What I Hate About Working At Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#91

Post by nuclear_eclipse » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:02 AM UTC

Uchikoma wrote: post #83

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…

A lot of our manpower goes into designing, implementing, and maintaining highly scalable systems and tools that allow the actual product teams to do their work. And of course there are plenty of teams that are simply focused on improving the scalability of existing features.

It's hard work to scale something as complex and inter-dependent as Facebook when you're operating at the scale of almost a billion monthly active users.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#92

Post by anthonyb » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #64

anthonyb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email and face to face communication are completely different beasts though, particularly for tougher issues.

Sure, but not all issues are "tough". Many people never write and always meet. And that's the wrong balance that annoys engineers.

Engineers typically go the other way though: always write email and never meet. Then they wonder why their project goes south because the specs are incomplete or the users aren't happy.

I think it's largely a knee-jerk reaction against bad meetings - hour long no-point crapfests - but they don't have to be like that.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#93

Post by jyap » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

You know things are all good and well when a company is doing well and pre-IPO but the truth is, Facebook will need to so major results quarter on quarter to prevent the stock from tanking. A little less satire and a little more business is what's needed. Given the state of Facebook's stock performance post-IPO, I would say the joke is on him.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#94

Post by lupatus » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

jackowayed wrote: post #61

crazygringo wrote: post #45

I 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…

I work at Cloudera, and engineering has work from home/no meeting Wednesday. It allows people to work wherever they prefer and are most productive, and to have the whole day to focus with minimal distractions. That said, we do still communicate as needed for the active work. But we do so in terms of emails, chat messages, and sometimes phone calls between only the necessary parties, without any long scheduled meeting…

I work from home / where ever every day. And, it is wonderful. I can even take as much unpaid time off as I want, whenever I want, as long there is no disruption of business services to our clients. This works because I get paid hourly (I don't work = I don't get paid) and we have very fine granularity in tracking what work was done when. There is also high trust amongst all the team members that everyone is being honorable.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#95

Post by thesash » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:08 AM UTC

I can't believe the comments on that blog post are real. Apparently sarcasm isn't a language everybody speaks.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#96

Post by irollboozers » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:12 AM UTC

heretohelp wrote: post #89

flyt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The average Nigerian or Bangladeshi has more phones than you do.

Facebook has not yet exhausted mobile.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#97

Post by akiselev » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

Danieru wrote: post #41

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.

He had me until the second point's header. Overall it was a fantastic read if just for the moment of realization. Still it would have benefited with more subtly or fewer items. Some point's like #4 had great potential but needed less sarcasm.

More subtlety would definitely have done this article well.

As it stands, the satire is both obvious and contrived.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#98

Post by SqMafia » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:18 AM UTC

A not-so-subtle pretend recruiting/bragging piece, except perhaps it had the reverse effect on me.

#1 reason I won't want to work at Facebook so I can avoid smug, not-so-witty, immature douchebags like the author. With the stock price where it is, I guess FB might have to resort to these kinds of tactics to attract talent these days.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#99

Post by SqMafia » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:23 AM UTC

xenen wrote: post #90

I was way too naive to expect a Facebooker to not actually be drunk on the cool-aid and actually bother to offer a comprehensive good/bad overview of FB.

The thing is that had he actually did that, I would have a more positive view of working for FB. I would be impressed by the caliber of people who work there -- people who're capable of parsing out the nuances of a given situation and take a holistic view of the situation. Those people are the type who can work through difficult situations and salvage a bad one. Instead, I walk away with the impression that FB is full of immature toolbags.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#100

Post by languagehacker » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 5:23 AM UTC

"The food is too good. What’s wrong with good food? Well, here’s what’s wrong: there’s too much of it. Three meals a day. Free. Cooked by award-winning chefs. And too many choices: salads, entrees, desserts, vegetarian food, soups, whole grains, usually a second dessert, organic stuff, barbeque, ice cream, fresh-squeezed orange juice. For someone like me with zero gastronomic self-control, this supposed “benefit” or “perk” is a complete disaster. Why doesn’t the FDA step in?"

Is he complaining that he's getting too fat from eating at Facebook's buffet?