7 Answers
Tom Whitnah,
Views · Upvoted by Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, I taught Zuck in college and have worked for him for years. and Keith Adams, Engineer at Facebook
Most Viewed Writer in Facebook (company)
Working with Mark is generally a really great experience. It's hard to imagine a CEO being easier to work with. He listens really intently and incisively, maintains an impressive amount of context for every project I've had product reviews with him on, is firm and deliberate when he wants to make a particular decision for a product feature and very direct about decisions he wants to leave entirely up to the teams working on the product. He's always open to people's ideas, whether they are a product director or one of the good number of new engineers and sometimes interns who end up in a Zuck review. He generally has a clear vision for what he wants for the product, is able to provide very specific advice quickly and has a really strong design sensibility. His input and vision is always very valuable and his decision-making is often prescient with a good intuition for where the product and industry are heading.
Every so often he pulls the figurative "Because I'm CEO Bitch" card when a team is really resistant to a decision he believes in strongly, but he's still pretty patient when that happens and works with teams to resolve the tension of a decision they find hard to go along with. While I'm sure he's been angry in a few meetings, I've never seen it firsthand. The closest I've come is when he was real disappointed in the pace a particular project on my team was moving along. I would describe it as "sternly disappointed", which was enough for us to gather a couple teams into a "war room" and get the project completed at a faster pace than he had anticipated.
And what is probably most striking about product reviews with Zuck is just how light and often jovial the mood is. There are often many hilarious quotes that come out of these reviews. While people try to come pretty prepared, he makes it clear he doesn't usually want teams to put a ton of time polishing presentations to impress him. What's most important is having a good understanding of what decisions you want to be made in the meeting and a clear understanding of the issues and data related to your product.
While my most extensive experiences in Zuck reviews are in the last 18 months on Graph Search where I've been in about 20 Zuck reviews, I've found his style has been pretty similar since first attending a Zuck review in 2007 while working on The Awesome Button during my fourth week at Facebook. It's always been really clear why Zuck has consistently had the best employee ratings on Glassdoor:
Mark Zuckerberg Is The Best CEO, Says Glassdoor
Every so often he pulls the figurative "Because I'm CEO Bitch" card when a team is really resistant to a decision he believes in strongly, but he's still pretty patient when that happens and works with teams to resolve the tension of a decision they find hard to go along with. While I'm sure he's been angry in a few meetings, I've never seen it firsthand. The closest I've come is when he was real disappointed in the pace a particular project on my team was moving along. I would describe it as "sternly disappointed", which was enough for us to gather a couple teams into a "war room" and get the project completed at a faster pace than he had anticipated.
And what is probably most striking about product reviews with Zuck is just how light and often jovial the mood is. There are often many hilarious quotes that come out of these reviews. While people try to come pretty prepared, he makes it clear he doesn't usually want teams to put a ton of time polishing presentations to impress him. What's most important is having a good understanding of what decisions you want to be made in the meeting and a clear understanding of the issues and data related to your product.
While my most extensive experiences in Zuck reviews are in the last 18 months on Graph Search where I've been in about 20 Zuck reviews, I've found his style has been pretty similar since first attending a Zuck review in 2007 while working on The Awesome Button during my fourth week at Facebook. It's always been really clear why Zuck has consistently had the best employee ratings on Glassdoor:
Mark Zuckerberg Is The Best CEO, Says Glassdoor
Yishan Wong,
Views · Upvoted by Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, I taught Zuck in college and have worked for him for years. and Alex Wu, worked at Facebook for >4 yrs
Most Viewed Writer in Facebook (company) with 30+ answers
No. There are plenty of people who are happy to work with him, though there are also plenty who find it difficult.
He is not some sort of ideally charismatic person whose primary quality is that he's easy to get along with. Rather, he's a demanding CEO with a monomaniacal focus on making Facebook succeed in its mission. This is not to say that he's mean - he's a perfectly nice guy on a personal level; it's just that professionally, he is focused on getting it done, and has a limited tolerance for emotional fragility in the people he needs to help him execute on that mission.
In my study of business leaders, I've yet to come across one who was considered "great" who didn't also have a significant body count of ex-employees claiming that they were autocratic and mean. Examples include Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison. My theory is that the level of personal demandingness needed to drive a global enterprise to a position of world-changing leadership is one that can be too much for some people. Such leaders don't tend to provide much in the way of emotional coddling, and Mark Zuckerberg is like that. If your confidence in your own abilities is self-generated and emotionally secure, and you are seeking someone who will pose to you ever-greater challenges to surmount, then Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty good fit for you. However, he is not there to "develop" you - that's your own job.
He does have a touch of the Asperger's; in my experience this is primarily manifested in that he does not provide much active feedback or confirmation that he is listening to you. I have had multiple experiences where he will ask for my opinion on something and even when we're the only two people in the room, I wasn't sure if he had really comprehended or cared about what I was saying (he doesn't do the usual "oh, all right!" or "hmm, I see!" that most people do; he just listens, sometimes while looking away from you), until later when some strategy change was announced that integrated some or all of my opinions. I think this leads many people to think that he's thoughtlessly autocratic, but it turns out he is actually listening all the time to anything that anyone is saying to him, but you will simply not receive confirmation or acknowledgement until later when he announces his conclusion or decision, whereupon you can observe that he has integrated all his streams of information and advice together.
I would characterize him as "tough but fair." He's not a pain in the ass to work with if you're the type of person who is looking to achieve greater and greater things in life, but if you just want to get something good done once and then take a break, then he's probably not the guy for you.
For further reference, Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth wrote the following note about working with Mark Zuckerberg: http://www.facebook.com/n
He is not some sort of ideally charismatic person whose primary quality is that he's easy to get along with. Rather, he's a demanding CEO with a monomaniacal focus on making Facebook succeed in its mission. This is not to say that he's mean - he's a perfectly nice guy on a personal level; it's just that professionally, he is focused on getting it done, and has a limited tolerance for emotional fragility in the people he needs to help him execute on that mission.
In my study of business leaders, I've yet to come across one who was considered "great" who didn't also have a significant body count of ex-employees claiming that they were autocratic and mean. Examples include Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison. My theory is that the level of personal demandingness needed to drive a global enterprise to a position of world-changing leadership is one that can be too much for some people. Such leaders don't tend to provide much in the way of emotional coddling, and Mark Zuckerberg is like that. If your confidence in your own abilities is self-generated and emotionally secure, and you are seeking someone who will pose to you ever-greater challenges to surmount, then Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty good fit for you. However, he is not there to "develop" you - that's your own job.
He does have a touch of the Asperger's; in my experience this is primarily manifested in that he does not provide much active feedback or confirmation that he is listening to you. I have had multiple experiences where he will ask for my opinion on something and even when we're the only two people in the room, I wasn't sure if he had really comprehended or cared about what I was saying (he doesn't do the usual "oh, all right!" or "hmm, I see!" that most people do; he just listens, sometimes while looking away from you), until later when some strategy change was announced that integrated some or all of my opinions. I think this leads many people to think that he's thoughtlessly autocratic, but it turns out he is actually listening all the time to anything that anyone is saying to him, but you will simply not receive confirmation or acknowledgement until later when he announces his conclusion or decision, whereupon you can observe that he has integrated all his streams of information and advice together.
I would characterize him as "tough but fair." He's not a pain in the ass to work with if you're the type of person who is looking to achieve greater and greater things in life, but if you just want to get something good done once and then take a break, then he's probably not the guy for you.
For further reference, Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth wrote the following note about working with Mark Zuckerberg: http://www.facebook.com/n
Jens Begemann,
Views
The employee reviews by Glassdoor.com may be helpful:
Their list of top places to work at lists Facebook as #1 and
"Mark Zuckerberg [...] got a 96-percent approval rating from his employees, better to or equal than all but four CEOs — including Steve Jobs, who got a 97-percent rating."
http://gigaom.com/2010/12
Their list of top places to work at lists Facebook as #1 and
"Mark Zuckerberg [...] got a 96-percent approval rating from his employees, better to or equal than all but four CEOs — including Steve Jobs, who got a 97-percent rating."
http://gigaom.com/2010/12
Dipen Chaudhary,
Views · Upvoted by Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, I taught Zuck in college and have worked for him for years.
Is Mark Zuckerberg difficult to work with? and http://www.facebook.com/n
Edward Boches,
Views
Read the Time profile. Apparently not. Most people seem to like him, respect him and find him quite personable. As well as brilliant. The people whom I know that work at FB and know Mark have only kind words.
