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At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

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Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#31

Post by eweise »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

Facebook can be disorienting for some older employees, who feel their past experience and accomplishments aren’t valued. Maybe I'm in the minority but I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Past experience and accomplishments get you in the door but beyond that those things don't matter, the question should be: what are you doing now to bring value?

The idea is that past experience helps you make better decisions in the future which is the value they are bringing to the company. I sense that you don't have much experience yet otherwise this would be fairly obvious.

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#32

Post by jes5199 »

(I'm not going to subscribe to read this so I'm just assuming...)

Is this a good time to bring up the Tyrany Of Structurelessness? http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The observation is: if you pretend that you don't have a hierarchy, then your de facto hierarchies will be harder to see, harder to criticize, harder to improve.

This is reflected in the standard failure modes of agile process ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-scrum-should-ba... )

so, tell me - who actually makes decisions at Facebook?

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#33

Post by AndrewKemendo »

eweise wrote: post #31
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

Facebook can be disorienting for some older employees, who feel their past experience and accomplishments aren’t valued. Maybe I'm in the minority but I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Past experience and accomplishments get you in the door but beyond that those things don't matter, the question should be: what are you doing now to bring value?

The idea is that past experience helps you make better decisions in the future which is the value they are bringing to the company. I sense that you don't have much experience yet otherwise this would be fairly obvious.

I sense that you don't have much experience yet otherwise this would be fairly obvious.

You sense wrong. Anyway, I don't disagree with your first point, and it doesn't refute mine.

The point here is that no-one should get extra "rank" just by being experienced. If that extra experience doesn't help you out-compete someone without it then you might as well not have it.

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#34

Post by pmoriarty »

jacques_chester wrote: post #12

Earlier today, someone told me that I've "drunk the kool-aid" of my employers, Pivotal Labs. Well, it happens that I decided to work for Labs after visiting the Facebook campus. Literally while I was driving back to SF from Palo Alto. At Labs I work for 40 hours per week. Not an on-paper 40 hours -- actually 40 hours . When I was new to the company I found myself one night on a train to Philadelphia for a personal tr…

More important than official lines on hours worked or dressing down by colleagues for working late is how realistic the company is about what's expected of you and the resources you are given to achieve it.

If you are assigned more work than you can achive in 40 hours, yet only given 40 hours to do it in, you are either being set up for failure, or the company really does want you to work as many hours as it takes, but just not be so open about it.

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#36

Post by dang »

dep_b wrote: post #11

At Hacker News, Paywall is a Dirty Word

That's an overstatement. We need to take into account that (a) sometimes there isn't a non-paywalled version of a good story, and (b) most of these paywalls have easy workarounds. The paywalls suck, but banning paywalled links would make HN worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777971

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634076

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647853

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#37

Post by frostmatthew »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #30
frostmatthew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's wrong for companies to charge for their product or service?

I don't think anyone claimed it is wrong?

> I don't think anyone claimed it is wrong?

click170: The point is to penalize sites that employ paywalls by taking your pageviews elsewhere.

One usually penalizes behavior they consider wrong.

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#38

Post by _RPM »

lstyls wrote: post #26
jacques_chester wrote: post #12

Earlier today, someone told me that I've "drunk the kool-aid" of my employers, Pivotal Labs. Well, it happens that I decided to work for Labs after visiting the Facebook campus. Literally while I was driving back to SF from Palo Alto. At Labs I work for 40 hours per week. Not an on-paper 40 hours -- actually 40 hours . When I was new to the company I found myself one night on a train to Philadelphia for a personal tr…

I was a Software Engineering intern on an ads product team at Facebook last summer. My experience was almost exactly the opposite of what you assume here. Most people worked 7-8 hour days. I stayed plenty of late nights because I was dead-set on getting a full-time offer, but I was literally the only one on my entire floor most nights (including interns). On the off chance someone stopped in late and saw me, they wer…

So, did you end up getting a full-time offer?

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#39

Post by op00to »

jes5199 wrote: post #32

(I'm not going to subscribe to read this so I'm just assuming...) Is this a good time to bring up the Tyrany Of Structurelessness? http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The observation is: if you pretend that you don't have a hierarchy, then your de facto hierarchies will be harder to see, harder to criticize, harder to improve. This is reflected in the standard failure modes of agile process ( http://gilesbowk…

For WSJ, just google the title and the first hit will generally be the article. When you come in with Google as your referrer, the full article loads instead of the paywall'd version.

Re: At Facebook, Boss Is a Dirty Word

#40

Post by jacques_chester »

vellum wrote: post #22
jacques_chester wrote: post #12

Earlier today, someone told me that I've "drunk the kool-aid" of my employers, Pivotal Labs. Well, it happens that I decided to work for Labs after visiting the Facebook campus. Literally while I was driving back to SF from Palo Alto. At Labs I work for 40 hours per week. Not an on-paper 40 hours -- actually 40 hours . When I was new to the company I found myself one night on a train to Philadelphia for a personal tr…

so I opened my laptop and answered some emails from a client. The following week I got a mild dressing down from my colleagues for working after-hours and I was told by my manager not to do it again. That happened to me at my old non-tech job. By answering a client's emails, you train them to expect you to be on call, which hurts the whole team.

Yep. And we were trying to encourage the client to let their developers go home too.

I've been handing out free kool-aid samples pretty much since that first project.

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