Julie Rubicon. Recognition of a former Facebook employee

A note from Robin Sloan, who posted an entry on his blog on March 15, 2016: “This story appeared in my secure box at the end of last month, along with the request to publish it on Facebook in exactly this format. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story, but it seemed to me rather strange and interesting. ”

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Writing all this is the last thing I want to do, but it is necessary. Partly for the sake of people who are obliged to know what happens to their postings on Facebook, but mostly (99%) for Julie Rubicon and that peak on the chart.

My former colleagues from Facebook Inc. in Menlo Park, California - hello, jane, hello, neil, hello ... Mark? - they will immediately understand who wrote it, and the company will probably pursue me, but I think they will turn everything quietly. The Securities Commission is not limited to a quiet investigation, if the relevant rules and regulations are really violated, but honestly ... there are hardly any such rules.

I write this on February 27, 2016. Today is my last day on Facebook. I handed over my badge, laptop and walked out on Willow Road, with a flash drive and screenshots that you will see below. On the street, I watched in silence as corporate applications disappear from the screen of the smartphone one by one.

It was strange to feel that I was not a Facebook employee, although I had been waiting for my dismissal there all the time. I started in the development group, it didn’t work very well there, I moved to the advertising department, where it was even worse, and I graduated from PIU (Partner Intelligent Group). The PIU department is where my story begins.

Each Facebook user can only see a narrow, personalized system slice. A wider picture is available for Facebook itself. From my working PIG terminal, I could run requests for all posts with comments, open and closed. According to personal messages, too. I could ask: how many people on Facebook mentioned the US presidential election today? How many people wrote something about Donald Trump? How many of these messages contained an emoticon? (On the morning of February 27, if you are interested: 65 million; 42 million; 32,541).

Advertisers like this statistic, but obviously, Facebook cannot give them direct access. (Is it really obvious, is it true? It should be obvious). Therefore, there is an intermediate link. If you spend a large amount on advertising on Facebook - I never got to know exactly how much - the PIU department will prepare for you special reports about how your brands / products were discussed throughout the system. As of last October, these numbers included references from Instagram and WhatsApp.

There is nothing sinister in such statistics; all internet companies do this. The data is carefully anonymized. This is a look at a billion users from a height of 10 kilometers.

Just for the sake of example, here is the timeline I prepared for Adidas last year, with some helpful notes.



You can notice a peak on the graph in mid-February, immediately after the release of the Yeezy 750 sneaker. Here is a simple story: cause and effect. My partner in the marketing department of Adidas showed this schedule to the authorities and said: look - we bent the reality!

There were three people in the PIU department: I, Ti, and Julie Rubicon, whose real name I give for reasons that will soon become clear. I came to the department with minimal expectations, but it turned out great there because Ti and Julie turned out to be smart and interesting people. Ty was really passionate about the various brands and / or products that we analyzed; our clients liked her very much and it was clear to me that she belonged to another camp, demanding reports rather than preparing them. (Keep it up, Ti!)

Julie Rubicon was different. She came to the PIU from the department of work with users, got rid of the monotonous routine and craved new tasks. I was lowered into the PIU, and Julie pushed her claws here. This difference was visible to everyone, including Julie, and on the second day at the PIU she called me an asshole. For this, I will always be grateful to her. My resentment turned into bitterness, which hardened to determination and, in the end, I learned to really do my job. Julie and I became friends.

In the spring of 2015, I received a very strange schedule.

All PIG requests are processed by an internal application called Enchilada. These requests consist of two parts: a comma-separated set of keywords ("yeezy 750, yeezy boost, yeezy 750 boost") and a date range: start date, end date.

I was preparing a report for Vernix, a brand of children's shoes. I entered keywords as usual ("" vernix, babyboots, vernix babyboots ""), but when I set the time range, I made a mistake and did not specify the final date.

I sent this request almost a year ago, in April 2015. It is strange to remember this.

Enchilada was supposed to return an error message, but something went wrong in the data center, and instead of an error came a schedule that ended for some reason in October 2016. The data with senseless squiggles continued into the future.



I considered this a strange bug and repeated the request. Parents were keenly discussing Babyboots.

On June 1, 2015, Vernix announced the purchase from Nike, and our partners ordered that all the PIG statistics be consolidated under a common account. Something snapped in my head. I rummaged in the only crowded folder where I dumped all the prepared reports, and dug out that erroneous schedule.



The peak on the graph matched perfectly.

It turns out that I had a schedule with a demonstration discussing the purchase of Vernix, received two months before this discussion began .

I spent almost a whole day on the roof of the MPK20 [Facebook headquarters building - approx. Per], feeling anxious and anxious, peering at the bay.

That evening I sent a request to the system that was not associated with any client. The NBA playoff finals, Golden State Warriors vs. Cleveland Cavaliers, were due to start, so I asked Enchilada a message schedule for each team. This time I did not specify the end date again, now intentionally.

Enchilada did not predict a winner as such. She simply predicted the number of discussions. But discussions strongly correlate with real events, which is why advertisers are primarily interested in them. Peak discussions happen when a winner is determined. When companies merge or go bankrupt. When politicians fall into scandals. When people die.

On the sixth game day, I showed the schedule to Julie Rubicon. A series of growing peaks predicted the result is excellent, and the largest and sharpest peak indicated that the Golden State would win the final in a magnificent style.

The next morning, Julie came up to my table: “Come with me,” she said. We crossed the Bayfront Expressway with us, and there on the path near the salt marshes, in a loud voice to shout down the wind, she said that we were starting to trade stocks.

We took a list of the largest companies in the world. We acted cautiously. Each system in Facebook is tracked, and for certain the flow of exchange symbols will cause suspicion in someone from administrators. Usually, the department of PIG generated about a dozen requests per day; we decided that we would be safe to add two more requests every day.

We did not say this to Ti, and Ti, if you read this, forgive me.

As we worked through the list of companies, we put forward various theories about the country of a new “feature”. In recent months, Facebook developers have been able to connect powerful neural networks to many of our systems. Maybe Enchilada was hooked, intentionally or not, to something like a developed artificial intelligence that not only analyzed, but also extrapolated data, and not only plausibly, but ideally? May be. Or the rat gnawed the cable. Or maybe this rat was magical.

We received two charts at a time. Apple and Exxon Mobil. Berkshire Hathaway and Google. For the most part, they looked like a random set of values. Incoherent. The future was boring.

And then in August, I saw it.



Just in case, if you did not understand the values ​​of y from the axis, it was a very large peak. This giant among the peaks. It was September of 2015.

Can you guess?

The graph shows all the posts and comments on Facebook, open and closed, from the recent past and perhaps the near future with the mention of ... Volkswagen. I told Julie that it must be something awful. In a sense, a car company? We made a lot of reports on the release of new car models, a huge amount. They never looked like that.

Julie is with me, each of us, put $ 2000. I read a bunch of blogs and learned how to take a short position on the action, and put all the money against Volkswagen. That September day we earned $ 1000. Happy Julie gave me a “five” and we celebrated success walking in salt marshes.

We could not wait to continue, but the peaks of this scale turned out to be elusive. In November, something was drawn on the Walgreens chart. But I was wrong. As easy as earned a thousand, we lost it.

Everything lasted until December: small wins, small losses. We found the magic lamp - there was no doubt here - but I had a nasty feeling that the genie inside did not speak our language. Come si dice , "I want to get rich?"

As before, Julie Rubicon thought faster. She again called me into the street and said: forget about this intraday therding. “Let's become data brokers. Let's launch a secret company hidden inside Facebook. ” It will be possible to access it only on a site in a hidden network through Tor, it will only give raw data, without interpretation, payments only by Bitcoins.

Julie has been reading William Gibson novels.

“There will be rumors about us,” she said. - Hedge funds will want this. They will come to beg us. ”

Julie was eager to start.

I read even more blogs, learned how to make sites on the hidden Onion network, and just launched such a site on the day when Julie last Monday of January sent me a request to Enchilada about ... us for an unknown reason.

She asked for our names.

Here is the schedule for me.



Just the way it should be. I am a normal person, not a celebrity or politician. Not a brand.

But Julie's schedule.



Peak discussions happen when a winner is determined. When companies merge or go bankrupt. When politicians fall into scandals. When people die.

What in the world could trigger a peak of discussion for Julie Rubicon?

That day, looking into the distance of the salt desert, she said with confidence in a trembling voice: "They know."

No, I assured her. They may not know.

“They will find out. They will look at the logs. We will have trouble. They'll put us down. ”

“I don’t think there are any laws against this,” I said. What could be laws against something impossible? I asked her not to worry.

But not only did this rush bother me.

January flowed into February. At the meetings in the department, Julie looked fine - clear and confident, as always - but every time I quietly asked if we could talk about something secret, her eyes grew cold and she answered: later. I'm busy with "Puma".

It has always been a Puma, for some reason.

I didn’t enter any tickers anymore, I didn’t shortstock stocks. There were no visitors on our website at the darkweb, because no one knew about it. Occasionally I ran requests for presidential candidates without a final date. Not to say that there was.

And I saw Julie check her name again and again. Each time on the chart was the same peak in the middle of March, towering and implacable.

The next morning after Valentine's Day, elegant red napkins were still hanging around the PIU department. I and Ti gathered for a timeline. Julie did not come. We waited 15 minutes. Still no Rubicon. Ty sent her a message. I dialed her number. Nothing.

That afternoon she missed the call from the Puma.

Soon, our manager Jane locked herself in a meeting room with a human resources officer, studying the file of the missing employee.

I understood perfectly what had happened.

She beheld this peak on a chart that comes in two weeks and is fast approaching. It is impossible to imagine what could cause such a large number of Facebook users to call her name, but exactly what they would call him - Enchilada predictions, if they were clear, always came true. Over the 13 months of work at the PIU, she knew that sharp peaks meant great distress and shame ... contemplating all this, Julie Rubicon did an absolutely reasonable thing.

She ran away.

At first I was angry, mainly because she did not ask me to run away with her. But soon the anger was replaced by anxiety when I presented the possible options, for what terrible reasons in two weeks Julie's name will be on everyone’s lips. Abduction, plane crash, bomb blast - my imagination painted all the scary pictures. I could hardly fall asleep.

And suddenly the idea came to fix it.

Peak discussions happen when a winner is determined. When companies merge or go bankrupt. When politicians fall into scandals. When people die.

And maybe when people are telling the truth.

Here she is.

The Affiliate Intellectual Group on Facebook used an application called Enchilada to scan and summarize all posts and comments on the system, public and non-public. She delivered the results of this scan to clients from among advertisers, not for malicious purposes, but simply for some person to tell her boss: look, we did something right.

In the fall of 2015, Julie Rubicon and I used the undocumented and inexplicable function of the Enchilada application to make several transactions in the US stock market, due to which we received a net profit of $ 162.

I am sending this message to several journalists and writers, assuming that most of them will reject the story as a joke or a fiction. But I know how Facebook works; I mean, I really know. If only a few of my addressees publish this, it will disperse.

And I will, if not forgiven, then at least be deprived of this burden.

And the development team will fix the Enchilada application (Neil, seriously. Fix it).

And this message, all the various copies of it, compressed or retold versions, will start to spread in the system - this could be the peak of Julie. Not a scandal. Not a disaster. Just a true story.

Julie, if you read this - on Facebook or repost elsewhere - I think it means that you are safe. So, all the people who published this text actually worked together to remake the prophecy of Enchilada. This means that if you want - and I understand, if not - you can go to our website at Darquab and use that mailbox to tell me where you are. My bag is collected.

It's all.

...

Although it may be worth writing her name a few more times. Each mention is counted separately.

This is for you, Enchilada:

Julie Rubicon.

Julie Rubicon!

JULI RUBIKON!