There has been a lot of griping about Facebook lately.  IPO trouble, privacy concerns, the “what is this doing to society and do I really want to contribute?” crowd.  They’re getting slaughtered in the press, on Wall Street, and in the court of public opinion, and they seem to be doing shockingly little about it.

I’m not a heavy Facebook user; I go on mostly to answer messages or, if I’m travelling, to see which friends are in town (I can never keep track of where people are).  And as a social psychologist, I have serious reservations about any system that propagates a curated life, because people start thinking that it is reality and wonder why their life sucks in comparison.

But all that said, I’m not trying to burn Facebook to the ground.  So here’s my tip for making the world not hate them: tell us, in several very short sentences, how you make money.

I actually think the business model mystery is a huge part of Facebook’s PR nightmare.  A good friend recently pointed out that Amazon also has a ton of data about us, but we’re not concerned, and that point is fundamental to my theory here: people hate Facebook because they have no idea how it works and yet it is big and important.  So they invent bogeymen.

If you ask the average person on the street how Amazon makes money, they’ll tell you.  Sure, it might not be in incredible detail and they may not have a great understand of why they are a high volume, low margin business (they may not even know what volume and margin are).  But they still essentially understand how stores work: they sell us stuff for more than they buy it for, and the difference is profit.  They get why it is a $100B company.

Ditto Google, which may be a more fair comparison.  Google is a huge internet name that confounds most folks, but when you ask my parents how it makes money, they’ll blind stab “advertising”.  And they’d be right; that’s a huge source of revenue for Google.  $200B, lots and lots of advertising, scary because they are big but not because we don’t understand them.

Advertising is a huge source of revenue for Facebook as well.  85% vs Google’s 95%.  But how many people in America can tell you that?  Facebook never says “we’re an advertiser” in the same way Google does and consequently, people can let their mind run wild.  Maybe they are selling our data!  Maybe it is the next credit score or background check!  Maybe they are simply going to blackmail everyone!  $50B market cap, smaller than either other country, but entirely black ops.  And entirely scary.

There is abundant psych literature that should remind Facebook that faced by the unknown, people will get scared, hostile, and generate “things that go bump in the night” pretty quickly.  The best thing they could do right now?  A simple infographic and a short statement that says “this is how we make money now, and how we plan to make money, and anytime you have questions, let us know”.  People know who Zuckerberg is, so make him deliver it.  The Facebook fireside chat.

I got invited to talk to a group of 90 high schoolers at Columbia yesterday, and as usual, I didn’t prepare slides but just took a walk and thought about the things I’ve learned (and repeatedly not learned) along the way.

For one, I’ve learned always to curse when talking to either high school or college students.  They’re old enough to hear it and it makes them pay attention.  In this case, I somehow also managed to work in a comment about breast implants during this talk.

It made sense at the time.  One student asked what the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is and I replied that, for me, it is knowing something that can make the world better and simply not having the resources to get it implemented.  To which another student followed up: when that happens, how do you get the attention of the people with resources?  I talked a bit about sources of resources, how pitching works, and then…breast implants.  As in “don’t get breast implants to impress a guy, don’t change your morals to get an investor.  Do, however, take showers and wash your clothes and be willing to be more conventional than you might want to be in order to fit in well enough to get heard.”

I also talked a lot about the fact that startups aren’t just their CEOs.  The media tends to talk a lot about the public faces of companies, because they are public and because we like our heroes.  But the majority of people at startups are not founders or CEOs.  They are employees who found a niche and learned to fill it well.  Startups are a collective endeavor and we need to get serious about training the next generation of employees.  Not just founders – employees.

My point to the students was to find what you’re naturally good at and do that.  Don’t just pick a title off the board and say “marketing sounds cool, I’ll do that.”  Actually look at what you are uniquely suited to do.  And of course, because I didn’t talk enough about how to do that, one girl actually wrote me afterward to ask how to know what you’re good at in the first place.

Which is actually a tremendously hard question.  Until you get into college and are able to experiment with different areas of curriculum, it can be very difficult to know where you fit into the workplace.  Which is why internships play such a critical part of our tech employment ecosystem: they allow people to see what different roles at a company actually do, day-to-day.  Education needs to look more like internships, and until it does, the only recommendations I can make are about experiencing as much (with as much diversity) as possible, listening to where people give you positive feedback, and carefully looking at your own projects for where they have succeeded and failed.

In some ways, that is also a challenge to innovators, HR people, and the entire adult community.  While education sorts itself out, try to create at least one new internship every quarter and do your best to make those valuable, not just “copy this” jobs.  People in tech complain there isn’t enough talent around?  If you can’t find it, make it.

I caught up on the first three episodes of The Newsroom over the weekend and it has been fertile ground for reflection (which, besides strict entertainment, is the thing I love most about good stories).  But one theme has preoccupied me more than most: Newsroom’s reflections on the modern American working relationship.

I don’t mean the romantic underpinnings of the show, which I’m entirely uninterested in.  I mean the actual relationships that grow between people working together on a project, and in particular the primary importance of having a good boss.  Whatever his personal faults, newsman Will McAvoy is meant to be the show’s lodestone, its anchor as much figuratively as literally.  The show may be just a smug opportunity for Aaron Sorkin to tell us how to get America right, but he certainly gets one thing right: we all want to work for a badass.

Everyone on the show works for a badass; they all think their immediate boss is awesome.  And that’s something I think has been missing from all the recent interest in the workplace as a creator of meaning.  People have latched onto the psych research that shows that mission, more than money, keeps people happy and satisfied at their jobs but I’m willing to bet that looking up to your boss is a surprisingly large component of that.

After six months of relaxing, I’ve been starting to look at jobs again.  Having said “maybe” to a bunch of offers, I’m trying to get good at saying “no” and narrowing them down.  And I’m finding that the primary factor in my decision is precisely my estimation of the quality of that relationship: is this a job where I get to work for someone I believe in?

I’m a Mac, not a Will.  Which is to say that while I will certainly lead a team within a larger organization, I have no desire to be the man at the top.  Consequently, I need someone at the top that I can trust and respect and encourage to fulfill both the potential of the product and their own potential.  And I don’t think I’m alone in that job desire.

Asking “what makes a good boss?” may be a bit like asking “what makes a good teacher?”, in that it may vary largely with the person you’re asking.  But before we even start thinking about what makes someone a good boss, I think we have to start asking why so few bosses actually think about their role.  That is, most bosses in the American workplace have to manage both up and down: they are simultaneously someone’s boss and someone’s employee, and it is the employee role that tends to take up the majority of their energy.  Even when they are managing those below them, it is with the purpose of impressing those above them.

So maybe that’s the call to action: be a better boss.  Or at least think about what being a boss means, and how you can serve those who you manage.  What kind of leader would you like your boss to be?  Who would you follow?

Side note: instead of saying “someone’s employee”, I almost said “someone’s bitch”.  Isn’t it odd that we don’t have a nice word for someone who reports to someone.  The thesaurus suggests: aide, assistant, attendant, deputy, flunky, gofer, helper, inferior, lackey, minion, peon, scrub, second, second fiddle, second stringer, serf, servant, slave.  With the possible exception of deputy, I don’t want to be any of those.

I love building things. Teams, products, solutions, meals: if there is a way to see it as construction, that is almost certainly the perspective I’ll take. And given that love, I spend a tremendous amount of time working directly with engineers, both to build my own projects and helping with others.

As a whole, I tend to like engineers, which is perhaps unsurprising given my own perspective as a scientist. They like logic and rules, have a problem solving approach that is slanted heavily towards the analytic, and their geeky side interests are appealing to me.

But lately, I have the growing feeling that something has turned the corner in tech. Engineers are starting to suck.

I don’t mean they are becoming bad coders; if anything, the average ability of even a junior engineer has risen and that should continue as higher education and other training programs reorient themselves to practical, rather than theoretical, computer science. Rather, I mean that engineers are becoming disappointingly lame people. Not because they are losing their geekiness, but because they are becoming prima donnas.

Engineers are seen as indispensable by companies and are constantly told by the startup community that they make or break many startups. There is a culture in tech right now of engineers being somewhat like wizards: if you have really good ones, you are bound to win, even against overwhelming odds. They are the single most recruited position, no successful startup goes without them, and they are allowed remarkable freedoms in terms of where they work, how they work, and personal grooming.

And then there is the economic reality of engineer scarcity: we need more than we have and that results in heavy competition for them. The average pay for a starting engineer in Silicon Valley is literally twice or three times as much as other members of a startup team (marketing, product, design, etc.). And according to strict economic principles, it should be: scarcity governs price.

But teams are not strictly economic. When you take kids fresh out of college and start paying them eighty thousand dollar starting salaries, bad things happen. They do it in finance and look how well that has been working for us. When people don’t know what to do with their money, they generally choose incredibly stupid things that are not need (or even really want) driven. As anyone walking around Silicon Valley right now will tell you, it is a good time to be in luxury goods.

And praise is the same way. Even if we stopped paying them too much money, if we continue to tell engineers that they are the only thing that truly matters, it will ruin them. That’s just part of human nature: if one cog thinks it is THE COG, it will start and stop when it damn well feels like it, just to exercise some control in the world.

In reality, this is a love letter to all the engineers who don’t suck. Sumit Ahluwalia. Bill Cromie. Will Koshuta. Hilary Mason. The legion more that I know. They are all the more awesome because it would have been so easy for them to slip into being a “brogrammer”, but they didn’t. And by and large, what distinguishes them is that they actually care more about the machine than their own little cogdom. They aren’t coding as part of making a million dollars, they are coding in service of something that generally actually believe in. Like me, they love building, and I suspect they’d be doing it if even if it paid a heck of a lot less.

So what’s the takeaway?  Treat engineers like you would treat other employees you are leading.  Sell them on the mission, not their individual fiefdom.  And for the love of god, stop paying them so much – to quote The Streets, when playing blackjack, “He might get the ace or the top one / So organise your two’s and three’s into a run then you’ll have fucked him son”.  Take a few junior engineers with one good leader and train them to be the kind of people who will make things better.

Though I suspect few people actually stop to think about it, titling blog posts is actually quite a bit harder than writing them.  In reality, most of what is interesting about a post boils down to a few words: NYC soda ban is not an issue of freedom pretty much says it all.  But you want people to read, to understand the finer point that you’re trying to make.  So a truly good title gets people in the door, but doesn’t give away the whole plotline.

That isn’t actually all that easy to do.  As I remember one of my content-heavy friends noting, statistically the best titles are the “list” titles: 3 ways to shoot your dog, 6 things never to do on a date, The 100 most creative people in cajun music.  They tell you what you are going to be reading about, without actually imparting any of the important information, so that you’re forced to click-through if you’re interested.  And the click-through, the view, is the metric of all things holy in commercial blogging.

Where title writing gets interesting to me is for non-commercial bloggers.  You could argue they don’t exist, in that even those who do not make direct money off their blogs are still trying to get people to read it (otherwise, why write it at all?), but I do think the motivation set is different.  The longer I’m at this, the more I realize I don’t really mind if people get the main point from the title, since my whole endgame is to nudge people around with the knowledge contained in the points themselves.  So the title is actually a fairly good means to that end, provided I can do it well.

But that presents its own set of problems.  Writing your main point down into a few words that are difficult to misconstrue is not an easy thing, especially if your chief talent is in science rather than communication.  In the long format of a post, I feel that I can be forgiven for rambling; as any writer will tell you, it is the concise, dense prose that is the hardest.  And what could possibly be more concise than a title?