"If lots of [employees] are flocking to a new business unit, that's a good sign that the opportunity is a good one. . . . If a business unit can't attract people very easily, that's a good sign that it's a business Enron shouldn't be in."

- Jeff Skilling, former president of Enron

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

Contrast that with the Facebook approach:

"Resourcing for projects is purely voluntary.
-a PM lobbies group of engineers, tries to get them excited about their ideas.

-Engineers decide which ones sound interesting to work on.

-Engineer talks to their manager, says “I’d like to work on these 5 things this week.”

-Engineering Manager mostly leaves engineers’ preferences alone, may sometimes ask that certain tasks get done first.

-Engineers handle entire feature themselves — front end javascript, backend database code, and everything in between. If they want help from a Designer (there are a limited staff of dedicated designers available), they need to get a Designer interested enough in their project to take it on. Same for Architect help. But in general, expectation is that engineers will handle everything they need themselves."

Good god. Does this strike anyone else as disturbing? Surely every single piece of work being taken on should have the USERS needs and concerns as top priority and not sexy stuff that can attract sufficient engineering interest?

What if there's important problems that are really bothering lots of users and a PM can't get anybody interested (or no-one decides to take on the problem?)

Here's a complaint from a guy about maintaining a personal page and fan page:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/01/leaving-facebook/

Some quotes from that piece:

"As a programmer myself, I can’t fathom that it would take much technical and design effort to address these issues, and Facebook is flooded with complaints from users begging them to fix these headaches. From my perspective as a Facebook user with a very active personal page and fan page, I can’t help but get the impression that Facebook deliberately wants to make some basic admin tasks (like blocking spammers) difficult or impossible in order to compel you to spend more time on the site. There doesn’t seem to be any other logical reason for these glaring design flaws that I can comprehend, other than pure incompetence, and based on their success in other areas, it seems more likely that these choices are deliberate."

"Surely someone on their team is aware of all the complaints and requests to fix the broken elements. So why do they seem to ignore what appear to be such glaring (and fixable) problems?"

"I thought that Facebook would be an interesting place to share inspirational messages and build more community around growth-oriented people. But the current implementation of Facebook can’t handle the way I’ve been trying to use it without creating more headaches than it’s worth, and their momentum appears to be headed in the wrong direction for me to expect that these problems would be fixed anytime soon."

"So I’ve crossed the threshold where Facebook’s value isn’t worth the hassle to use it. I concluded that the best choice was to simply drop the service altogether and invest my time elsewhere."

Who will take on these issues?

Again from the Malcom Gladwell article linked above:

"You might expect a C.E.O. to say that if a business unit can't attract customers very easily that's a good sign it's a business the company shouldn't be in. A company's business is supposed to be shaped in the direction that its managers find most profitable. But at Enron the needs of the customers and the shareholders were secondary to the needs of its stars."

Facebook should wake up in my opinion. They did really well to reach 600m users (or whatever the figure is now) but if they want to stay there they should get their priorities straight.

EDIT: Grammar