71–80 of 112 posts
> This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook. My > experience here has been incredibly transformative: I joined > Facebook after dropping out of college having never faced the > challenges that I've seen during my time here. At this point, I've > worked through these challenges for longer than 4/5 of the people at > the company and thought I would share some of my insights in hopes > that other engineer…
> This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook. My > experience here has been incredibly transformative: I joined > Facebook after dropping out of college having never faced the > challenges that I've seen during my time here. At this point, I've > worked through these challenges for longer than 4/5 of the people at > the company and thought I would share some of my insights in hopes > that other engineer…
[Continuing because of HN's length restrictions] > In the code base that you live in, you quickly develop an > understanding of how the components fit together. Use this > knowledge: instead of only fixing a bug you're assigned, consider > how you can prevent that class of bug from ever happening > again. Instead of implementing a new feature, consider how you can > create a common abstraction between the new and old…
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[Continuing because of HN's length restrictions] > In the code base that you live in, you quickly develop an > understanding of how the components fit together. Use this > knowledge: instead of only fixing a bug you're assigned, consider > how you can prevent that class of bug from ever happening > again. Instead of implementing a new feature, consider how you can > create a common abstraction between the new and old…
Wow, sounds rough. You seem bitter and hurt by the whole experience still. Let me just tell you: this experience is good for you in the long run. I can tell you as someone who sits on the ASD scale, I've had some painful periods in my early life where my brain locked on and obsessed over similar rejections. And the obsession and bitterness didn't do me an ounce of good. But later on I accepted it and realized the exp…
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[Continuing because of HN's length restrictions] > In the code base that you live in, you quickly develop an > understanding of how the components fit together. Use this > knowledge: instead of only fixing a bug you're assigned, consider > how you can prevent that class of bug from ever happening > again. Instead of implementing a new feature, consider how you can > create a common abstraction between the new and old…
The thing about this story that strikes me is that it's impossible to know if this rejection was because of any objective quality that would have prevented you from being a good Facebook employee, or whether it was just politics. Even for the players themselves I don't think anyone can say for sure. Even though Facebook has a reputation for a strong, engineer-driven culture, the fact is that at a certain size the pol…
In two words: screw that.
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With all this hackathon bullshit I think that companies try to squeeze out more free time from people for their needs, including advertisement.
I was told that working on those projects was a privilege and that we had to perform at our jobs (minus any output from hackathons) before we could work on the stuff we wanted to. I think it's a sensible strategy. Hackathons do keep engineers on the edge and excited about work, but you want to avoid it distracting from the core focus too much.
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[Continuing because of HN's length restrictions] > In the code base that you live in, you quickly develop an > understanding of how the components fit together. Use this > knowledge: instead of only fixing a bug you're assigned, consider > how you can prevent that class of bug from ever happening > again. Instead of implementing a new feature, consider how you can > create a common abstraction between the new and old…
> Instead of telling another team member that he was wrong, I shared an experiment and results to demonstrate so, in order to minimize argumentation. [...] my overall performance was deemed poor. That's interesting, because you often hear that "code wins arguments" at FB. >> This might take more effort now but gives vastly greater results in the long run. I'm also surprised by this. There seems to be a lot of importa…
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The thing about this story that strikes me is that it's impossible to know if this rejection was because of any objective quality that would have prevented you from being a good Facebook employee, or whether it was just politics. Even for the players themselves I don't think anyone can say for sure. Even though Facebook has a reputation for a strong, engineer-driven culture, the fact is that at a certain size the pol…
Even if it's "just politics"—politics is what prevents companies from thriving. It's a sign of poor management, poor culture, and poor understanding of human psychology. In two words: screw that.
> This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook. My > experience here has been incredibly transformative: I joined > Facebook after dropping out of college having never faced the > challenges that I've seen during my time here. At this point, I've > worked through these challenges for longer than 4/5 of the people at > the company and thought I would share some of my insights in hopes > that other engineer…
[Continuing because of HN's length restrictions] > In the code base that you live in, you quickly develop an > understanding of how the components fit together. Use this > knowledge: instead of only fixing a bug you're assigned, consider > how you can prevent that class of bug from ever happening > again. Instead of implementing a new feature, consider how you can > create a common abstraction between the new and old…
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Even if it's "just politics"—politics is what prevents companies from thriving. It's a sign of poor management, poor culture, and poor understanding of human psychology. In two words: screw that.
My point is that politics are endemic to large organizations. You can't have no politics, you can only have different forms of politics.
I think the negative aspects can be controlled better than they are in most large organizations. But most large organizations don't focus on that, to their detriment.
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I can confirm the same experience as a non-engineer. I worked in a group that was not engineering, and had the same schizophrenic experience with respect to what I was told was the culture, what was expected and what the reality was. The culture of facebook is that of a pretentious enclave of people who think that simply their being at facebook is validation of their any actions or motivations. While the benefits of…
Wow, quite a few similar stories. I wonder how indicative they are of fb as a whole, or just particular teams. Does anyone have any positive experiences to relay?