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What I Hate About Working At Facebook

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131–140 of 191 posts

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was making a broader point, not one about this piece in particular.

I still don't see how satire is supposed to detect anything other than who gets that it's satire, and who takes it at face value -- which is not even possible until you, uhhh, read or saw the satire. So that point of yours, it's lost on me unless you elaborate.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#132
At first I wasn't sure if this was real - which is kinda scary. For those that have ADD, if they read perhaps just the first 3 - 4 points they could come away feeling like this is a real gripe about FB.

Not sure it was executed as best as it could.

Maybe this is one example of something that should have been 'peer-checked' before pushing to production.

Just saying.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was making a broader point, not one about this piece in particular.

I still don't see how satire is supposed to detect anything other than who gets that it's satire, and who takes it at face value -- which is not even possible until you, uhhh, read or saw the satire. So that point of yours, it's lost on me unless you elaborate.

My premise is that people who fail to detect satire do so because their existing bias makes them see what they want to see. People apparently disable their critical thinking apparatus when presented with an argument that even superficially resembles their own viewpoint.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't found a strict ordering, though, for which is better at tougher issues. Sometimes face-to-face is much quicker, especially if it's hashing out high-level disagreements or overcoming misunderstandings about motivations and general directions. Sometimes for architecture or deciding on features or cuts as well. But when arguing more complex technical points, I prefer LKML-style discussion, where you intersperse code and text, and have time to properly research a serious reply.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#137
I can see why this guy got the job: he has the "I don't think the way you do" mentality that is so typical of silicone valley employees, I'm sure they probably loved him for it in his interview. That said, I think this guy is a misfiring canon. He's getting mad at all the wrong people for what seems to be his own dissatisfaction with not being in charge, ad he's getting mad at them for doing most of the things that have caused such dysfunction in traditional companies. Is like this guy's ideal work environment is an Innitech next to Michael Bolton and Samir.

In my experience, companies that fight to boost their stock prices in the short term end up making them plummet further in the long run. It's the companies that have the restraint to accept a loss in order to build toward a bigger reward that end up changing the world.

Look at Apple. They used to spend so much money on R and D that their stock prices were miserable. But shit, they got the iPod out of it, and look where it took them. If they had instead tried for short term profit, they probably would have ended up putting out another garbage iMac. Or a Zune.

And finally, you can't be so shortsighted as to overlook the impact of encouraging creativity an freedom. If you force beaurocracy on your employees you might end up getting more done at first, but as they start to lose the excitement that comes with being enabled and excited by a company that believes in their ability to be autonomous, the quality of their work will start to decline.

Short point: don't play devils advocate just because all your peers are stoked to work for Facebook. And especially don't do it to get hits on your blog.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#138

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.

Silly me. And I thought satire was supposed to be edgy and humorous in an uncomfortable way.

Jonathan Swift (http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html) is crap in comparison to this work of masterpiece (AKA "why I love my job").

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#139
post #98

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.

And they're smart enough to make it corporate policy to upvote their shitty HR blog posts onto HN.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#140

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…

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…

An hour to write plus 10 * 6 minutes of reading time = 120 minutes total. That's an average of 11 minutes for each of the 11 persons.

It's very difficult to hold meetings that only interrupt employees for 11 minutes. In addition to this, emails are async so they have less interruption overhead.

So being able to write very well is important, it's a very underrated skill in many companies.

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