I see what you did there
What I Hate About Working At Facebook
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#52Satire is well and good, but i can't grok #9. Interviews in a hot tub? So... even for the women? Or is it used preferentially for high pressure engineers only (whom of course are all men)? It may be just me, but I can't see the HR department in any state being okay with that. And if it's not for interviews... what's it for?
Are women allergic to hot tubs or something? I wasn't aware there was anything particularly masculine about a hot tub.
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#53A lot of this is believable (i.e. can be taken for real, not satire) if you don't read into each point, because a lot of it is quite different from how Google does things:
1. At Google, code has to be designed, written, tested, and reviewed. You can't just start writing and shipping stuff, partly because there's so much infrastructure, and partly because you pay for shoddy code later. Google has long outgrown the kind of "start-up" velocity that you feel at Facebook.
2. Arguably, software does need to be talked about and debated. Google and many others hold meetings to make sure teams don't end up with 5 incompatible siloed components when what they really needed was a server and multiple clients. Teams have been bitten in the past by the "shit, let's rewrite all this except with a good design" problem. Certainly, they try to keep engineers out of meetings as much as possible.
3. Google doesn't have Larry and Sergey micromanaging things, and PR has been something that Google's struggled with. The role of a CEO is debatable.
4. Sure, although a low stock price isn't without consequences.
5. Several design changes have been made to food at Google: healthier snacks on the snack shelves, color-coding snacks, more plates of the smaller variety in cafes. Some people do get the Noogler 15.
6. Engineers can be pretty bad at making certain kinds of decisions, especially because they spend a lot of time heads down on a small components. (Have you seen the typical engineer-designed UI?) Google PMs that work between teams focus a lot on product decisions that affect the users and other products. Remember criticism that Google just makes a bunch of random, disconnected products?
7. Facebook has had some embarrassing "launches" of Hackathon products. One poorly thought-out launch can mean multiple criminal investigations and loss of user trust.
8. Social is important to Google, but it's hard getting people to agree that it's important.
9. Does it drive away candidates?
10. Trust is all fun and games until you give people in your PRC office extensive privileges to the internal network.
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#54I understand it's tongue-in-cheek, but #2 is actually worrisome: > There’s even a “no meeting Wednesday” meme in the company, which you might as well call a “failure to communicate” death wish. Software needs to be talked about and debated, not simply written. It’s lunacy to be writing and shipping code at a blistering pace, instead of letting things bake a bit in committees representing broad swaths of all semi-affe…
Meetings are a very expensive way to communicate. A concise, well-edited email is more difficult to prepare, but cheaper for the company. If something takes you an hour to write but the ten recipients can understand it in six minutes, you saved nine hours of time over having an hour meeting. That's like having an extra person on your team, without having to pay them or buy them a computer!
(That's why a textbook costs $100, but a semester of class costs $2000. Economy of scale.)
Of course, if you anticipate the discussion to mostly be back-and-forth, then a meeting could be necessary. But have an agenda and stick to it. If you just want to socialize with your coworkers, duck out early and hit the pub.
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#55The funny thing about this list is that a few of the items, while intended as satire, are actually spot-on. Especially item #1:
"But the rate of source code commits continues to grow proportionally with the number of engineers. This is in clear violation of the law that Fred Brooks established nearly 40 years ago in The Mythical Man Month."
Whoop de do.
This might, just maybe, because no particular behavior of FB really matters all that much. You're not building a space shuttle launch program or even a spreadsheet that people rely on to give correct answers.
I'm sure that a business model that can allow 80 godzillion developers to fling spaghetti at a wall in parallel with a view to seeing 'what sticks' is quite a bit less subject to Mythical Man Month type scaling problems.
And is there anyone so naive that they don't understand the agenda behind "3 free meals"?
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#56[deleted]
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#57Good grief people - It's satire. The entire thing is meant to be funny. I didn't even think it was particularly subtle so I'm not sure how others are seeing it any other way.
Took me until point 4...
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#58I understand it's tongue-in-cheek, but #2 is actually worrisome: > There’s even a “no meeting Wednesday” meme in the company, which you might as well call a “failure to communicate” death wish. Software needs to be talked about and debated, not simply written. It’s lunacy to be writing and shipping code at a blistering pace, instead of letting things bake a bit in committees representing broad swaths of all semi-affe…
Meetings are a very expensive way to communicate. A concise, well-edited email is more difficult to prepare, but cheaper for the company. If something takes you an hour to write but the ten recipients can understand it in six minutes, you saved nine hours of time over having an hour meeting. That's like having an extra person on your team, without having to pay them or buy them a computer! (That's why a textbook cost…
Email and face to face communication are completely different beasts though, particularly for tougher issues.
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#59Wouldn't this be better as "10 things I love about working at Facebook"? Why not just drop the "hilarious" satire angle and say what is awesome directly. I hope I don't sound like the death of fun... It sounds a little smug as it is now.
Satire is useful to detect people who have decided to agree or disagree before they've read what you've written.
wow, that is actually a pretty slick move
Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook
#60As a user, I'm not so sure #1 and #2 are haha funny. Things are being added and changed constantly, reducing usability. Features seem to be broken or at least temperamental all over the place.