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What I Hate About Working At Facebook

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Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#81

Post by javert »

jrockway wrote: post #62
onan_barbarian wrote: post #55

The 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 rea…

It's likely that the code is not coupled. Fred Brooks studied OS/360, which was essentially one big component. Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way, and so the "teams" are much smaller than "all of Facebook". If you watch velocity on individual components, you'll probably see sub-linear scaling as Brooks predicts.

Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way

How could that even be possible?

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#82

Post by flyt »

soup10 wrote: post #66

Real reasons why working at Facebook isn't that attractive in my opinion: 1. Giant php codebase. 2. All the excitement is gone post-IPO, they've reached an inflection point and growth is slowing down. 3. Mark Zuckerburg doesn't have great social skills/intelligence. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that he runs a giant social network. 4. The corporate mission of making the world more open and connected just doesn'…

re: growth. Facebook has one billion active users. There are seven billion humans in the world. There is a lot of growth left.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#83

Post by Uchikoma »

Must admit I've stopped after the firtst, but: With thousands of programmers, what real features have been released to facebook.com? I often ask myself what those thousands of programmers do, as a user (I know not customer in this case) I can't see it. All of them mobile? Ads? Image recognition? With thousands of programmers should't the output be (5 people dev teams, one feature a month) hundreds of features/stories per month? Could users live with that?

I'd also think commits are not a productivity metric.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#84

Post by ninetax »

javert wrote: post #81
jrockway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely that the code is not coupled. Fred Brooks studied OS/360, which was essentially one big component. Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way, and so the "teams" are much smaller than "all of Facebook". If you watch velocity on individual components, you'll probably see sub-linear scaling as Brooks predicts.

Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way How could that even be possible?

The messaging back-end is probably completely decoupled from the stuff running other components of the site. I would imagine everything interfaces with each other, and as long as you don't break the interface, things could be changed pretty orthogonally.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#85

Post by MTGandP »

andrewfelix wrote: post #57
ghshephard wrote: post #8

Good 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...

It took me until I read the comments on this thread.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#86

Post by pspeter3 »

JasonYang wrote: post #12
pspeter3 wrote: post #2

Sounds pretty terrible to work there. On a serious note, it's awesome how much stuff gets converted from hackathons

Used to think this is a great idea. But reality told me this could lead to chaos (way to much chaos), especially when the company is going through a finanancial crisis (hopefully not the case for FB for a really really long time). For most of the companies, leadership should be vital. Things like hackathons are luxury game rich people allow to play.

I was thinking more that you let your employees come up with new ideas every once in a while. Like Google 20% time or LinkedIn HackDays.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#88

Post by jrockway »

ninetax wrote: post #84
javert wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way How could that even be possible?

The messaging back-end is probably completely decoupled from the stuff running other components of the site. I would imagine everything interfaces with each other, and as long as you don't break the interface, things could be changed pretty orthogonally.

Indeed. They have quite a toolchain and a wide variety of libraries. While a change in the javascript framework or PHP compiler affects everything, it isn't dependent on everything.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#89

Post by heretohelp »

flyt wrote: post #82
soup10 wrote: post #66

Real reasons why working at Facebook isn't that attractive in my opinion: 1. Giant php codebase. 2. All the excitement is gone post-IPO, they've reached an inflection point and growth is slowing down. 3. Mark Zuckerburg doesn't have great social skills/intelligence. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that he runs a giant social network. 4. The corporate mission of making the world more open and connected just doesn'…

re: growth. Facebook has one billion active users. There are seven billion humans in the world. There is a lot of growth left.

What so the third world doesn't exist? Seriously?
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