Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company

http://blog.holler.com/why-all-employees-should-be-vip-at-your-company-2011-09

by biznickman • 15 years ago

143 39 15 years ago

blog.holler.com

codecaine• 15 years ago

I've never been to Silicon valley, in fact I've never been to the US but I personally feel that this picture the author draws of "old" SV is very idealized. This rant contains high amounts of nostalgia and therefore does not seem to be entirely rational. I would love to know if SV used to be like O'Neill describes it in his article.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

I'm just saying from my experience, when I came here I was able to easily connect with other top execs at events around the bay. The main point is that Steve Jobs & Wozniak, Sergey and Larry, these guys were all accessible at some point and participated in the community. Jobs doesn't exactly participate in events anymore, yet many highly successful people show up at events of all types. That sort of contribution to the community from more "successful" individuals is exactly how SV was built.

I should also add that I'm not suggesting that exclusive events are alone the source of the problem. They can even be useful in some cases. I'm simply stating that exclusive events are not useful when you are trying to build a community of any type (in Facebook's case it's a community of developers).

coffeemug• 15 years ago

I live in SV for two years now (moved from NY, and from Ukraine before that). You can send a cold e-mail to almost anyone here asking for advice, and if you're polite, sound intelligent, and have sensible expectations, nine times out of ten you'll get a meeting. I'm talking about people whose bank accounts are as large as budgets of some small countries. These folks do it because they genuinely love the startup world and want to help out. This sort of openness is unheard of in the finance world in NY, for example.

Some people are inaccessible (you likely won't get a meeting with Steve Jobs by sending a cold email), but it's an exception rather than the rule. I also suspect it has more to do with his schedule than his attitude (unlike other parts of the world).

That being said, people will be people, and there's plenty of VIP-type nonsense going on here. The thing is, you can't think of these things in absolutes - you have to compare with the rest of the world, and SV is by far the most open place I've ever seen. That being said, I'd really like the culture of disrespect for the respectable here to get even stronger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kirzr6lnSs&feature=playe...

biznickman8• 15 years ago

Great video

dorkitude• 15 years ago

Facebook hardly represents all of Bay Area tech.

And it certainly doesn't represent startups (at all).

biznickman8• 15 years ago

Agreed. The same thing isn't limited to Facebook though. I only gave two examples (one of TC Disrupt, and the other of FB) but there are plenty of other events where this happens.

_delirium• 15 years ago

There are quite a few hacker events with more of a flat-hierarchy, open-to-all-comers ethos, but yeah, you probably won't find them attached to these more high-profile media events (there are exclusive sponsored after-parties associated with events like WWDC and GDC as well, to add more examples). There's fortunately the whole other parallel world of stuff like Noisebridge, DevHouse, etc...

mikeash• 15 years ago

There are certainly plenty of exclusive events hosted by third parties at WWDC, but as far as I know, all of the official Apple events are open to all attendees, as well as (I believe) all employees who are able to attend the conference.

fleitz• 15 years ago

The reality of the situation is that a party with 10, 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000 people feel completely different. With social dynamics being what they are it's difficult to invite everyone and still retain the atmosphere sought by the planner. I have no insight into the mindsets of the planners but I have a feeling the situation is probably the result of the realities of party planning rather than a desire to exclude certain individuals, or a class of individuals.

The situation with the B-list party could probably have been handled better with regard to musical talent and an obvious discrepancy between the talent invited.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

Ultimately both parties weren't planned by the same people.

rektide2• 15 years ago

Small non-exclusive company rails against big companies who shield their developers / have become exclusive, news at 7.

I'm all for companies that can keep developers and engineers up at the front, being deeply technical involved and interacting with their communities. But that's not going to be all companies, and Facebook in particular is one of those companies that is by their nature a closed system that builds itself not out in public (ala, say Mozilla), but through the proxy of press releases and new features dropped onto users' and 3rd partys' laps.

The other big factor I'd pitch would be consistency: how much technical content is there, and what amount is appropriate for a developer to be showing off? If the event is not inherently a technical event, a fifteen or thirty minute segment from a developer might seem really out of place. Developers are to be respected, but Facebook isn't a technical company, it's a networking company.

smokinn• 15 years ago

Facebook is a closed system?

I'm not one of their employees and yet I know how their build system works, how they store more photos than the rest of the internet combined (Haystack), how they process their analytics and likes (HBase counters + scribe + ptail + puma), how they store messages (HBase), how their data centers are built (open compute), the list just goes on and on.

As far as large internet companies goes Facebook has one of the most open engineering departments I've ever seen.

rektide2• 15 years ago

Facebook's infrastructure is open, but their product I would not hesitate to label as closed, even if it has APIs.

reso• 15 years ago

This guy has obviously never worked for Facebook, and so has no idea how Facebook treats its engineers. Not getting invited to a particular f8 afterparty (which sounds like it was Spotify's deal and not Facebook's), is peanuts compared to the level of respect and power they are given within the company every day.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

I agree that developers are given a lot of power. Trust me that I know of the company well as I covered it daily for four years. That doesn't mean community events should be divided.

jsavimbi• 15 years ago

You have to separate business events from community events. I never take offense to not being invited to a business event, even one held in-house, where management is looking to schmooze with potential investors, partners and clients. Management rehearses what type of interaction they're going to have, with whom, for how long and what the content of the conversation will be (or at least they should be rehearsing), and to be honest, those plans need not be shared with developers nor should developers/sales/support/operations be rubbing elbows in the same room with prospects.

It's a business, not an egalitarian democracy. We all know some numbnuts will get drunk and embarrass themselves and the company. It's easier to avoid the potential of that happening by restricting the invite list to only the strategically important people. As a developer, I never considered myself to be such. Also, I never invite my boss to any of my parties, so whatever.

As far as the marketing/biz dev/party planner people us concerned, they're a necessary evil who more often than not display asshole behavior of the kind described in the post, but as a developer you should ask yourself if your life is worth working with/for people who's great idea is a car-sharing service with the need for a VIP room.

thatsiebguy• 15 years ago

I skimmed the headline at first and thought it said "How The "IT Crowd" Hijacked Silicon Valley". Boy was I in for a disappointment.

butterfi• 15 years ago

How much of this kind of thing is a by-product of marketers as well? I've seen more then a few events where the people who actually did the development were excluded to accommodate business partners and clients. It's not that marketing necessarily wants to exclude developers, but space and resources are limited, and socializing is an important tool in the marketer tool kit. Not that I condone this (having been on both sides of this equation), but it does speak to the shifting sands of prioritizing the goals of these kinds of events (is it a company celebration to thank employees, or a marketing event?)

nikcub• 15 years ago

all of the major developer conferences (IO, f8, etc.) have been hijacked by marketing, PR and BD people.

they forgot what these conferences are supposed to be about

asdkl234890• 15 years ago

So thing X about thing Y, organized initially by and for people of type Y, has over time been hijacked by people who are X experts.

If Marketing, PR and BD hijacked a programming competition, I'd be surprised. If they hijack a conference about anything, not so much.

mmahemoff• 15 years ago

FWIW that wasn't my experience for the past two IOs. I mostly met real developers and entrepreneurs, even at the after-parties. To be sure, the lure of free phones makes for a few fanboys and denies some deserving developers. But it was overwhelmingly a developer conference and the sessions certainly reflected that.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

In the past ... the PR people used to actually communicate to us that the event was just as much a celebration to thank employees as promoting the company.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

"Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company"

Been visiting Lake Wobegon recently I see.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

Love that show!

rmason• 15 years ago

It appears to me from afar that Facebook has forgotten one of the most important rules of the Valley. When you start ignoring the contributions of developers the better ones leave.

http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...

megablast• 15 years ago

This article is almost insinuating that only the developers work hard, but the other people at facebook are just coasting on the developers hard work. The fact is, other people can bring a lot to a company as well. Where do the developers think the money comes from, not from writing great code, but getting advertisers interested.

kelnos• 15 years ago

Sure, but the advertising platform itself doesn't exist without the developers. I didn't really catch the insinuation you caught. I read it as just that the developers were getting snubbed in favor of the "a-list" personalities, when they should be peers.

jonursenbach• 15 years ago

An argument can be made that the product, and the underlying code that comprises it, is what actually brings advertisers in. Not salespeople.

sadlyNess• 15 years ago

That is what I tag as(the inception of) a Stupid Arguement, pretending a unit of a whole is 'better' than another unit(not sub-unit), and ignoring Context. A successful FB is made of both the working business and the working tech ends. They may not be equal but it's up to Context(actual facts) to determine which end is key to the 'success'. But then we are humans, we have opinions and egos. Oh and the title used 'All'.

gavanwoolery• 15 years ago

I have never had any desire to go to any conference, ever. What I tend to find is that talking gets very little done, and often not much is learned beyond a few truisms. If I want to talk to people I do it online, it is just more time-effective. At a conference, I don't necessarily know who a given person is, but online I have full access to their information (typically), and I only talk to the people I want to.

If I want to get into a good party (which is seldom), I go to whatever club is the current flavor of the month and shove a filthy wad of cash in the bouncer's hand. I could give two shits about an "exclusive" SV party, and I would hope most Facebook employees feel the same way.

delinka• 15 years ago

I'm right there with you. I can learn more from a good book and an online chat than I can from a conference. As a developer, I never expect to get work done as a result of attending a conference because I feel that they are strictly social events.

donw• 15 years ago

There's nothing wrong with having private events -- sometimes, you really don't have room for everybody at the party.

Whatever you do, though, don't host a public event with a separate area for the VIPs.

A private party is just that -- a private party. The only people that know about it are the invitees, and I certainly wouldn't feel excluded if I wasn't given an invite to a small gathering because I wasn't in-group.

I'd be damned insulted if you hold a public hoo-hah with some big names on the playbill, and then whisk said big names away to some sort of private, exclusive party, where I can't go, because I'm not one of the cool kids. Not because the exclusive gathering was, well, exclusive, but because the open-to-the-public side of things had some massively false pretenses.

biznickman8• 15 years ago

You've effectively articulated my exact thoughts. There's a right way and a wrong way to do things.

Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company

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