14 DAY TRIAL // We find it very intriguing how some companies create a culture of professionalism around them, whereas others only manage to get made fun of (we're looking at you, Yahoo).
The famous motto "Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem" seems to have delivered us yet another case where an employee has managed to improve something in the company's product by taking things into her own hands and fixing it without corporate heads being involved.
We say "her" because we're talking about Caitlin Winner, design manager at Facebook, who in a very enthralling Medium post revealed the process through which the Facebook Friends icon was changed. Yes, the Facebook Friends icon changed! Did you miss that? So did we! And it happened six months ago.
The whole affair started when Mrs. Winner (awesome name, BTW, #winning #bydefault) noticed some weird chip in the female shape of the old Facebook friends icon, which prompted her to go to one of her colleagues and try to remedy the situation.
When confronted with "the new guy's" dilemma, her colleague simply pointed to a banner in the Facebook offices that displayed the company's famous motto "Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem!"
Facebook's organizational culture is as strong as its traffic stats
Clearly, the colleague was trying to pull a Bill Belichick "Do Your Job!" routine with the new guy and put him in the Facebook state of mind, or he was simply trying to say "Leave me alone, I'm busy!" Either way, it worked!
Energized by how Facebook grants freedom to its staff to just go around and change things as they please, Mrs. Winner grabbed the company's icon kit from their servers and started tinkering around with its content.
After removing the chip from the female's shoulder, she also went through a few new icon variants, "tempted to remove the Darth Vader-like helmet and give her hair some definition," as Caitlin puts it herself.
After the female icon, the male icon also got a new look, and then she moved on to the other icons where these two were used.
This included the Friends and Groups section of Facebook, where Mrs. Winner was clearly upset by the fact that the female icon was much smaller and positioned way behind the male icon.
At first, she tried to merge them together, but the only results she got were icons that looked "like a two-headed mythical beast."
Not deterred by her initial failed attempts, she later overlapped the female icon over the male icon, keeping them on the same level and at the same size without diminishing one figure or the other, and that's how your new Facebook friends icon was made, to reflect today's mindset of equality between genders.
But not quite. There's more. Noticing how the Facebook Groups icon features two males and one woman, the woman shown to the side, Mrs. Winner also updated that icon as well, moving the female in the center, between the two male figures.
And before "some" of our users go on a misogynistic rant on how this is just another case of extra-feminism, we would point them to the gentleman's code of chivalry, in the street etiquette section, which states, "If there are two men walking the street with a woman, she should walk in the middle." So there, an explanation that has nothing to do with sexism or over-empowering modern women.
There's no "bureaucracy hell" at Facebook
After all her work was finished, she saved a copy of the icon kit on Facebook server's, different from the official kit, and hoped some of her bosses took notice and checked her work out, mostly fearing some backlash for her intrusive actions.
"[I was] not sure if I was breaking any rules and half expecting a bunch of angry designers to message me asking why I was messing up Facebook’s glyph kit," said Mrs. Winner.
But the answer was something she didn't expect at all. She didn't get angry emails, she didn't get congratulations, nor any feedback at all. Instead, the new icons simply started appearing on the site, replacing the old ones with no fanfare or other complications.
Soon they spread to the mobile apps as well, and that's the backstory behind Facebook's new Friends and Groups icons, which also kind of reveals why the company is so successful as it is now, trusting its employees to do the right thing without putting them through political correctness propaganda and bureaucracy hell.
