Endless Perks
Carless People. Facebook. Memoir and Mary Karr. Infinite Jest. Cardinals. Entropy. And Pandoc.
The Illusion of Endless Perks
I picked up Sarah Wynn-Williams’ opus Careless People, a reflection about her Facebook journey. Is it perfect? No. But she hooked me with the Fitzgerald quote.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
I’m a sucker for Gatsby. Short (can be read in an afternoon). Packs a punch. Changes the reader, no matter if it’s the first or fiftieth time through. Quote aside, I loved Wynn Williams’ story for two surprising reasons—neither involved the salacious details the social media company tried to suppress. You see, to begin, there aren’t enough memoirs like this in the wild. Publishers gravitate toward the powerful. Obama. Clinton. Trump. And the Founding Fathers (read Chernow’s homages). Or Walter Isaacson, he’s written about Franklin, Leonardo, Jobs, and Musk. And don’t forget Prince Harry because, well, the Royals sell. Don’t shame me, the Buckingham Palace outcast holds the all-time record for fastest-selling non-fiction book.
But the mid-level manager or individual contributor?
We don’t see enough of these so if you fit the profile get to writing. If you want to tackle your own, what are the key components of a solid memoir? Lucky for all of us, Mary Karr drafted a guide after reading hundreds. I love this quote early on, “I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”
Memoirs are ultimately journeys of self-reflection for both the reader and writer. Trauma sells books.
Sarah Wynn-Williams dissects her time at Facebook, beginning by describing how she landed the job. Of course, she used the platform to forge connections. It’s all about who you know.
And yes, I read portions of the book and wondered about the more troubling, headline-worthy accusations. Some moments felt odd—yet I know nothing good happens in Davos, where the wine flows and your mode of transportation hints at class and status. Still, no matter what Facebook’s Public Relations team spins, I believe the writer is being truthful to quote Obi-Won from a certain point of view.
Yet, the book violates many of Karr’s memoir rules, nothing is gained without self-reflection. Did the writer question their own decisions? Or learn anything meaningful? Is the hero’s journey earned? There is some of this here, Every time someone told me I was lucky to survive, I thought, Shouldn’t I be doing something with this life? Devoting myself to changing the world in some way? How do you do that?
And there is more than enough justification to her pen’s venom as she describes her complications during child birth. Spoiler, she felt the company gave little support, forcing her to return early. Yet, I felt she made Mark and Cheryl caricatures. The recount of Zuckerberg’s election-denial conversations with Obama or lavish corporate retreats at White Lotus resorts feels unfair without more inner monologue and self-examination. I mean, she worked for a company bending over backwards to gain access to the Chinese market. Zuckerberg learned Mandarin, even awkwardly asking Chairman Xi to name his first child. By pandering to the extremes, one wonders how much of Facebook’s code made its way into Chinese tools to crush internal dissent, or how much AI research was freely shared for favors. From the book, It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.
Yes, Wynn-Williams is the hero in her own story, a secret agent battling the forces of corporate evil. But I believe she can’t reflect on her role too much for legal reasons. Yes, there is a pending lawsuit. All industry players, Facebook included, grant options and signing bonuses but this comes with confidentiality clauses and fine print. These used to be normal fair, narrower and often limited to trade secrets or proprietary code. But lately, they’ve ballooned, making truthful disclosures hazardous. Legal departments and risk management firms must lie awake at night after reading William Blake, “A truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.”
She’s exposed herself legally by even writing this play-by-play account of excess and forays into dangerous global hotspots. Her only legal out might fall under whistleblower protections due to the immense detail around Zuckerberg’s China at all costs strategy. And it’s hard to have self-reflection if you’re blowing the whistle, the logic doesn’t land. I suppose every writer is an unreliable narrator. We all are.
That’s why this is a story about what’s left unsaid. There is magic and meaning in the silent ommissions. Here’s a favorite quote:
Sheryl tells me that the punishing scale of work is by design. A choice Facebook’s leaders had made. That staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start. The fewer employees, the harder they work. The answer to work is more work. To encourage this, the Facebook offices are overflowing with “perks.”
I remember joining a certain tech company; the onboarding trainer asked new hires to name their favorite company perk—SWAG, 401K match (money is good), healthcare coverage, etc.,
For her, it had to be the free food. She described her day, arriving at the company gym for a run before dawn. Breakfast followed, unlimited greasy bacon. Lunch with colleagues. And then, finally, her family swung by for dinner, meeting at the office. Life revolves around the buffet line.
Breaking it down further, let’s say she arrives at 5.30 AM for that morning workout (note, there is less traffic with this approach) and leaves after dinner and emails at 8.00 PM. Well, do the math, there isn’t much of a day left after the commute. This explains why a 23-year-old bought a moving truck and parked it in the parking lot of a major tech company in 2015. Why buy the house if you’re never there?
Social media hate and banter tends to analyze these perks, plug them into their own working routine, and think they are extravagant. Unlimited vacation looks great on paper but with overworked, small teams it becomes impossible to use. Guaranteed sabbaticals are often punted to next year. Yes, the phrase cultural commitment requires, you guessed it, extended hours. If you’ve ever walked the Las Vegas Strip, there’s a reason for the granite and opulence—they want you to stay forever.
And then there is the justification. Why does she stay? Wynn-Williams does wrestle with these choices.
They could have exercised basic human decency. It was all within their power. Instead, they focused on commencement speeches, vanity political campaigns, vacation properties, raising artisanal Wagyu beef from macadamia-eating cows, whatever their latest plaything was. And it seemed that none of these choices, these decisions, these moral compromises, felt particularly momentous to Facebook’s leadership.
But I tell myself I joined Facebook because I believed the platform was a force for good that would change the world.
Yeah, leaving work behind can feel like escaping Stockholm syndrome. We rarely understand the true cost of endless perks, the status of working at certain companies, and career meaning until we find ourselves asking, like the great philosopher Thanos, “What did it cost?” and realizing the answer might be, “everything.”
Be Cool, Pass The JPLA On …
What I’m Reading (Infinite Jest):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s most well-known book spans a thousand plus pages. There’s even hundreds of footnotes on top hitting themes of entertainment, destruction, genius, and addiction. For some, reading reamains a right of passage, and I admit, I'm doing less reading and more studying. It’s that type of book. In this world of drowning distraction, paying attention is challenging. Heck, it may be a moral act. And here, with this tome, you really have to pay attention. The writing is circular. The prose is dense. And the descriptions are vivid but each word has a purpose.
Yesterday, I read one paragraph, which took a half hour. I read it three times. Reading a book warning about distraction, I found myself distracted by the structure. I can’t imagine the time, the cost and toil, to weave this together. It’s almost like he was writing to quell a certain circular noise inside his own head.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, after finishing this opus, Wallace moved to teach at Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois. I wonder if the students even knew they were being taught by one of the world’s greatest authors, lost in the noise of college. How many times did people see him at Denny’s or Babbit Books—a popular local bookstore? I'm sure some would remember the do-rag he often wore but not know about his countless essays and the work left behind.
It's hard to describe the depth, even in the shorter pieces like This is Water. Nobody writes like this.
And maybe nobody will ever again.
What I’m Watching (Cardinals):
That’s why they play the games. I modeled the mighty Redbirds to be under .500 for the year, which could still happen. But they’ve had a hot May fueled by a pitching staff defying expectations, even Mikolas threw strong this month (shout out to a friend who said, ‘When Mikolas’ ERA falls below Contreras’ batting average we might have something’).
Here’s to hope and not waiting until next year.
What I’m Tinkering With (A New Way to HTML):
About every five years I think about switching computers, sometimes this stretches to seven. With major manufacturers continue to push smaller devices, the time between is becoming less and less due to battery wear and tear. What tests out at fourteen hours diminishes as lithium ion degrades. Microsoft must love filling the dump with Surface devices; I’ve had two go from eleven hours to two fairly quickly. Sure there are docking stations and wall plugs but nobody wants a laptop that dies that quickly. It kind of defeats the point of the portable argument. Apple remains the gold standard, I’m six years going with tried and true Intel.
But it’s showing age.
And so, I have to think about moving files and work, which in turn gets me into thinking about my own digital archive. I’ve realized, after digging, that files are spread across Dropbox, iCloud, and hard drive with local back-up—such as quaint solution. Keeping a writing site going since the mid-2000s also creates interesting problems. WordPress, what powers it, has been a gift; I’ve changed the CSS and theme multiple times yet the content transfers with each migration, even if I change hosting providers. The community often thinks in code. But I’m glad, as an end user and writer, that these benefits play out over time. Developers don’t often think in decades. Still, I’m sure creep in my workflow exists, making changes on the site without going back to the original source files. I don’t do it frequently, but I’m sure a misplaced comma annoyed me once upon a time 2019 edition. Without change logs, temptation creates interesting problems. There has been controversy through the years in big media with writers making substantial changes to articles after the fact. It’s so easy to make small tweaks, but one should resist it all the same. A comma can build to something more.
And I’ve been thinking about my own writing workflow and source tracking and my online publishing methodology. I’ve been writing in .txt files and .md for years. Typically, I cut and paste the source files to the site. Some might say just write to WordPress (it leverages markdown). But text files have been around since the 1960s, and I don’t believe they’re going away anytime soon. So, I’ve been testing a new system using Pandoc, Python, and .html templates that requires me to always make changes to the .txt files before publishing to the site.
This runs fairly well (and the pages load fast) but highlights the buy .vs build technology conundrum even large companies face. Yes, I probably don’t need a quarter of the function WordPress and a CMS provides—comments, page rankings, etc., Yet, I do need categories and tags for sorting, tracking, etc., Right now, I’m about 85 percent there in building my own personal CMS, which gives me exactly what I want. But I’m not sure if it’s quite worth it yet.
Again, what does it cost?
Around the Web:
Indian metal reminds me of Roman Concrete, old technology can be better.
Looking back at old code, fifty years.
When Words Fail (Five Years Later):
#Jamal
X | Verge Commentary | Jeff Bezos
