How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics • Hacker News Board

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#51

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

m82labs wrote: post #17

gmarx wrote: post #2

"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell. I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massive…

I guess I need more detail to understand your position on this one. An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings and will likely not care to work on projects that move the company forward. I don't think they are saying you need to die for the company, simply that your work should be focused on the goals of the company. It's kind of what you g…

> An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings

Well, that wasn't what GP said (specifically your "only"). What was stated was that company > team > self is not a natural ordering. And I agree.

In particular, people will generally rank team > company. This is well-known to anyone who's studied small unit leadership, and has been well-known since von Clausewitz, perhaps even since antiquity.

However, having some degree of overall faith in the leadership of the company, or at least in the purpose of the company (what's typically referred to in the military literature as Esprit de Corps) is a necessary precondition for small unit cohesion.

TL;DR: the relationship between self, unit and company is much too complex for a linear ranking of their priorities to be useful in anything but vacuous statements.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#52

Post by r00fus » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

devy wrote: post #27

"Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.” Some of the organization structure setup is not unique to Facebook. My former boss was a long time Microsoft employee, from what I heard from her anecdotally, Microsoft has long been setup with dual tracks for technical employees. The management track and the engineer track. One moves from engineer track to management track is a true lateral move in that salary don't…

IIRC, Microsoft still has a fellowship program.

However, the gist of the matter is that despite being on-par with compensation (assuming metrics like years of experience / company tenure), a manager role is simply more powerful, allowing easier leverage for more compensation more quickly.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#53

Post by lr4444lr » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #6

gmarx wrote: post #2

"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell. I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massive…

> No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way Except, for example, the ACM Software Engineer's code of ethics where this is the explicitly stated order. [1] http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good.

You think Facebook engineers can seriously go to work every day and abide by that?

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#54

Post by gaius » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #9

gmarx wrote: post #2

"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell. I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massive…

We're not talking about life and limb stuff. Your professional responsibility should be in that order. You're being paid after all.

We're not talking about life and limb stuff.

Kinda are, tho'. Stress, burnout, depression, carpel tunnel, strain on relationships, poor diet and lack of exercise, sleep deprivation - these are all things that many companies demand of their employees.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#55

Post by muse900 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

You can't take politics out of people... no matter how hard you try.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#56

Post by bbcbasic » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

Overall I see a lot of merit in their approach although for me it would be a culture shock.

The problem with those interview questions however is they are more a test of "gift of the gab" or preparation and memorization than anything else.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#57

Post by eropple » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #46

1024core wrote: post #12

> Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.” In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.

"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them. It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.

What do you envision that looking like? It feels inherently rivalrous, at least to some degree.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#58

Post by rhc2104 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #44

boto3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is who decides the annual bonus and raise?

More importantly, who decides who's manager next quarter/year? I've never seen non-managers exercise much leverage on this front. Being able to determine who works with whom is a very powerful position.

Actually, I planned on writing a blog post on this at some point. I work at Hired, and we had an interview process to determine who (internally) would become the next manager. This involved three interviews with engineers, and a presentation with management.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#59

Post by alexgartrell » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

wskinner wrote: post #8

"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. " This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.

I think you're absolutely right, in general, but I've been at Facebook for 5 years now, and the one thing I'll say about it is that once you establish a track record of 1) doing good work and 2) making good long-term decisions, that trumps any considerations around level. The culture is definitely such that the very senior folks (Director++) will value trust over level, so it's very much "influence over authority."

Personally, this has lead to me getting messed with my managers ~never, which is a very high-order bit in my work happiness.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#60

Post by tikhonj » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

It's interesting to compare what Facebook does with how Galois organizes itself. They just published a blog post about how many traditional management functions are handled on a rotating basis—instead of having people who always manage, they have individual researchers and engineers step up to lead efforts on specific projects. This general approach even extends to firm-wide management (via a "Jedi council") and finding new clients.

https://galois.com/blog/2016/06/undirector-of-engineering/

Galois is a private research lab/consulting firm that specializes in high-assurance computing relying heavily in programming language techniques and Haskell. I mostly know about them because they publish a whole ton of cool tools for security, low-level programming and verification. They also seem like a wonderful place to work partly because they're tackling fascinating, research-level problems and partly because the internal culture seems like something fundamentally special.