Family called this morning to ask why Facebooks Vice President was leaving. “The” Vice President, singular. Saw it on the news. Reporters seem to think that Facebooks org chart looks like this: Mark, The CEO | Sam, The Vice President | Peter, The Director | Allison, The Manager | —Raylene, The Engineer Who Builds Facebook —Chuck, The Guy Who Runs the Server that Runs Facebook —Dirk, The Sales Guy Who Sells the Ad Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to work for such a lean company—I’d own 20% of it, and I’d use that power to immediately fire Dirk. But that’s not the world we live in, and the media’s blind spot here is as baffling as it is rare. The only other press error I can even think of recently is an article I saw warning that Facebook Messenger comes with two anal probes (it comes with one). News organizations themselves have dozens of people sharing one title, so I’m not sure why they keep making this mistake. I suspect they dismiss technology companies as easily governed playthings. But I’d like to see one of their VPs manage 20,000 Google engineers at once! There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and sometimes less is more. When you’re forced to use Messenger and need to vent your feelings about it, it’s good to know that there’s a central VP of User Feedback who’s listening (naomi@fb). Computer science has a word for the medias worldview; its called the Singleton Pattern (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern). You create one instance of a Vice President, and the next 300 times you ask for a Vice President, thats who youre gonna get. Singletons usually stick around for the lifetime of the program, and the code relies on that guarantee. Facebook’s outgoing VP is definitely one of a kind, but if you think he’s a bona fide singleton, sell your stock: his departure will crash the company unless teams who depend on him are prepared to lazily instantiate another Sam. Already you’re starting to see problems with this pattern, but there’s more: It can also erode specialization. If weve already got a Vice President who knows everything, the thinking goes, then why not just give him all the work and skip new hires? This kind of thinking is why AP reporters, or I should say, The AP Reporter, would not make (a) good programmer(s). Not that I would make a great reporter with that grammar, but luckily we already have one. In fairness, even some of the people who work at Facebook have questionable judgment when it comes to their own specialization. Just stop by one of the weekly Q&A’s. Without fail, someone will stand up in front of the entire company and ask Mark a question like “WHY IS THERE NO STRAWBERRY SOFT-SERVE IN CAFETERIA 29?” Here we have a prime example of how the singleton mentality corrodes division of labor. While the API of a CEO running a $200 billion company might typically expose functions like SetRoadmap() or GoPublic(), some employees lard the role over time with additional responsibilities, anything from ReplenishFrozenYogurt() to MediateParkingConflictWithSusan() to OmgWormsIntheFish(). And this phenomenon is not unique to employee Q&A; you’ll also see it unfold on earnings calls, where analysts call functions like ExplainWhyGrowthDippedInLibyaLastTuesday(). All of these methods are inappropriately specific for such a high-level singleton, and proper engineering technique would shift the burden to a lowly worker class. For instance, CEO.MediateParkingConflictWithSusan() becomes self.MediateParkingConflictWithSusan(). Fortunately the singleton pattern also makes for a wonderful coping mechanism. Because instead of worrying that you work with thousands of people asking thousands of dumb questions a year, you can just tell yourself that its the same person asking a different dumb question every week: The Company Imbecile. Yep, hes a singleton. He works at your company, my company, companies all around the world. And he just ran out of strawberry.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 23:14:11 +0000
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