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What I Hate About Working At Facebook

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Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#111

Post by sardonicbryan »

anthonyb wrote: post #92
jrockway wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. On my team at Kabam, we have meetings, but

1) They are as small as possible, typically including just 2 or 3 people.

2) Are always optional.

3) Typically last around 15 minutes.

It helps to have plenty of space/rooms where you can just pull someone aside to hash out a quick issue, and a mature, responsible team that doesn't need baby sitting to get stuff done.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#112

Post by msg »

An interesting litmus test. I caught the satire at 3 but double taked when I started wondering how this stuff would translate to my company of choice.

True story, two weeks ago my team launched a feature and decreased latency. We hunted for an explanation and finally found out that some code that blew away our feature was launched coincidentally at the same time. It was a pretty unlikely scenario, and we have controls designed to prevent it, but it happened anyway. I wonder how many collisions like this Facebook will have to deal with as they expand.

I would vote for free healthy food though.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#113

Post by thinkingisfun »

tedunangst wrote: post #23
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #21

Wouldn'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.

Wait, what? You lost me at "Satire is useful to detect people".

To me it seems like a passive-aggressive jab at those who complained about working at facebook, and left.

"It's just a joke" is just a lame way of saying something, without anyone being able to actually call them on it.

And to call this stuff satire is kind of extreme, too? Let's ignore the lameness for a sec: what, exactly, does it make fun of and shed light on?

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#114

Post by thinkingisfun »

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…

That still leaves the question about what features are there?

It's not like you can search for people with common names, or organize your own profile in any meaningful way, or search it. You can add stuff to the stream and that's that. I remember when they rolled out the timeline, and what a joke that was/is..

I get it, scaling is hard. Do you get that scaling is only required when stuff is completely broken? If facebook was a protocol and free code, there would be no scaling problem, there would just be a lot of servers. So yeah, they don't fucking understand the internet and like money, so they create problems for themselves which they then solve.

Awe-inspiring! That still leaves us with a set of features no CMS would be caught dead with.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#115

Post by possibilistic »

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'…

Would you mind explaining item 3?

> "3. Mark Zuckerburg doesn't have great social skills/intelligence. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that he runs a giant social network."

I'm not calling you out for stating this without supplying the supporting evidence. I'd just like to know what you do. Is it with respect to his business missteps, or is there something else you see?

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#116

Post by pirateking »

datalus wrote: post #25

How far you make it down the list before you realize it's a troll is the quality of said troll... I give it a 4/10.

0/10. I knew it was steaming troll feed before clicking the link. If the title was "What I Hated..." instead of "What I Hate...", then we could have had some sweet juicy content.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#117

Post by thinkingisfun »

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.

one billion active? are you sure? I have two accounts and one of them was a joke account from the get go, the other I haven't used in months. But that's 2 "active" profiles in the stats right there, I constantly get email for them.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#118

Post by aloneinkyoto »

neilk wrote: post #48
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…

No meetings != no communication.

Meetings != Communication

(always avoid double negations)

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#120

Post by thinkingisfun »

franzus wrote: post #103

> 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 wher…

When someone talks, with a straight face, about

- "building great products" - "solving interesting problems" - "changing the world" and/or "transforming the way people view/do X"

It's pretty obvious they're just repeating what they learned in sophistry class. Or to paraphrase Zuckerberg: "they actually mean that. dumb fucks."

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