Comments on: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus

By: Facebook Engineering Director Aditya Agarwal Depart | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:29:06 +0000

[...] there a long time. Meanwhile Facebook has put new people, both hires and acqhires, in charge. As I wrote in a feature for GigaOM a few months ago: Staying at a tech startup for more than four [...]

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:28:29 +0000

That’s just not correct. On http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html only 3 out of 16 members of Operating Committee are clearly Jewish. If you discount Larry and Sergey, since they are not hires (it’s not like they could choose their own ethnicity), then only one of the hired execs (Jonathan Rosenberg) has definite Jewish heritage. For example:

Eric Schmidt (CEO) – German.
Nikesh Arora (President) – Indian.
David C. Drummond (SVP) – African-American.
Urs Hölzle (SVP) – Swiss.
Omid Kordestani – Persian.
Patrick Pichette – French-Canadian.
Alan Eustace, Shona L. Brown, Rachel Whetstone, Bill Coughran – Anglo-Saxon.

By: #Commentz: The number of devices connected to the Internet is expected to hit 5 BILLION this month

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:21:07 +0000

[...] How Technology Is Renewing Attention to Long-Form Journalism – Twitter makes it relatively easy [...]

By: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus

The Early Facebook Employee Exodus — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:41:41 +0000

[...] Staying at a tech startup for more than four years — the default stock option vesting schedule — is a rare thing, but it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook, many early and influential employees have moved on, several of them recently. Facebook is an unusual employer, having been incredibly successful while steering clear of the public markets longer than expected. Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure. Read ahead [...]

By: Top Posts — WordPress.com

Top Posts — WordPress.com — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:05:31 +0000

[...] The Early Facebook Employee Exodus Staying at a tech startup for more than four years — the default stock option vesting schedule — is a rare [...] [...]

By: Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:46:02 +0000

I agree with this post. The same goes for Google as well. The founders, CEO, board, top management team – all seem to be jewish. Strange?

By: SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 17, 2010

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 17, 2010 — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:01:33 +0000

[...] The Early Facebook Employee Exodus, gigaom.com [...]

By: Paramendra Bhagat

Paramendra Bhagat — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:19:40 +0000

A very interesting read.

By: DemiGuru

DemiGuru — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:35:28 +0000

What about these names makes lends you to believe they are Jewish??
Ezra Callahan
Ruchi Sanghvi
Bret Taylor
Yishan Wong
Adam D’Angelo
Chris Cox

BTW, chutzpah means spunk, audacity not courage.

By: Noah Walser

Noah Walser — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:20:35 +0000

I’m not anti-Semitic at all. However, when I take a look at the above published list of names of now and former high-profile Facebook employees, the thing that strikes me is that FB seems to clearly prefer employees with a Jewish heritage.

As I said: Nothing against hiring Jewish talents. What irritates me is that FB seems so biased and imbalanced in regard to the ethnicity, religion and (elitist) background of their hires that it almost appears as anti-Non-Semitic (which of course is against the law, too) or anti-non-elitist.

Considering that FB aims to be a community for ALL the people in the world, how does their own hiring policy match with this aim? How wise is this in regard to business and ethics? How credible is a company where one social stratum is totally over-represented in staff in regard to its prevalence in the job market, let alone in the world?

I hence ask Facebook to release statistics about how well their employees represent Facebook’s potential user-base and the world population in general. What’s the percentage of Afro-Americans in the Facebook staff? What’s the percentage of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews etc. employed by Facebook? What’s the percentage of employees that come from a wealthy background (read: whose parents earn more than 150’000 USD per year)? What’s the percentage of Asians, Africans, Europeans working at Facebook?

There is a natural tendency that birds of a feather flock together. A company like Facebook should be aware of this fact and actively promote diversity by adjusting its hiring policy.

I think this article suffers from the same bias. Or is it a coincidence that the last word is “chutzpah” (which means “courage” in Yiddish)?

So let me ask all of you: Where is your courage to think out of the box? To promote equal chances, fairness, diversity?