Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I Hate About Working At Facebook

worldofsu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 191 posts

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#61

Post by jackowayed »

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…

I work at Cloudera, and engineering has work from home/no meeting Wednesday. It allows people to work wherever they prefer and are most productive, and to have the whole day to focus with minimal distractions.

That said, we do still communicate as needed for the active work. But we do so in terms of emails, chat messages, and sometimes phone calls between only the necessary parties, without any long scheduled meetings or meetings that provide value in the longer term (eg. interviews or longterm planning meetings) as opposed to helping someone do the right work today.

It works great, we've been doing it for basically the whole life of the company, and I don't see it stopping.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#62

Post by jrockway »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #55

The funny thing about this list is that a few of the items, while intended as satire, are actually spot-on. Especially item #1: "But the rate of source code commits continues to grow proportionally with the number of engineers. This is in clear violation of the law that Fred Brooks established nearly 40 years ago in The Mythical Man Month." Whoop de do. This might, just maybe, because no particular behavior of FB rea…

It's likely that the code is not coupled. Fred Brooks studied OS/360, which was essentially one big component. Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way, and so the "teams" are much smaller than "all of Facebook".

If you watch velocity on individual components, you'll probably see sub-linear scaling as Brooks predicts.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#64

Post by jrockway »

anthonyb wrote: post #58
jrockway wrote: post #54

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.

Sure, but not all issues are "tough". Many people never write and always meet. And that's the wrong balance that annoys engineers.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#65

Post by masterzora »

anthonyb wrote: post #58
jrockway wrote: post #54

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.

If your meeting absolutely positively must happen on a known weekly no-meeting day then there's really only three cases I can see: 1. You are bad at planning 2. You are bad at communicating 3. Something really, really bad happened and people will understand breaking policy

There's a big difference between "no meetings ever" and this.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#66

Post by soup10 »

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't seem very high impact. Facebook at it's core is a way to share photos and keep up with old friends, it doesn't really change social interactions.

5. Their focus is very narrow, they don't work on many novel exciting problems.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#67

Post by jrockway »

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…

+1

I can kind of see the logic behind the author's first point. When I write code for fun, I don't write design docs or invite friends over for design reviews. I just do whatever I want, mostly typing in lines of code, until I can't stay awake anymore. And it is a lot of fun. The problem is, it's ignoring things like "making money" and "not annoying users" and things like that. When you need to engineer instead of play, then you need to think about things like: "how can I not write this code". And that's why you need design docs and design reviews and meetings: to learn, to share knowledge, and to ensure that your time spent programming is the best possible use of that time.

If someone said, "your job is to write as much code as possible and push to production every eight seconds", that would be fun. I just don't think the company would last longer than ten years. At that point, that company would do nothing but extinguish fires, and a new upstart would be doing "more with less" and out-innovate them. Name the popular tech companies from twenty years ago that you interact with on a daily basis today. Yeah.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#68

Post by jrockway »

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'…

My favorite thing about Google is that I haven't seen a single "Keep calm and carry on" poster.

Oh, except for one making fun of said poster.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#69

Post by thomashillard »

It's important to create an awesome work environment. But in my experience it's usually a trade off, the downside of which can be having diminished social life outside of the office. You're also probably expected to sacrifice some compensation and the deal tends to be in favor of the employer.

Re: What I Hate About Working At Facebook

#70

Post by anthonyb »

jrockway wrote: post #68
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'…

My favorite thing about Google is that I haven't seen a single "Keep calm and carry on" poster. Oh, except for one making fun of said poster.

"Violate privacy and break things" perhaps?
Post reply on HN