<story><title>Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csallen</author><text>After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it&apos;s refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it&apos;s inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs.&lt;p&gt;I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook&apos;s internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing individual incentives? Sounds like a really good (though scary) environment for ensuring that people do their best work.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s well-known that big companies are much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, but this seems like a step in the right direction for closing that gap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlinsey</author><text>This employee-ranking system is common at big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.  There are two key difficulties with such a system, and it would be interesting to learn how Facebook grapples with them:&lt;p&gt;1 - It&apos;s imperative that the criteria for ranking employees is well-aligned with company goals. At Microsoft for example, on most teams you are ranked mostly on what features you ship. That sounds great but it can lead to extreme feature bloat in products. It&apos;s hard to take a stand for simplicity and elegant design in a meeting when the other guy&apos;s job depends on shipping the feature, and your job depends on getting the other guy to agree to include &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; feature.&lt;p&gt;2 - AMZN and MSFT both merge each manager&apos;s ranked list of direct reports with the lists created by other managers who report to the same Director or Senior Manager.  This process can often be much more political than meritocratic, since other managers usually don&apos;t know much about an individual engineer&apos;s performance.  If a team is flat-out better than other team and all of their engineers deserved to be ranked higher, that can be very difficult to defend in a meeting in front of a VP.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csallen</author><text>After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it&apos;s refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it&apos;s inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs.&lt;p&gt;I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook&apos;s internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing individual incentives? Sounds like a really good (though scary) environment for ensuring that people do their best work.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s well-known that big companies are much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, but this seems like a step in the right direction for closing that gap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vaksel</author><text>sounds like a slave driver environment, if you ask me. It can&apos;t be good for morale, having people rotate through the company every month.</text></comment>