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What I Hate About Working At Facebook

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Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#101

Post by Uchikoma »

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #91
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 acti…

How is productivity measured than? (OP)

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#102

Post by SqMafia »

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.

Knock 1.3 billion off that number because FB is blocked in China.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#103

Post by franzus »

> specifically Zuck’s idealism (perhaps even naïveté) that focusing on building great products will lead to solid long-term businesses

Nothing against that. Also I find it a good thinh that he's still involved in the products ...

But what good products does he think does Facebook make? Quality does not really come to mind when I think about Facebook. This is common among my peers too. To us Facebook is the place where soccer moms get ripped off by clicking on pixel cows.

That's also why I'd never work for them. It's something my hacker honor wouldn't allow.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#106

Post by xenen »

SqMafia wrote: post #99
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 ful…

Yup, pretty much. My view of FB prior to this was luke-warm because of their contribution to open source, but it's just gone in the toilet.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#107

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

Uchikoma wrote: post #101
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acti…

How is productivity measured than? (OP)

Hell if I know; I've only been here for two months. I'm just reporting what I've seen as a production engineer in that time. :)

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#108

Post by codeonfire »

beering wrote: post #53

A 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 kin…

First, what are you trying to say? Are you being sarcastic like the original post? Or are you making genuine observations about Google and approve of them?

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#109

Post by Domenic_S »

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…

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

An interesting topic. If you look at commits on the same project for a long enough period, trends do emerge.

The time scale is important, because committing a 3rd-party library or a bunch of docs isn't really productivity, but it evens out over time.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#110

Post by Resident_Geek »

btilly wrote: post #77
beering wrote: post #53

A 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 kin…

Thank you for demonstrating the truth of Steve Yegge's observation in https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK... that Google's software culture tends towards risk-adverse conservatism.

Don't worry, I don't think there's any controversy there. Google is quite conservative, engineering-wise.
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