New Book About Facebook, Reveals Unusual Employment Rules

Martinez reveals how Zuckerberg declared ‘total war’ on Google in 2011 when it launched Google Plus, its ill-fated rival social network in his new book Chaos Monkeys.

[From article]
Facebook has long been accused of being a sexist workplace and letting founder Mark Zuckerberg rule with an iron fist in a velvet perk-filled glove.
But as far as one ex-employee is concerned, the glove is now definitely off.
Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook advertising manager who was fired two years ago, claims that working at the social network was like being in a cult akin to North Korea with Zuckerberg its unquestioned leader.
Female employees were told not to wear clothing that might be ‘distracting’ to male workers,
Human resource managers gave a speech during initiation for new employees in which they told women that there was a dress code which they had to stick to.
They also pulled women aside and ‘read them the riot act’ if their skirts were too short.
Men do not appear to have been given the same treatment according to Martinez' new tell-all book, ‘Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley’, published by Harper Collins



Martinez takes the title from a term used in the tech world for a tool used by computer developers to identify problems before they crop up.
But for Martinez, there were problems aplenty at Facebook, not least the KGB-like internal police force called ‘The Sec’ which monitored everything that staff did.
Facebook has long faced allegations its workplace culture is sexist and still mirrors the Frat House style environment that harks back to social media's early days.
Facemash, for example, was a crude ‘hot or not’ style game that went viral in Harvard, where Zuckerberg studied.
Since then former employees have claimed that little has changed and that it is more like Mad Men when it comes to equal rights.
Martinez, who was sacked by Facebook in 2013 after two years working on targeted advertisements, describes how new employees went through a series of talks to induct them into the company’s way of thinking.
The author recalls being told by Chamath Palihapitiya, one of the stars of Facebook: ‘Look, we’re not here to f*** around. You’re at Facebook now and we’ve got lots to do’.
After 20 minutes more of lecturing he finished off with another missive: ‘Just f*****g do it’.
But 'doing it' had its limits.
Martinez says that Facebook's Human Resources told them that the policy on asking co-workers out was that you got one try and if they said no you had to leave it.
‘Next was a warning to the womenfolk,' writes the author.
‘Our male HR authority, with occasional backup from his female counterpart, launched into a speech about avoiding clothing that ‘distracted’ coworkers.
‘I’d later learn that manager did in fact pull aside female employees and read them the riot act. One such example happened in (advertising) when an intern who looked about 16 coming in regularly in booty shorts.’
Such attitudes toward women got senior staff into trouble with Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook and one of the few female boardroom executives.
On one occasion, she was evaluating a presentation of a new tool that used pictures of cats instead of users’ pictures.
When Sandberg asked why they were all cats, the product manager Dan Rubenstein said: ‘Well, you know, kittens and cats are like pu…’
Sandberg did not need to hear the word ‘pussy’ and replied: ‘Got it!’ followed by a sharp intake of breath,
She said: ‘If there were women on that team they’d NEVER EVER choose those photos as demo pics. I think you should change them immediately’.
Rubenstein duly scribbled in his notepad: ‘CHANGE PUSSY PHOTOS NOW!’
Martinez, a former Goldman Sachs trader who had an on-off relationship with the mother of his three children, has his own chauvinistic issues.
He writes: ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of s**t.
‘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’.
Martinez admits that he once tried to have sex in a closet on the Facebook campus after getting drunk in the bar on site called ‘Shady Lady’.
He admits that he had his ‘fair share of scares’ with women nearly getting pregnant after having unprotected sex with many women.
Martinez writes: ‘I was on season four of the show where a tear-filled woman X shows up two weeks after the shag saying she had ‘missed her period’ (sort of in the same way I'd say I ‘missed my bus’).
‘Nothing had ever come of it and after the third showing you just wanted to say: ‘Look, woman, unless you've got a screaming infant in your arms and it looks like me, we have nothing to talk about’.
In another passage about his pre-Facebook says Martinez says that trying to attract venture capital funding with an ongoing lawsuit against was like ‘walking into a singles bar with a T-shirt announcing: ‘I’m HIV positive’’.
The day that an employee joined Facebook is called their ‘Faceversary’ and is marked by celebrations akin to how Christians celebrate the day they are baptized.Martinez says that working for Facebook is like being in a cult with Zuckerberg as its leader who is followed by ‘true believers’ who have a Messianic zeal to get everyone in the world onto the social network.
It was essentially treated as a second birthday and everyone would congratulate you and give you balloons.
The day people leave Facebook is considered their ‘death’ and they would post a picture of their battered ID card as their Facebook profile to show they were going out the door.
In Facebook’s first office, one conference room was called Ping and the one next door was called Pong.
When Facebook moved to its sprawling campus in Menlo Park signs were put up which read: ‘Our work is never done’, ‘Embracing change isn’t enough’, ‘Make it faster’, The journey 1% finished’ and ‘What would you do if you weren’t afraid?’
Zuckerberg’s office became known as ‘The Aquarium’ because of its all glass walls while Sandberg’s conference room became dubbed ‘Only Good News’, apparently because that is all she wanted to hear.
Staff were expected to work 20 hour plus days, Martinez claims, and eat all their meals at the cafeteria, which developed to cater for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Not every initiative was a success though and when Zuckerberg asked staff to paint the walls of their new office he was furious because after two days the place was covered with obscene drawings.
Martinez says the gist of the email Zuckerberg sent round to staff was that ‘I trusted you to create art and what you f*****g did was vandalize the place’.
According to Martinez Zuckerberg was obsessed with secrecy. When one employee leaked details about a new product launch Zuckerberg responded by sending a chilling email round to every single worker with the subject line: ‘Please resign’.
The email was designed to cause alarm to anyone who received it - in this case the whole company.
Zuckerberg was so angry at the employee who leaked details about the new product that he 'excoriated' the individual in the message - attacking the person for his or her 'base moral nature' and how he/she had 'betrayed the team'.
The book says: 'The moral to this story, a parable of a prodigal son but with an unforgiving father, was clear: F*** with Facebook and security guards would be hustling you out the door like a rowdy drunk at a late night Taco Bell'.
[. . .]
Zuckerberg made decisions that affected Facebook's 1.6 billion users based on 'gut feel' and 'whatever historical politics were at play' rather than a considered judgement, Martinez claims.
[. . .]
A lot of the change appears to be the work of Sandberg, who arrived in 2008 having previously been at Google and been mentored by former Federal Reserve chairman Larry Summers while studying at Harvard.
She instituted what Martinez calls the ‘Supreme Court of Sheryl’, or a system for improving targeted advertising that she controlled.
The book says: ‘She clearly knew her boss inside and out. Here was a boss who excelled in the role of gatekeeper and shepherd to difficult and powerful men, whether that role was chief of staff for prickly US Treasury Secretary Larry Summer, or COO of and for Zuck’.
One of Sandberg’s tricks for hiring the right staff was to make them think they were missing an unmissable opportunity.
[. . .]
A colleague told Martinez: ‘She basically convinced me by saying: ‘Look, I either hire you now and you come work for Facebook, or a year from now I’ll hire you to work for the guy whose job I’m offering to you right now’. And that’s what convinced me’.
Martinez reveals how Zuckerberg declared ‘total war’ on Google in 2011 when it launched Google Plus, its ill-fated rival social network.
Martinez claims that this hit Zuckerberg like a ‘bomb’ and that he put the entire company on Lockdown, meaning that they were not able to leave the building.
In a speech in front of the entire company Zuckerberg quoted Cato the Elder, one of his favourite philosophers, and told that Carthage must be destroyed, referring to Google.
According to Martinez: ‘Everyone walked out of there ready to invade Poland if need be’
[. . .]
The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory turned Zuckerberg’s catchphrase into posters in bold type with a Roman centurion’s helmet which were put up all over the campus
When it became clear that Google had been inflating the figures for how many people were using Google Plus and it was not a threat.
Martinez is not the first former Facebook employee to highlight its workplace culture.
In ‘The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network’ Katherine Loose claimed that it was deeply sexist and stuck in a 1950s mentality.
She wrote that female workers at the social network were propositioned for threesomes or given crude insults like ‘I want to put my teeth in your a**’.
Lower ranking employees who were invariably female were banned from a conference unless they worked as coat checkers whilst there.
In the book she compared Zuckerberg to Napoleon and branded a ‘little emperor’ who created a company where his staff could ‘idol worship’ him.
Loose was employee no.51 and worked her way up from customer relations to a senior marketing role before becoming the speechwriter for Zuckerberg.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3666501/Mark-Zuckerberg-s-hostile-emails-Sheryl-Sandberg-s-Good-News-conference-room-s-wanted-hear-Dress-codes-no-booty-shorts-women-Life-Facebook-exposed.html

EXCLUSIVE: ‘I trusted you to create art and what you f***ing did was vandalize!' Mark Zuckerberg’s hostile emails…Sheryl Sandberg’s 'only good news' room… Dress codes (no booty shorts) for women. Life at Facebook exposed!
FIRED Facebook advertising manager Antonio Garcia Martinez has written a tell-all book about his time at the social network
Zuckerberg fired off angry email after he asked staff to paint the walls and the place was covered with obscene drawings
When one employee leaked details about a new product launch Zuckerberg sent a chilling email to every worker. Subject: ‘Please resign!’
Staff who stepped out of line were monitored by a 'KGB-like' internal police force called ‘The Sec'
'F*** with Facebook and security guards would be hustling you out the door like a rowdy drunk at a late night Taco Bell,' Martinez writes
He claims female employees had a strict dress code so as not to distract men - who had no code at all
The day that an employee joined Facebook is called their ‘Faceversary’ and is marked by celebrations akin to Baptisms
By DANIEL BATES FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 07:55 EST, 30 June 2016 | UPDATED: 12:00 EST, 30 June 2016

Israelis Appeal to Billionaire Facebook Founder, "Stop Killing Jews!"

[From article]
It takes a global village to kill a Israelis. The recipe is well known. Begin with the lie that Islam is the religion of peace. Take U.N. (that is, U.S.) money and hire jihadis to teach small children Jews should all be killed. (First taught to the Moslem Brotherhood by Eichmann himself, sent by Hitler to launch the modern jihadi movement -- read here, and here). Take Saudi money and staff every mosque with Wahhabi imams. Use oil wealth to brainwash vulnerable teenagers with Islamic supremacist idealism and promise endless sex in heaven if they kill a Jew. Flood the P.A. territories with billions of dollars in international aid, turning the entire place into one giant welfare state of entitlement and rage.
And then give the jihadis Facebook, to spread the message: go out and kill a Jew today. With detailed instructions on how to do it.
The wave of stabbings in Israel are a Facebook-fueled intifada.
[. . .]
Israelis are fed up. They can’t stop the U.N. from supporting jihad. They can’t stop the Saudis. They can’t stop Europe and America from sucking up to the Arab world by throwing money at the Palestinians with no strings attached
[. . .]
Calling on people to commit crimes is not constitutionally protected speech and endangers the lives of Jews and Israelis. Shurat HaDin will pursue the claims against Facebook on behalf of its 20,0000 clients until Facebook makes it will not allow itself to serve as a tool for terrorists to transmit their rabble rousing messages to their followers and that incitement to anti-Semitic violence will not be tolerated on its website.
[. . .]
The anti-terror group Shurat HaDin has launched a campaign called Zuckerberg Don’t Kill Us. They are trying to raise $30,000 for good old fashioned billboards to go up around Palo Alto, where Zuckerberg lives, to shed light on what he is doing.
[. . .]
Notice Zuckerberg [. . .] does not condemn Islamic extremism. And most significantly, he does not say that Facebook will do everything possible to stop jihadis from using Facebook to incite and organize murder. Instead, he assures Muslims he will fight to protect their rights and welcome them on Facebook.
[. . .]
In the lead-up to the last election, after complaints from the Obama campaign Facebook removed this posting about Benghazi from a Navy SEAL’s Facebook page (hat tip Eric Wemple): “Obama called the SEALS and THEY got bin Laden. When the SEALs called Obama, THEY GOT DENIED.” It was removed three times before Facebook admitted they had no right to remove political speech.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/israel_to_zuckerberg_stop_killing_jews_.html

January 20, 2016
Israel to Zuckerberg: Stop Killing Jews
By Karin McQuillan

Facebook Billionaire Avoided Taxes, Morphs Into Philanthropist Explaining What Is Good For The Rest Of Us

Mark Zuckerberg, Billionaire Creator of Facebook

[From article]
Yet there is a dark side to this trend. For behind it lies the sanctimonious hypocrisy of billionaires who build vast fortunes with firms that avoid the taxes paid by the rest of society, then arrogantly think they are best placed to solve the planet’s problems.
Zuckerberg talked in his letter of creating stronger communities. Yet Facebook, like too many technology behemoths, is a serial tax avoider undermining government through its stubborn refusal to pay its fair share to society.
Last year, this all-conquering social media firm handed over just £4,327 in corporation tax in this country: less than the annual sum paid in tax by the average worker.
Yet its staff in Britain took home an average £210,000 each in pay and bonuses, safe in the security of a society that relies on public servants to protect them from terror, provide health care in hospitals and repair the roads on which they travel to work.
The Facebook founder has hailed Bill Gates as his hero — the world’s richest man, who has been revered as something close to a secular saint after promising to give away the bulk of his £57 billion fortune.
[. . .]
Microsoft was accused of avoiding paying £3 billion annually in tax by shifting earnings around between low-tax nations. In Britain alone, it reported £1.7 billion revenues in one year for online sales of software, on which it paid no corporation tax. Zilch.
Gates even has the gall to tour the world telling governments to take more and more money from taxpayers for his beloved foreign aid programmes, once even branding those who oppose such policies as ‘evil’.
[. . .]
In one radio interview, Gates spoke of how philanthropists of the past such as the oil giant John D. Rockefeller offered a model for him and his generation of billionaires.
It was an interesting comparison, since Rockefeller, a ruthless monopolist, became the world’s richest man by using controversial practices such as collusion with railroad companies to crush his oil industry rivals — and then gave away $500 million to good causes.
[. . .]
are among the most notorious examples of cut-throat capitalists who stop at nothing to build their fortunes, then seek in later life to improve their public image with good deeds.
[. . .]
It is laudable to see the super-rich devote themselves to good works and give away big sums for the betterment of others.
Many of these people are technological visionaries, creating fortunes though their energetic entrepreneurship.
Yet too many of them seem to think it is acceptable for their companies to avoid paying taxes, in part because they see themselves as wonderful benefactors engaged in personal crusades to solve the world’s problems.
In effect, they are saying the super-rich have the right to ‘self-tax’ themselves by giving away money to pet causes, rather than the companies with which they made their fortunes paying their fair share of tax to governments, like the rest of us.
However much good they achieve, this is not just breathtakingly arrogant, but profoundly undemocratic. And for all their skills and smartness, they are often no better than governments at tackling problems in public services.
Zuckerberg went on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show five years ago to proclaim a $100 million gift to turn schools in the New Jersey town of Newark ‘into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation’.
The donation was doubled with matching funds from others. Yet his controversial scheme failed to meet its goals after blowing $20 million on consultants, and running into opposition from parents, teachers and community leaders.
[. . .]
The harsh truth is that the likes of Zuckerberg and Gates may be philanthropists, but they built those fortunes off the back of companies engaged in massive tax avoidance.
Such corporate strategy weakens society while placing heavier burdens on the rest of us.
It is all too easy in our globalised age for corporate giants to exploit tax loopholes and outwit inadequate politicians by paying the best advisers to shuffle paper profits around the planet.
So by all means praise a plutocrat such as Mr Zuckerberg for promising to give away extraordinary wealth. We must hope the money is put to good use to transform lives.
But at the same time, do not be deluded by the self- proclaimed altruism promoted so publicly by these titans of the technology revolution.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3343771/The-tax-avoiding-Facebook-mogul-act-charity-reeks-hypocrisy.html
The tax-avoiding Facebook mogul and an act of charity that reeks of hypocrisy
By IAN BIRRELL FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 20:18 EST, 2 December 2015 | UPDATED: 03:44 EST, 3 December 2015

Facebook King Purchases 700 Acres In Hawaii

Mr. Facebook and Companion

[From article]
In 2010 Zuckerberg was renting a modest property near Facebook's headquarters while he put in 16 hour days at the office.
The following year he upgraded to a $7 million, 5,000 sq ft residence in Palo Alto, California which was still modest in comparison to the homes of other technology billionaires.
He later spent $30 million buying up four homes adjoining his in Palo Alto to fend off a developer who was going to purchase them, and market them as being "next door to Mark Zuckerberg".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11160588/Mark-Zuckerberg-buys-part-of-Hawaii-for-100-million.html

Mark Zuckerberg 'buys part of Hawaii' for $100 million
The Facebook chief executive will have an estate befitting a billionaire as he buys up 700 acres on the island of Kauai, Forbes reports

By Nick Allen, Los Angeles
7:32AM BST 14 Oct 2014

Book Excerpt: Facebook Creation

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/on_double_LhqTdZ46WoutNOlmlfIHvO

On double secret probation

Facebook chief's disregard for privacy dates back to his early Harvard projects

New York Post

Last Updated: 4:39 AM, June 6, 2010

Posted: 2:15 AM, June 6, 2010