Facebook didn’t become the world’s largest social media platform overnight. Many people know that Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while in his dorm room at Harvard back in 2004, a little over a decade ago. Today, Facebook has just under 13,000 employees around the world. A former Facebook employee, Antonio García Martinez, has recently written a book about his time at Facebook as well as his time in Silicon Valley. He describes Facebook as being like North Korea or Cuba, also mentioning that the company has their own security team which keeps tabs on everything their employees do.
Martinez also talks about how if you incurred Zuckerberg’s wrath, you wouldn’t be smiling. Security guards would be quick to show you the door, and not in a polite manner. He also stated that human resources often gave lectures to employees about “distracting clothing”. One example that he cited in his book was in regards to a female intern who he thought looked to be around 16 years old (still in high school, obviously) and came “in regularly in booty shorts”.
These aren’t the first snippets to surface in regards to Martinez’s book about his time at Facebook. Recently, it surfaced that when Google+ launched, Zuckerberg put Facebook in a state of lockdown. As he felt that Google+ would be a legitimate competitor to Facebook. Citing that Google already has millions and millions of accounts, and had the tools to really take down Facebook. Of course, some five years later, we now know that Google+ wasn’t a legitimate threat to Facebook. Another snippet talked about how Mark Zuckerberg’s stare was on the psychopathic side of things, and obviously that would scare quite a few employees.
The New York Times has said that this book “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley”, is an irresistible book that gives a “360-degree guide to the new technology establishment.” If you’re interested in Silicon Valley, and more particularly interested in knowing what goes on behind the scenes, this may be a book you want to pick up.
It’s not surprising that working at Facebook wasn’t all good times. Rising to the top and then staying at the top isn’t easy. Facebook is the only social network that has been able to become number one and stay there. Just look at other social networks like MySpace, that popped up in the 2000s.