Career Advice: Don't Spend Half Your Work Day On Facebook And Then Brag About It
A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named "Charlie" was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook entered 2007 with a split personality: a September 2006 News Feed redesign kept users hooked, a Youth Trends survey put it on top among 17-to-25-year-olds with its lead widening, and it turned down rumored buyout offers in 2006 to stay independent — yet media buyers ranked it the worst-performing site for advertising campaigns even as the company claimed a $150 million revenue track.
The Goldman Sachs warning lands squarely on the fault line between those two stories. A service whose core audience is office-age workers, funded by attention that advertisers aren't converting on, has now prompted a major financial employer to put a named trader on notice — the kind of friction that tests whether Facebook's growth can coexist with the workplaces its users sit in.
First-order effects
- Goldman Sachs has drawn an explicit line with its UK trading staff: Facebook visits on company time end, turning social-networking discipline from an unspoken assumption into stated management policy at a firm whose business is billable attention.
- Facebook keeps the logged hours regardless — its $150 million 2007 revenue plan depends on engagement, and time spent at desks counts toward the audience its ad sales rest on.
Second-order effects
- Media buyers who already rank Facebook the worst-performing site for campaigns get fresh evidence that heavy usage doesn't equal commercial performance, pressuring the company to convert raw time-on-site into results before more employers follow Goldman Sachs' lead and cut off the office audience.
- Every large employer watching this case faces the same block-or-tolerate decision, and each public warning raises the internal cost of having no policy at all — shrinking Facebook's workplace footprint wherever IT departments act.
Third-order effects
- If workplace bans spread, Facebook confronts a structural problem its 2006 redesign deepened: a product optimized for consuming attention meets employers whose economics require producing it, pushing toward either formal HR regimes or product modes designed to be defensible on the job.
- The pattern points to employer network policy becoming a quiet gatekeeper of consumer-web growth — companies deciding, site by site, which services their subsidized bandwidth will carry.
The trend: As Facebook's young user base ages into office jobs, social networking is heading into direct collision with workplace productivity norms, with employer policy as the emerging battleground.