Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

What was still undecided was which of the two proposals Facebook would pursue. A year from this meeting and in this same conference room, with more or less the same cast assembled, we’d finally decide that question. It would take Facebook an exasperating year to even decide to decide. The resulting decision, when it finally came, would see me ejected from Facebook, and change how Facebook made money for years to come.

A year to decide that...after months of preparatory haggling? Yes, this guy should lose his job. Also, why didn’t he have a recommendation, rather than: “here are three options, I don’t think the first one will make money, and I won’t say whether we should try either or both of the other two.” What’s he doing all this time?

I looked up from a row of four monitors covered in blue windows flowing with computer code, a financial matrix only a select few understood, but whose outputs made the world go round.

Which was it? Code or data? Sounds like data, not computer code. This guy....

According to our code-repository statistics, McEachen had written about half the code in the Adchemy codebase. As employee number eleven, he was that archetypal figure on every product team: the silverback, the neckbeard, the absolute expert who knew all the secret scripts that could be run, and where all the technical bodies were buried. And he was that person for just about every product the company had ever made, all the ill-conceived, disconnected, and random functionality that lay unwanted and unmonetized in hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Not something to be proud of if you’re actually trying to build something to last. Retrospection may suggest doing otherwise, but wouldn’t want to confound with someone who exhibits this behavior.

Sequoia was ensconced in one of the regulation two-story, poured-concrete-and-wood-trim, open-courtyard structures that dotted the manicured slopes around Sand Hill Road between Stanford and the 280.

“The 280”? Outsider.

But the average Facebook user considers the service to be some sort of frivolous toy, rather than a social utility on par with running water, and therefore thinks we can just shut it down if it seems to harbor any hint of criminality.

Sounds right to me.

Whine if you must about the odd erroneously flagged post, but spare a thought for the Facebook security team, those dedicated geeks in the watchtower. They’ve likely put away as many (if not more) bad guys than your local law enforcement agency, and they keep their vigilant guard with nary a thanks from users.

Ok, let Facebook be the honeypot and do something useful with your time?

If this stretch of Facebook life seems chaotic in its random divagations,

You’re only allowed to use words with that same root once per book. -10 points for Slytherin.Especially suspicious given the admission that his editor removed around a dozen “massive”s from the text. The set of people who naturally overuse both *divagation* and *massive* would seem to be small, perhaps fictitious?

Oh, and spare me your claims that you’d be willing to pay for Facebook instead of seeing ads. It’s not even clear what Facebook should charge you. The whole point of the ad auction and the dynamic marketplace for your attention is figuring that out. Setting a usage fee would be like IBM declaring it’s going to pick an individual price for every investor who wants to buy a share, rather than leaving the price discovery to the open market of a stock exchange.

Or not. Many companies find that they are able to set prices for *valuable* services. Casinos too, which is really what fb is: info casino, cause occasionally it’s actually good (or so I hear), but the house always wins (all of your data). ;)

Advertising is the only reliable business model that’s worked for all but a handful of publishers, and those only among the elite, content-producing ranks of The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, who manage to charge their users. If you want to interact with the world via the Internet, then deal with ads.

Why are video and game media so much more able to charge? It’s a good question. Guess not enough people like to actually read, or care much about what they’re reading. Case in point: I’m reading this...oh, and I paid (something) for it, doh!

We needn’t have worried. The adoption of the new policy lost by a landslide: 90 percent of voters were against the new data policy that Facebook needed to survive. But . . . almost nobody voted. Not even close to 30 percent of users. As such, the voting result was “taken under advisement”—by which we mean “ignored.” And be grateful we did; Facebook would be in trouble right now otherwise, as the company-saving products that launched later would have been impossible under the old data policy.

Eh, yeah, not so grateful. Would have been happy to see fb fall—and global worker productivity immediately rise!

All Facebook’s technology is designed thusly, and that will never change. If you stop for a moment and realize how suicidally stupid it would be for Facebook to hand over its data on users to anyone, for any amount of money, you’ll realize how tired that “Facebook sells your data” meme is.

Ehem. A) Cambridge Analytica B) Even after that, fb still thrives.

When infiltrated, someone would post on the Facebook Commute group indicating there was a Google spy on the bus, and to keep conversations down and screens hidden. What happened to those spies, I’m not quite sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if HR kept recruiters on board, like the FAA air marshals on international flights, in order to snap them up as new hires the moment the doors closed.*

Heh, may be right! :)

Track racing is an exhilarating pursuit. You take your performance car

Naively assumed (hoped?) this was going to be about cycling :/ Further disappointment.

Even Facebook, whose ability to maintain a fast-moving, always-be-shipping culture well into corporate middle age was admirable and unique, was simply a German-style autobahn, not a racetrack.

But you actually get somewhere via the autobahn. Check your metaphors.

An idle mind is the devil’s playground, as the saying goes, so in the meantime I got down to the serious business, as some product managers do, of trying to bang my product marketing manager.

I won’t even bother getting disgusted by this. As with much else, probably rewriting the script in retrospect. Whatever dude, just go somewhere and try to actually do something productive. Then report back. And stop procreating.

We traded flirtarious barbs around whether CPM was an initialism or an abbreviation,

How much trading of barbs could there be? There is an clear answer to this deep question.

and whether a needlessly flowery formulation of mine, written in response to some insipid corporate conversation, was a metonym or a metaphor.

What’s the difference between synecdoche and metonym? Not sure metonym used in flowery language? Maybe the word he’s looking for is malapropism? ;)

Making the Facebook sale to the CEO of General Motors was like teaching an Amazonian tribesman how to set a clock radio: possible, so long as you couched it in their language and framed it in whatever quirky mythology they held sacred.

Facebook sold ads directly to GM’s CEO? Is that how it’s done? That makes GM sound broken.

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Facebook user growth.

Let’s reread this sentence in 10-20 years.

Of course, with acquisitions, it’s not what you pay, it’s what they cost you that matters. Facebook would have to feed and maintain a mountain of crap code (and the crappy coders who created it) for a long time to come.

If Sheryl didn’t agree, then it would mean the death of FBX and everything around it: the technology itself, the innovative IP we had patented, the budgets we’d secured, the work the FBX partners had done to integrate, the bigger vision of it all. Gone. We were all-in and betting on just one card being drawn.

And would the world be a different place either way?