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I warned you about Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook is drawing scads of negative press. Executives are bailing. And questions are arising about the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

My only question: Is this 2018, or 2008?

When Mark Zuckerberg hired Sandberg away from Google to be his No. 2 a decade ago, tech groupthink consolidated around this story line: Sandberg would be the adult at the wheel, keeping Zuckerberg from crashing.

Now it looks like she’s the one driving the company into the ditch. The company’s bad press seems to be affecting employee morale, the one metric that makes Silicon Valley CEOs worry. And the bad press seems linked to areas she oversaw, from policy chief Joel Kaplan’s eyebrow-raising appearance at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearings to the hiring of a dodgy Washington PR firm to bad-mouth Facebook’s critics.

It all seemed so familiar to me: Sandberg, an experienced inside-the-Beltway operator before she joined Google, has long lived by Lee Atwater’s line: “Perception is reality.”

It started before she even joined Facebook officially. Back in 2008, as Sandberg was saying goodbye to colleagues at Google, I was running Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip publication, which uncovered all kinds of mischief at her employer. Her reaction, according to sources who spoke to us: She promised to “shoot the guy who writes Valleywag.”

That’s one way to manage perceptions.

So when you tell me that Sandberg seems more anxious about her own image than the company’s fate, I’m not shocked. When I read that morale is low, I’m not shocked. When departing executives who reportedly clashed with Sandberg tell us how great she is, I’m not shocked. Fibbing about the company? Next you’ll be telling me there’s gambling in a casino. It’s all of a pattern with how she behaved when she first got to the company.

Here’s what would shock me: If she actually left. In 2008, as in 2018, the rumors were when she would hop from Facebook back into the world of politics. That door seems permanently closed, her carefully maintained reputation stained by Facebook’s many misadventures. She’s stuck with Facebook, and Facebook is probably stuck with her. (Imagine if Sandberg followed up “Lean In” and “Option B” with a tell-all book about Facebook. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.)

And though Facebook stock has taken a hammering lately, she’s made Zuckerberg and other Facebook shareholders — as well as herself — insanely rich, which gets you a more or less permanent pass in the world of tech.

Zuckerberg made clear in a CNN interview Tuesday that there would be no change at the top of Facebook, not even some reshuffling of roles, such as him giving up the job of chairman. He said he hoped to be working with Sandberg for “decades.” Here, too, I heard echos of 2008, when Zuckerberg likewise defended his embattled lieutenant, while making it perfectly clear who was in charge.

No one ever seems to get fired at Facebook. It’s bad optics. And perception is reality.

— Owen Thomas (othomas@sfchronicle.com)

Quote of the week

“As a parent, you want to give your kids so much. You want to give them all that you have and all that you can get. You want to give them the world, and a better world than the one you’ve got. It’s terrifying to look up in the sky and think about what they’ll inherit. It’s terrifying to realize how little you can do as an individual to make it better.”

— BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan, writing about the California wildfires; reading this made me want to run home and snuggle Ramona the Love Terrier

Coming up

I’m working Black Friday — as is Melia Russell. Hit her up on Twitter (@meliarobin) if you’re planning to go shopping for toys IRL. I promise she won’t LOL.

What I’m reading

Lizza Dwoskin looks at Instagram’s earliest employees. Not only have many quit the company — they’re quitting the photo-sharing service, too. (Washington Post)

Carolyn Said reports on an illegal Airbnb that turned into the site of a gang shoot-out. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Former eBay executive Michael Dearing has a must-read Twitter thread on what Sandberg should have learned at Harvard Business School — but apparently didn’t. (@mcgd)

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Read More

J.D. Morris, our newest reporter, swings in big with a look at what PG&E’s options are as it faces billions of dollars in liability from wildfires. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Tech Chronicle is a thrice-weekly newsletter from Owen Thomas, The Chronicle’s business editor, and the rest of the tech team. Follow along on Twitter: @techchronicle and Instagram: @techchronicle