Want to work for Facebook? You’d better be prepared to act like Mark Zuckerberg’s boss.
At a town hall style Q&A at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Wednesday afternoon, the Facebook CEO said he has one rule for hiring people to work for the social network.
“I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person,” he said. “I think this rule has served me pretty well.”
Zuckerberg noted that hiring is a problem at Facebook, because there is more work to do than people to accomplish it. That can lead to hiring people who may not be the best candidate for a job.
So the Facebook CEO said that his team looks for people whose values align with the company’s.
“Facebook is not a company for everyone in the world,” he said.
Zuckerberg answered more than a dozen questions, fielded from people sitting in the audience and submitted online before the event. Here are some of the other questions posed to Zuckerberg, and his responses:
How do you start delegating to other people as you grow your own company?
“The most important thing is to keep your team as small as possible,” Zuckerberg said. “[Facebook] serves more than a billion people around the world but our team has fewer than 10,000 people. It’s only possible because of modern technology. Big companies get bloated.”
What’s the best tip you can give to young people with ideas to change the world?
“The most important thing is to just have faith in yourself and trust yourself,” he said. “When you’re young you hear that you don’t have experience to do things, that there are people that have more experience than you. I started Facebook when I was 19.”
“Don’t discount yourself, no matter what you’re doing,” he added. “Everyone has a unique perspective that they can bring to the world.”
How is Facebook working with governments who request greater censorship?
“We want to give the most voice to the most people possible,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that this means complying with each country’s laws after thorough investigation of issues that certain governments raise. “We review each request very seriously and we push back every time we think something is too broad, which is a lot of the time.”
Recently with Russia and Turkey for example, Facebook deemed the countries’ requests were legal.
“We may not have agreed with them,” Zuckerberg said. But he noted that if Facebook denied the request to take down certain content, then these countries would have blocked Facebook and prevented tens of millions of people from using Facebook.
What is Facebook doing to curb hate speech on the site?
“The line between factually untrue and disagreement of opinion is not always black and white,” Zuckerberg said.
But if a lot of people report the same item, Facebook pays more attention to it. As a result, Facebook will show that piece of content less frequently in News Feed.
“A lot of freedom of expression often means sharing things people disagree with, [but] we have certain rules on this especially on the hate speech side,” he said. “Anything that incites violence or terrorism, we just take down immediately.”
What are Facebook’s plans to get into other areas of technology, like Apple and Google are doing with wearables and driverless cars?
Zuckerberg said that content will evolve toward video over the next few years and that the company is excited and focused on virtual and augmented reality.
“We’re definitely looking into future technology,” he said ambiguously.
