone called CityVille. That game, a moronic rip-off of the far cleverer game The Sims, had accumulated one hundred million users in a month. One hundred million users! If humanity had waited until 2010 to invent masturbation, it would not have caught on as fast as CityVille. That\u2019s how fast Facebook could make something happen.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another data point for you: As part of our push to woo Facebook, I had been getting Google Alerts on the company for months. One in particular had caught my attention. In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying. A mother destroyed with her own hands what she\u2019d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game. Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they\u2019re legal, simply cannot fail in the world. Facebook was legalized crack, and at Internet scale. Such a company could certainly figure out a way to sell shoes. Twitter was cute and all, but it didn\u2019t have a casualty rate yet, …<\/p>\n

I recall very little from the interviews, except a comment from one of the DabbleDB engineers. After getting through the stress questions, I asked him, \u201cSo what do you like most about Twitter?\u201d By this point, we\u2019d built a decent rapport, so with a nod and a wink, he said, \u201cWell, you know, in companies like Facebook and Google, they serve you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here at Twitter, they only serve you breakfast and lunch.\u201d I cringed inwardly. So the big selling point was that nobody worked late into the night, so we could have that chimerical work-life balance?* I smiled to keep the warm vibe going. But that comment more than anything else sealed my decision. I was not going to blow the biggest career wad of my life on a\u00a0company that hesitated to work past six p.m. daily.<\/p>\n

I submit [Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>]\u00a0was an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well. The Jefferson, the Napoleon, the Alexander . . . the Jim Jones, the L. Ron Hubbard, the Joseph Smith. Keeper of a messianic vision that, though mercurial and stinting on specifics, presents an overwhelming and all-consuming picture of a new and different world. Have a mad vision, and you\u2019re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you\u2019re a leader. By imprinting this vision on his disciples, he founded the church of a new religion. …\u00a0Then there was the culture he created. Many cool Valley companies have engineering-first cultures, but Facebook took it to a different level. …\u00a0That was the uniquely piratical attitude: if you could get shit done and quickly, nobody cared much about credentials or traditional legalistic morality. The hacker ethos prevailed above all. This culture is what kept twenty-three-year-old kids who were making half a million a year, in a city where there was lots of fun on offer if you had the cash, tethered to a corporate campus for fourteen-hour days. They ate three meals a day there, sometimes slept there, and did nothing but write code, review code, or comment on new features in internal Facebook groups. On the day of the IPO\u2014Facebook\u2019s victory rally\u2014the Ads area was full of busily working engineers at eight p.m. on a Friday.\u00a0All were at that point worth real money\u2014even fuck-you money for some\u2014and all were writing code on the very day their paper turned to hard cash.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A concrete example of the zealotry?<\/p>\n

In June 2011, Google launched an obvious Facebook copy called Google Plus.\u00a0It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets placing nukes on Cuba in 1961. This was the great enemy\u2019s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared \u201cLockdown,\u201d the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook\u2019s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical. …\u00a0the caf\u00e9s would be open over the weekends, and the proposal was seriously floated to have the shuttles from Palo Alto and San Francisco run on the weekends too. This would make Facebook a fully seven-days-a-week company; by whatever means, employees were expected to be in and on duty. In what was perceived as a kindly concession to the few employees with families, it was also announced that families were welcome to visit on weekends and eat in the caf\u00e9s, allowing the children to at least see daddy (and yes, it was mostly daddy) on weekend afternoons.<\/p>\n

I decided to do some reconnaissance. En route to work one Sunday morning, I skipped the Palo Alto exit on the 101, and got off in Mountain View instead. Down Shoreline I went, and into the sprawling Google campus. The multicolored Google logo was everywhere, and clunky Google-colored bikes littered the courtyards. I had visited friends here before, and knew where to find the engineering buildings. I made my way there, and contemplated the parking lot. It was empty. Completely empty. Interesting. I got back on the 101 North and drove to Facebook. At the California Avenue building, I had to hunt for a parking spot. The lot was full. It was clear which company was fighting to the death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More: read\u00a0Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley\u00a0by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains some reading list advice for engineers: On the last hour of the last day, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMore from Chaos Monkeys - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/10\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"More from Chaos Monkeys - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley\u00a0by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains some reading list advice for engineers: On the last hour of the last day, […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/10\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-09-10T17:20:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"philg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"philg\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"philg\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/448e4e6a0ae9105741a06dcf62cee50e\"},\"headline\":\"More from Chaos Monkeys\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-09-10T17:20:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1276,\"commentCount\":3,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/448e4e6a0ae9105741a06dcf62cee50e\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/\",\"name\":\"More from Chaos Monkeys - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-09-10T17:20:01+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/2016\\\/09\\\/10\\\/more-from-chaos-monkeys\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"More from Chaos Monkeys\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/philip.greenspun.com\\\/blog\\\/\",\"name\":\"Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\",\"description\":\"A posting every day; 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