Tech

The ruthless, punishing life of a Facebook employee

After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2008, Antonio Garcia Martinez struck out for Silicon Valley, founding a startup and seguing to Facebook, where he worked as a product manager from 2011 to 2013. His memoir “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley” (Harper, $29.99) dishes the dirt on what goes on behind the blue wall of Facebook.

The Facebook product managers making a presentation to the queen of Lean, Sheryl Sandberg, were maybe a little nervous, but not nervous enough. As they gave the company’s chief operating officer a run-through of the snazzy, technically challenging software they had designed to stop pornography from popping up on Facebook users’ pages, similar images kept popping up. Kittens. And cats. Cats. And kittens.

“Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley” by Antonio García Martínez (Harper Collins)Harper Collins

Wait a sec, said Sandberg. What was with all the felines?

Well, one of the product managers explained, we didn’t want to show you the actual kinds of porn we’re blocking. “So the engineers use kittens instead,” he said. “Because, you know, cats and kittens are like pu—.”

He stopped right there, but he nearly said the p-word in front of the billionaire Sandberg, one of the world’s most powerful women.

“Got it,” she said angrily, recalls another Facebook product manager, Antonio Garcia Martinez, who was present. “As if loading for a verbal barrage, she continued. ‘If there were women on that team, they’d NEVER, EVER choose those photos as demo pics. I think you should change them immediately!’”

Adds Martinez, “I was dying inside. You could feel either awkwardness or repressed laughter seething from everyone in the room at this unprecedented display of management wrath and PM [product management] folly. Demoing the p—y filter to Sheryl. Epic!”

In his highly caffeinated, score-settling tech-world memoir “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” Martinez explains that he is a former Goldman Sachs banker who today lives on a 40-foot sailboat docked in San Francisco Bay. He hooked up with Facebook after a startup he founded, AdGrok, sold to Twitter for a “piddly sum of money,” as he puts it. Suddenly he was no longer a Wall Street hotshot but a small fish in a very large pond.

The author recalled a meeting where product managers presented COO Sheryl Sandberg with porn blocker software, using cats to stand in for the graphic images. “Because, you know, cats and kittens are like pu–.”Getty Images

He sees a clash of cultures between polished, corporate brand ambassadors such as Sandberg and the unwashed spotty boy tech nerds who do its grunt work. To guard against sexual harassment — Facebook is maybe 10 percent young women, Martinez says — the nerds are told at orientation they are allowed to ask out a lady colleague once but not twice because “no meant no.” Many of history’s most fabled romances would never have begun under a one-ask policy, but on the other hand, you can’t really take a chance with on-the-spectrum math geeks who understand Klingon better than they do female social signals. Similar male obliviousness to norms was also evident in the bathrooms: The company provided bike racks, but not lockers. So guys who biked to work “hung their ridiculous Spandex nut-huggers on the towel racks intentionally inside-out to air the sweaty crotches.” Ew.

‘If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.’

 - Slogan from a book distributed to all Facebook employees

Some of these programmer jocks had difficulty gaining the attention they felt they deserved from salesmen as well as young ladies. One Facebook exec, Martinez says, walked into a BMW dealership burning to buy a car with $50,000 he had just won at poker but, being a badly dressed kid, couldn’t even score a test drive. So he walked across the street, bought a Mercedes for cash and drove it back on the BMW lot to show the first salesman what he’d lost in commission.

Geek fury! It’s petty, but it’s fun.

Wealth management is a persistent problem at Facebook. But how to discuss it? You can’t exactly mention your mountain of lucre in mixed company. Luckily, Facebook has a solution for that: a group called NR250. The NR is for “New Rich” and the 250 originally meant the first 250 Facebook employees, the ones who made bank at the IPO. The meeting group had to operate quietly, Martinez says, but all sorts of useful information came out of it. “How to buy land under an LLC [limited liability corporation] to hide the fact you’re amassing a compound, the best resort on Maui, how to book or lease private jets, the best high-end credit cards to use, and so forth. But not a word of it while on campus.” As a Google employee noted in a similar memoir, in Silicon Valley, the guy at one desk might be looking at movie times while the one next to him might be looking into weekend flights to Belize.

Facebook employees write on the “wall” at the company’s headquarters.Getty Images

That kind of success was the end result of Facebook’s ingenious positioning. Head of product Chris Cox is seen describing Facebook not as social network but more like a personalized news agency: “The New York Times of You, Channel You,” says Martinez. That a story originated in the Wall Street Journal was irrelevant once it was posted to Facebook: “your friend Fred had posted it, your other friend Andy had commented on it, and your wife had shared it with her friends.” The world would be interpreted “not through traditional institutions like newspapers, books or even governments or religions, but through the graph of personal relations….Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to 15 people.”

Success breeds its own brand of worry, though. As Mike Judge has noted in describing the theme of his brilliant HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” Planet Tech is best described as an irremediable opposition of Steve Jobs and Ayn Rand: the groovy, mellow, let’s-make-the-world-a-better-place hippie ethos versus ruthless crush-your-enemy’s-bones-and-smear-them-on-your-peanut-butter-sandwich capitalism.

As on “Silicon Valley,” peering an inch below the surface reveals which of these identities is a sham and which one isn’t. Facebook is pleased to present itself as a chill hang — a company joke goes that its offices are the only workplace where you can’t get in trouble with the boss for looking at Facebook all day — but also a bloodthirsty prehistoric savanna where you’re either ripping the other guy’s guts out or he’s doing the same to you.

Mike Judge, the creator of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” (cast pictured), describes the tech world as an irremediable opposition of Steve Jobs and Ayn Rand.HBO

In 2011, Facebook took over the former Menlo Park, Calif., campus of previous tech juggernaut Sun Microsystems, whose offices still had lots of logos scattered around the conference rooms and public spaces. Mark Zuckerberg removed most of them, but ordered that some remain, Martinez says, as a reminder that yesterday’s swaggering titans are today’s dead meat. (Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010.) Zuckerberg even preserved the giant Sun Microsystems sign facing the public, flipped it around, and painted the Facebook “Like” logo on the front to serve as the company’s nameplate. He purposely didn’t have the Sun logo painted over or concealed. And not because he couldn’t spare a couple of bucks for a can of paint.

“I have never seen a company before or since so maniacal in ensuring the perpetuation of its original values,” writes Martinez. “It was like the United States on the Fourth of July, every day.” Among the company slogans were, “Our work is never over,” “Make it faster,” and “This journey’s 1% finished.” A bound red book distributed to all employees delivered this bleak warning: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.” Embracing change won’t cut it because “it has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.” Welcome to Facebook! Aren’t we fun?

‘Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to 15 people.’

 - Author Antonio García Martínez

One shaggy-utopian pipe dream that didn’t survive exposure to brutal reality was the notion, promoted in early Facebook history (meaning 2009), that any changes to Facebook policy would be made subject to a vote by users. A vote? Involving a billion people worldwide? The idea was either loony or a meaningless attempt at spin control after one of Facebook’s many privacy-invading debacles. In any case, Zuckerberg was prescient enough to build in a self-destruct mechanism for making him an employee of the People: Any vote would be considered merely advisory unless 30 percent of all users participated. In late 2011, users were asked to vote on Facebook’s new, intrusive (anti-)privacy policy. Ninety percent of those who voted nixed it — but very few people bothered to vote, nowhere near 30 percent of Facebook users. So “the voting result was ‘taken under advisement’ — by which we mean ‘ignored,’ ” says Martinez. “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.”

The way evangelicals might annually celebrate the day they were baptized, Facebookies mark their date of hire as their “Facebookversary,” with much fuss and pomp around the office each time the date comes up for someone. Mylar balloons and bouquets would appear at your desk. To punish apostates, those who left the company would find their feed suddenly cleansed of all previous posts from internal groups. It’s as if you transferred out of your high school and discovered you’d disappeared from your old yearbooks.

When Facebook took over the Menlo Park campus of Sun Microsystems in 2011, Zuckerburg kept some of the company’s logos scattered across the public spaces — as a reminder that “yesterday’s swaggering titans are today’s dead meat.”Getty Images

Martinez, who writes in an overheated, chest-thumping style, spends much of the book making sweeping declarations on the meaning of Silicon Valley and capitalism. When he describes another techie as coated by “a certain resinous smarminess,” it’s a line that actually perfectly describes himself, especially when he’s talking about the opposite sex.

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of s- -t,” he writes. “They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

Fodder for another book, maybe, but probably not one Sheryl Sandberg will be endorsing.