This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here.

In retrospect, advising Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg was not Valleywag's finest moment. All we can say is she had us fooled, too — though not for very long.The reality, which took us too long to grasp: Sheryl Sandberg ran Google's customer service operation, the grunts who reviewed the text of AdWords ads for policy violations and fielded angry calls from Google advertisers with big enough budgets to be granted telephone support. Apocryphally, her boss at Google, Shona Brown, is said to have referred to Sandberg's operation as "a toilet." Sales reported elsewhere, as did the engineers who wrote the code for Google's money-minting ad machine. Hers was a thankless job, for sure, and one that needed doing; Brown's comment may have been unfair. But it was not an experience that qualified Sandberg to run much more than customer support — okay, perhaps HR, too — at Facebook. We're also hearing that Facebook's board, charmed by Sandberg's polished demeanor and wowed by her Valley connections, didn't do enough reference-checking at Google. If they had done a proper job, we're told, they would have turned up stories of Sandberg's mismanagement and deceptions — stories that would ring very true with Facebookers' experiences. So, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Sandberg took us in, too. But only a foolish consistency would have us still singing her praises. We've already gotten hints that Sandberg's work at Google was overrated, but our sense is there's much, much more out there. The tips line is open.