>At AppSumo, we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on full-time to ensure they’re the right fit.
Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.
At least they're transparent about it. Plenty of people end up working at companies with this attitude without ever knowing it. Especially in sales orgs.
My job basically prefers the Contract-to-Hire pipeline. One is often hired on as a contractor, and if things work out by the time your contract is up, then you can stay. In a sense, we are doing something similar to AppSumo.
I take issue with these because they're really just doing an endrun around labor law:
- you're going to be treated like an employee, because that's the plan, and I'd wager many Contract-to-Hire setups would fail the government's "20 Factor Test"[1]: Level of instruction, degree of integration, demands for full-time work...
- I've yet to see a non-VP+ level contract with severability clauses that require contractual compensation, i.e. most contracts are "severable without notice", no different to "At Will"
Indeed, the practical side effect of this is "We're going to hire you and we get to avoid paying you benefits for an extended period of time (the contract duration)."
There is the case where you are employed by a firm as a W-2, and you are a "contractor" in the eyes of the company you are doing the work for. And more often than not, after 6-18 months the company offers to buy out the contract to from your employer, converting you to full time.
They don't have to pay you benefits of course, but you can always market yourself at a rate that more than compensates for that. So it's not an automatic financial shafting for the contractor (unless they don't take this into account).
There is not a chance I would leave a real job for a gig like that. I can't imagine many folks who have mortgages and families to support would consider it.
Actually, I was the last junior hired -- 8 years ago. Somehow, my org is able to find mid-level to senior people.
However, we do not really have such titles since it's a very small shop. So, perhaps I am not the best at judging whom is truly a mid-level vs. senior.
I don't see how it's much different from working at a company for any period of time even as a fully onboarded employee, aside from specific legal obligations that possibly protect your employment. In any place where firing at will is legal, they can toss you at any time for almost any pretext and claim you weren't a correct fit. It applies in general even if you're fully hired, barring some specific contract (that they might anyhow wiggle their way out of).
Note the phrasing is "we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on".
While at-will employment does mean you can be fired at any time, the default assumption is that your job will continue, barring something happening (like poor performance, or the company being unprofitable, or your boss being in a bad mood that day).
The phrasing here makes it sound like the default is that it's time-limited and an extended interview. Sure, technically at-will and "a tech interview" both have the same amount of job-security (exactly zero), but there's social expectations around employing and firing people, and overhead for the company, which lead to full-time employment having more security in practice.
> full-time employment having more security in practice
Not sure about other at-will states but in Utah one can apply for unemployment after losing their W2 gig. If this trial period doesn’t involve W2 paperwork then I wouldn’t think it’s comparable.
I certainly agree that we shouldn't bank (figuratively or literally) on positive social expectations, such as expecting an employer to treat us fairly.
However, AppSumo is apparently promising the opposite - they are setting the expectation that it is quite likely new hires will not work out and you should be fully prepared for termination.
If the company follows normal at-will employment practices, there would be no need to mention it.
The fact that they explicitly call out this practice is probably a sign that they lay off a larger percentage of new hires compared to the average company. Otherwise, why mention it?
Legal, medical insurance, and the general understanding that you're an employee of the company and it comes with all the benefits of being one.
True, you can get fired at anytime for no reason at all, why would anyone with any option choose a place that says they will maybe explicitly fire you after a certain period? Might as well get hired at Netflix which has a similar perform or out culture where you are guaranteed a very high salary and a generous severance.
Just go to a regular place of employment. I've never seen any place with these kinds of deviant methods and process end up be a remotely successful company or an actual good employer.
It's a slightly more explicit version of a probationary/trial period, which is very common outside the US. (You don't need them in the US, because you can be fired at any time for any reason anyway.)
This. I've had to fire someone in their probation period, and their expectation (that they had finally landed a great job and could relax) clearly didn't match our expectation (we had a new employee on probation, let's see if they work out).
It would help people more if there was a clearer expression of "this is a trial. You might not pass it".
Agree. Unless there is a breakup clause that pays the employee (er, contractor) for severance, it puts all the risk explicitly on the employee, which is horseshit.
Edit: sorry, you got this question a bunch below. I didn't read ahead.
Are probation periods not a thing in the US? Maybe because of at-will termination?
In Australia most roles have a 3-6 month probation period in which either party can terminate the employment agreement at will. That's essentially a "paid trial period".
After that, employers have much stricter rules for what reasons they can fire you (in theory) and and both employers and employees must give 2 weeks notice or extra if agreed upon in contract.
That could easily put you in violation of your employment contract. And could result in your (ex-) employer coming after you, and/or your new employer.
I don't necessarily agree that it should, but it absolutely could.
You can make work trials that are obviously not competitive if you are really concerned, e.g. contributing a needed feature to an open source project. Realistically, companies are also just not going to sue.
If people are concerned about the risk of being paid, well, either you want to get paid or not, that's up to them, you can't have you cake and eat it too here.
They do. You get signals on how well people can work independently on a non-trivial task. How well they can understand their is being communicated to them, whether they clarify what is important, etc. How well they can get themselves unstuck vs needing to ask about everything. How motivated they actually are to work, etc.
They're not perfect, and you really do need to make sure the task is targeted at what you actually want to see from the person when they join, but they definitely give more signal than 6 hours of leetcode.
Take home exercises seem so pointless in the AI age tbh. Pretty much anybody can write large amounts of code very quickly these days. It kind of feels pointless to even test this skill.
Plus, most people very lazily state the problem when they give the take home exercise to a point large parts of the problem are open to big interpretation. To the effect any deliverable you produce feels either overdoing or not doing anything at all.
Some people take a part of the problem they are trying to solve at work and just put it in a paragraph and ask you to solve it. Most the times the context is missing, they don't give data you need to complete your work and more importantly it feels they just want this requirement off their table and don't wish to be bothered. So when you go back to them for the data or context, they straight up reject you.
When you do get a company/team, that gives you a good problem to solve. They don't bother to read through your solution. When they do, they want you to go through a live code review in front of the whole team, or work through feature requests on the code you just wrote with dozens of people watching as you type. Then followed by that rounds of grilling you on esoteric trivia. Which in case most companies have a policy that if even one person gives a negative feed back they reject you.
In all, you end up doing lots of work for nothing.
Interesting take home assignment with lots of ways to solve it + technical conversation about the code + checking things like README + deployment steps and whether it even runs or not, I believe, would be very sufficient.
The idea anyway is to find someone capable for solving problems with a specific tech stack, be able to discuss ideas with other people amicably and write decent code.
To me removing the tools which can and are actually using during the job is like asking someone to write flawless code on paper: is that what you are trying to filter for?
"Trial periods" are actually a thing in many countries with strong employment laws, where firing people requires a cause. It helps to reduce the risk of hiring somebody, and so they are advantageous for both employers and employees.
In a lot of countries, trial-periods are less of an interview and more of a "Firing you in the future will be incredibly hard, so we have a 3 month trial period where if you show up on time every day, you'll get converted to full time, and if don't show up, do zero work, and are an ass, maybe we won't convert you to fulltime".
In the US, when someone says "trial period", it usually means "extended interview" where there's a high chance of failure, while in other countries, the trial-period is a formality to make sure you're a functioning adult, but with no real chance of failure if you're not grossly incompetent.
For government/large corp roles, it's possibly a formality.
But for smaller orgs, the probation period where either side can terminate at will is very, very real. I have both fired someone during their probation, and walked away from a role during probation. It's not a formality, and just turning up on time and moistening a chair is not enough to pass it in many cases.
A probationary period (which is what we have in Europe) is very different to an extended paid interview as described by the trial period.
With a probationary period, your default state is “employed”. Typically what happens even if you fail the probationary period, is that probationary period is extended before any new hire dismissed.
Plus even in the UK, it’s actually not that hard to fire someone outside of their probationary period but inside of 2 years.
It’s also worth noting that generally employers still hold all the power even with the stronger employment laws. For example, unless you’ve got a very clear case for unfair dismissal, the cost of fighting a dispute isn’t generally worth the trouble - and in many cases the (ex)employee isnt even financially secure enough to hire a solicitor to begin with. So it’s easier to part ways and focus that energy on the opportunity.
As I mentioned in a reply above, I don't see the logic of them in the U.S. Fully onboarded or not, a company in most contexts outside of union-protected work can fire you at any time for nearly any reason or none at all. So why bother with a paid trial?
I work in a white collar union position in the US with a rather long probationary period, but nobody here would describe it as a "trial period." The expectation is very much that you will pass through the trial period barring something very extreme. It's more to weed out the totally, entirely unqualified than a "trial" that you might or might not pass.
I don't think that reflects the practical reality. For both legal and social reasons, firing someone is way harder than not hiring them after a trial period. Bad hires are costly.
What mess, exactly? Like the parent said, contractor or FTE, you're almost certainly at the mercy of "the company may terminate the agreement with immediate effect for any or no disclosed reason".
More accurate: "They can hire you a contractor for 3-12 months and not have to pay you benefits for that period."
I'm not an expert, but there are some financial ramifications associated with laying off too many people in proportion the the company size, at least in California, since people who have been laid off can claim unemployment benefits.
There's also the risk of wrongful termination lawsuits if you're hiring someone full-time only to immediately lay them off for not impressing you enough.
It is much simpler to hire someone as a contractor. You may not even have to go through HR to do it.
Yes, either way the relationship can be severed, by either party.
But if you're a FTE you will likely be able to get unemployment. As a contractor there is zero chance that can happen.
On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses, and if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule.
> On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses
There's probably not a lot of contractor-specific expenses you'd see in a C2H role. Hell, the two I did (admittedly a while back) gave me a company laptop. WFH tax concessions?
You're also not likely to get a C2H situation that looks like this:
FTE salary: $150,000, but for the duration of the "ramp" contract is paying you $150/hr.
You might have a small bump for tax discrepancies, but the last time I played that game you'd most likely find your contract rate to be $80-90/hr, i.e basically the same. They're not going to pay you effectively double for three months to hire you on at the base rate.
> if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule
I'd love to see the C2H that says "Hey, since you are a contractor, you can work your own hours and have your own availability". Or it might be said as lip service, but that's not how you're going to get the "hire" part.
> I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!)
> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. If he thought something was shit he would tell you and you’d have to start over.
Perfection seems a bit incongruous with moving fast and breaking things. Maybe different standards for copy (assuming this was external facing and not an internal document) vs code? Still a bit weird.
This is the guy that deemed the Nintendo Wii avatar acceptable for his big Metaverse reveal. He also, I suppose, signed off on Meta's also-ran TikTok competitor.
Perhaps being a billionaire changes your view on perfection but I'm not sure I buy the narrative about him being a perfectionist given how decidedly mediocre a lot of what he's touched is.
Aping Steve Jobs without anywhere near the same sense of style. A perfectionist of crafting the mediocre experience. Also the line about caring that they were "humans" and not "users" is particularly rich. I am not doubting he probably said something like this, but I doubt his sincerity knowing everything we do about the man now.
Turns out becoming a billionaire is not about being a super genius at everything for all eternity.
Actually it's more like ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain. Wait, what were we talking about?
I assume the implication is that the author was allowed to ship the document or finalise it quickly i.e. move fast, but this is feedback for the next version or next document. In contrast to creating a draft and waiting 2 weeks for it to be approved?
If he read it at 3.00 am, noticed the missing period, should he just have ignored sending a comment that the period was missing? Not sure what people thought Mark should have done here, should he have remembered the error and send the email later?
Email aren't meant to be responded to immediately.
Yup. And for all we know he queues them up and they're sent later so they're closer to the top of the inbox in the am AND it makes him look like a beast sending middle of the night emails.
It seems easy enough to reconcile. A good enough algorithm to excellence is the old three-phase:
Do it.
Do it right.
Do it fast.
So in this case, Move Fast and Break Things means that when an aspect of the work is in phase 1, there should be evidence of things breaking so you know that progress is happening at the maximum possible speed. Then because things are moving fast, work quickly moves into phase 2 of taking the breakages and fixing them to a high standard. Although I make no claim as to how it actually worked at Facebook.
This article lists out why he was fired. I was mostly curious if he was screwed over right before vesting or if he was legitimately fired.
Im actually impressed by the author, it takes a lot to move on from such a mistake. Id be interested in reading about that but i figure its painful to talk about
> Lesson learned: Go see if your weaknesses are hindering you at your job. Ie. I wasn’t great at planning or product management at this time. Fix them or move to another position. Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired*.
* Unless you do something really stupid or the company goes out of business.
"Also, constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable. You do that and you will never get fired"---
In most companies and for most people in them, this would be useless at best and most damaging at worst. Just as an example, if making the company more valuable causes you to come into conflict with your manager/boss, chances are that your brilliant ideas, along with your work, will disappear into the void. No champagne at the end of the quarter, no vacations to the Maldives paid for by the company.
As always in life, it is a matter of probability. If I had to choose between pursuing my ideas, which (perhaps) would make the company more valuable, or hiding them in the corner of my mind because they would irritate my manager, I would choose the latter.
Mileage may vary for smaller companies with a more direct path between the work done and the company's revenues and profits.
> constantly ask yourself how can I make the company more valuable
Ya only if you have some ownership in the company. Otherwise much better to do it for your own company / projects. You are hired to do a job, don't need to go beyond for a company who will not pay you more.
We know for a fact that's nonsense given how imperfect his main products (that he's spending most of his time on) are
> I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!)
Yes, this is not about perfection, but one of those effort sinks that can take all your sleep time and more while leaving you with no energy to focus on much more consequential things
I worked at a place where you'd get 3AM calls from higher-ups. It's often a flex or some grindset thing. The annoying hustle" attitude: "See we all need to be DoingBusiness™ while the competition is sleeping!"
Kagan told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington about Facebook's plans to expand beyond college students to a professional social network for companies like Microsoft and Apple... A few weeks later, Kagan was fired.
[Kagan] tried to use his role at Facebook to make a name for himself... used to host startup gatherings at Facebook's headquarters... frequently wrote blog posts on his personal site about Facebook's business... Zuckerberg asked [Kagan] to choose between himself and Facebook. Somehow, Kagan still didn't get the message, and he wasn't able to save his job.
I guess he was not a regular employee. If you see the opportunity and growth potential, why not try to put in work if your life circumstances allow it.
How do y’all filter out survivorship bias in articles like this? I can imagine 50 other people with the exact same experiences but then having worked for companies that ended up fizzling.
>Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell.
“They’re human beings”, he’d scream.
This is just too rich, considering the person and company the post is masturbating all over, and that company's current real-life treatment of users as something even less than users.
The whole post reads like a simplified fairy tale recounting of how glorious it was to be in the presence of some exalted being.
He is the same now as he was then. I don't understand all the fawning over the guy (I mean, I do, they want to be him and live his life, which I suppose means they are as morally corrupt as he is).
Oh man I remember this Noah guy. Doesn't he run a website with a bunch of b grade saas apps sold Groupon style? He has been selling this how to start a business course thing since like 2010 or something. I think what he fails to mention is knowing Tim Ferris and being in silicon valley is what got him where he is at today. All these business gurus don't really share anything meaningful. At least he is better than scammers like Alex Hormozi though.
> The marketing team’s plan was not to do anything and the night before we opened Facebook to the professional market (anyone with a @microsoft.com, @dell.com, etc…) I emailed TechCrunch to let Michael Arrington know to publish it in the morning. He ended up publishing it that night (I was at Coachella and will never again attend) before the actual product was released in the morning. I immediately notified the e-team and assumed full responsibility.
I guess the guy disagreed with the marketing strategy and did something he thought would be more effective for the company.
Curious on how others weigh in on this. Occasionally you hear stories of startups in the early stage, where some guy goes against some decision that was sub-optimal and it makes all the difference. Are these stories usually just positive selection bias and its better everyone falls in line? Of course, i'm not saying what this guy did was necessarily the right choice either.
Good lord this is terrible and the things that were learned and seemed to be normalized by Noah are not applicable to 99% of all individuals starting a company.
First section is about growth:
> “Mark, we’re not profitable. Let’s try selling tickets inside Facebook events,” I pleaded.
> He said no.
> Then he took a dry-erase marker and wrote on the board: GROWTH.
> Mark’s goal was 1 billion users.
> Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
Putting growth above profitability can only work when you are getting some sort of outside funding. Facebook didn't turn a profit until 2009, which means it was about 5 years of burning through other people's money. That is not sustainable for the almost all individuals who are wanting to start a company now or people who are running smaller companies.
Move Fast:
> At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.
That is just awful and it is painful to think that giving up so much of one's life was the norm there.
> We shipped several updates to the site every day. In comparison, companies like Microsoft would take months to write out product details, discuss them in a lot of meetings, and finally build them.
> As a startup, your biggest advantage against giant companies is speed.
There is a reason why things would take longer at Microsoft, you can't "go fast and break things" when it comes to an operating system or other software that is businesses may rely on for their day to day work. The fact that Noah makes the comparison to Microsoft is concerning since I don't believe that Microsoft had any social network product around the time that Noah worked for Facebook (though I could be wrong). A better comparison would be MySpace, since they were an actual competitor of Facebook's at the time and also worked on comparable products.
Treat Your Employees Well:
Many of the perks that he lists out are designed to ensure that the employee stays at the office as much as possible. It is easy to get your employees to work 12+ hour days when you make it so they don't have to go anywhere to get good tasting food 3 times a day, didn't have to worry about your laundry and would even get money for living very close to the office.
Scratch Your Own Itch:
>At the start, Mark never intended to build a company. He was just trying to help connect people at college.
I'm not really sure how creating a clone of "Hot or Not" really helps people connect. If Harvard didn't take Facemash down and Mark didn't face any sort of threat of punishment (expulsion, violation of copyright, etc) would Facebook actually exist currently? I don't think the "scratch your own itch" mantra works in this situation
Pay attention to details:
>He was meticulous about capitalizing the “F” in Facebook
Facebook is the name of the site and company and as such it is a proper noun. I don't know why it would even be a noteworthy thing to want to ensure that a proper noun is capitalized.
Give ownership to the team:
>Engineers and product managers could come up with features and build them out without needing anyone’s approval.
But previously Noah stated that:
>Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
With that kind of reaction to a feature being suggested it doesn't seem to me like there was as much free reign to build features as this section implies.
> I'm not really sure how creating a clone of "Hot or Not" really helps people connect. If Harvard didn't take Facemash down and Mark didn't face any sort of threat of punishment (expulsion, violation of copyright, etc) would Facebook actually exist currently? I don't think the "scratch your own itch" mantra works in this situation
Well, if his goal was to get fellow students to upload pictures of pretty girls from his campus, that would indeed be a "scratch your own itch" situation. The entire story has strong Revenge of the Nerds vibes - and I mean that in the more recent revisionist "oh god, all of them should be in prison for sexual harassment and at least one count of literally rape" sense.
My employer just went through a reorganization that was intended to improve the experience for students (a college).
Suspiciously, the only individuals impacted by the reorganization were director level, and were replaced by people the new president knew from prior employers.
I took it hard until the pattern emerged. That's when I realized:
Most times it's not about you. It's about someone else, you're just collateral damage.
Some call it "phoning it in", some call it "working sustainably and avoiding burnout". It's fine to "phone it in" for the daily grind if it helps you maintain your reserves for actual emergencies. As the author point out, early Facebook instead instilled a "sense of urgency" which means everything is treated as an emergency all the time, which just means nothing is.
This article has more red flags than a Chinese embassy.
> At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.
That is called unpaid overtime.
> Mark constantly pushed us to have a sense of urgency.
That is how you stop employees from reflecting on their situation and how you set them up for burnout. Sure, they're all 20-somethings and can pull all-nighters but that is literally burning the candle at both ends.
> Even our customer support team was filled with Harvard PhD’s.
Conflating "A PLUS players" with "Harvard PhDs" says more about the monoculture of early Facebook. Notably Zuckerberg himself is a Harvard drop-out.
> Mark recognized that having a work environment you want to work in would [..] make the existing [employees] [..] stay later at night
This is not about creating a "work environment you want to work in", this is about creating an atmosphere of group pressure and lock-in:
> Delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner catered
In other words: people are expected to come in before breakfast and stay until after dinner. This means they're expected not to have families or relationships outside work except whatever fits in weekends or late evenings. This helps isolate them, giving the company more weight in their social sphere.
> All expenses paid company trips to Las Vegas, Free happy hours every Friday
In other words: frequent "team-building events" except they're framed as social outings with your colleagues - who if you're staying from before breakfast until after dinner (and sometimes even for all-nighters) are your entire social circle.
> Subsidized housing. $600/month if you lived within 1 mile of the office.
That $600/month is effectively just a bonus paid out to employees moving closer to the office. But framing it as a subsidy prevents employees from asking why (hint: again reducing the time spent outside the office as living close makes the paid breakfast/dinner/laundry more appealing than if you have a longer commute) and it creates lock-in by enticing employees to commit to a more expensive apartment closer to the office and not thinking about the high rent they're actually paying because it is offset by the "subsidy". It also means if they get fired they suddenly pay $600 "more" in rent and will likely want to move away quickily, reducing their influence on their former colleagues still living close to the office.
> Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. If he thought something was shit he would tell you and you’d have to start over.
Doing detailed checks for punctuation, spelling, grammar and branding on everything public is one thing. But this makes it sound like Zuckerberg would come in after 90% of the work was done, tear it to shreds and tell people to start over - that would normally be the opposite of making employees feel appreciated or like they're given free reign but makes perfect sense if you instead want to make them internalize "what would Mark do" instead of following their gut.
> When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
Yes, and they won't be an owner. And they'll find out when they get fired on the spot and are left with nothing except the accrued compensation for their work. Again, this is about making people overcommit the way they would for their own startup or their own family and to go beyond their limits until you no longer have any use for them.
> My boss was fired the day I started. My next boss was fired a month later. I got fired in 9 months. [..] He removed the people that were holding Facebook back immediately and he quickly promoted the ones that were helping Facebook achieve its goals
In other words every employee was constantly at risk of getting on the wrong side of Zuckerberg and being fired on the spot - despite all the commitment demanded of them. This is an entirely one-sided relationship and it's exploiting it to the fullest extent.
> When I was at Facebook all I did was think/talk/dream about Facebook. Facebook was my girlfriend. It didn’t feel like a job, so I put in all my hours.
Heck, if you think anything I said is exaggerated, this is the author literally agreeing with me: Facebook was their life while they were employed by Facebook - and yet they were fired after a mere 9 months. They didn't own anything. They committed their life to the company until it all got taken away from them. And here they are proudly talking about wanting to continue the cycle of abuse in their own company.
I'm not saying this doesn't work. But this should put some of the early Web 2.0 era "Facebook is a cult" allegations into perspective - and I don't just mean the secret hoodie linings. These are literally social manipulation tactics we know from cults. Like, this is cult 101 stuff: https://people.howstuffworks.com/cult4.htm
- Isolation: I think I've already explained that aspect.
- Induced Dependency: This is literally what all the Web 2.0 boom era on-site "perks" are for (three meals, laundry service, housing subsidy, etc)
- Dread: The constant sense of urgency, the random firings, the risk of having your work torn apart for being "shit".
Facebook isn't a cult. And Facebook isn't alone in this - other companies like Google are well-known for having engaged in similar manipulation tactics. And many have likely come out successful or were able to use their employment history as a career boost or to write influencer think pieces like the author, but these are still deliberately manipulative cult tactics and they're specifically used to make employees overcommit at the expense of their private life. And of course they also prevent any moves towards unionizing but that's probably just a coincidence.
> They walked me back to the office and removed my laptop and my cell phone. Then I proceeded to the Verizon store to use their phone, called my gf (at the time) and drove to the house I shared with 6 other FB guys. Packed up all my stuff in my CRX, [..] and drove to my friend Johnny’s place.
> To spell it out. Facebook was my entire life. My social circle, my validation, my identity and everything was tied to this company.
At the same time blaming themselves for not putting the company first enough:
> I wanted attention, I put myself before Facebook.
I hate the non tech / culture side of tech and life. Why is it so hard to let people contribute to the best of their abilities give them a way to survive
The older I get the more Rockets, space, crazy weapons all seem trivial compared to the underlying human problem
Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.