Manifesto of a Facebooker

17 November 2013

So, tomorrow is the day I start at Facebook. Yes, I'll be living in sunny California, I'll be getting free food and I won't have to count my money very often. Yet, the journey I'm starting will be anything but a pleasure cruise. From a technical aspect, we will be facing challenges no one has ever encountered before, with the aim to make a system that works, rather than a bunch of impressive-sounding, but ultimately useless papers. From a social aspect, we bear immense responsibility. Looking at these two together: if I screw up, I will know that a billion curses spoken around the world at that moment are directed to me.

Using Facebook, people around the world find love, topple governments, and anything else in between. They all rely on a few of us doing our job well. Maybe you know the old message, “Oops... something went wrong, but we're working on getting it fixed as soon as possible”. Maybe you've wondered what happens behind the curtains when you're reading this. Well, the truth is, we are fucking working on getting the problem fixed as soon as possible, no matter what time of the day or week it is, and no matter what other plans we had. I expect to have some nights like that... yet, we want to avoid problems from occuring in the first place (and we're good at it - when was the last time you saw this message?), so I will have to in part bring and in part gain the expertise needed to build a system that works smoothly at such a scale. I expect countless evenings of exhaustion from what I've learned and done during the day. I will sure get my share of tough times... but there is this one thing that will always support me as I think of it —

Our Mission to make the world more open and connected

At the time I was born, it was unthinkable that I ever even get to see California — and why would I want to go there, in the degrading society of evil fascist imperialists. That was at least what we were being told; and the majority out there in the East didn't bother to think if it made sense, most people were just repeating what they were being told, and hated... and didn't know why. I suppose it was similar on the other side. And now that the Iron Curtain is gone, we started meeting each other, and we figured we're not at all as different as we had been told we were. You would think, something has changed. Yes — the names have. We are still hating people for no reason; we've only chosen other random criteria to base our hate on. Our mission at Facebook is to give the people the opportunity to share and to encourage them to do so; so that the enemies of today get to know each other better and realise they don't really have a reason to be enemies.

So the world is watching me, relying on me to change it for the better... and the pledge I make today is that I will not betray it!