“This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook”

I believe Steve Jobs said the reason he took on the role of CEO when he came back to Apple was so no one would be above him when it came to making decisions about the products.

My experience has been, when a company is built around a product, everyone at the company wants to think they know what is best for the product, regardless of their actual role and abilities. Installing yourself at or near the top is the only way to actually take control. If you can't get high enough up the ladder in the place you are at, and this is frustrating you, it's time to jump ship and move somewhere you can. Else you will likely become a poisonous influence on the team around you.

> Does internship to employment transformation imply easier interview process overall? i.e. rather than apply to full-time position directly.

Not necessarily easier, but having 12 weeks of experience working with me gives the company much more context on my software engineering skills than 4 hours of interviews does.

> Another concern - does this also imply the offer with a below average compensation?

I don't think so. Anecdotally, I've heard that recruiters have pretty fixed packages for newgrads and that I was given a newgrad package.

This is something I've often struggled with before I joined Facebook, and it's something I occasionally grapple with there too. Like you, I felt I was usually correct, but had come to the realisation that not only was I occasionally wrong in short-term hindsight (just after the fact), but sometimes only in longer-term hindsight (ie, after I'd learned some lessons further down the road).

Ultimately, it comes down to trust and teamwork. I had a much longer post, but:

a) Make sure you are doing what you believe to be the right thing for the company as a whole, and that you're armed with as much information as is easily obtainable about it to inform your strong opinion.

b) Then, if you are able to believe that the people around you are doing what they believe to be the right thing for the company as a whole (even if you might need to remind them that they should do that) based on the information (and you might need to help them understand what you have discovered) and experience available to them, then your life will be a lot less stressful than if you're the guy that feels they always need to steer the ship.

It's also something I've learned more and more about leadership and mentoring:

a) It's hard to learn lessons if you're not making mistakes. Telling people how to avoid mistakes in one case doesn't help them learn how and whether to try avoid them in future.

b) Choose your battles - expend your influence capital on the most important thing, and don't transform from that person that's been a great help in the past to that person who just tries to meddle in everything.

I think it's only acceptable if it's made very clear before you accept or decline the job offer. Otherwise it seems like it's taking advantage of people.

The main reason I view it that way is because Facebook hires a lot of fresh college graduates who don't necessarily have much (if any) money saved up. To work for Facebook, they're going to have to find a place to live in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. I think it is quite disrespectful to put young people with little money in a situation where they are signing extended leases only to be let go within six weeks.

Granted, Facebook gives out pretty good signing bonuses, so that softens the impact a bit, but still if I knew that the first six weeks were effectively a probationary period I'd make a special effort to find a housing situation where I could pay on a monthly basis rather than entering a six- or twelve-month lease.

Moreover, if I had a family, I'd definitely think twice before going into a sort of six week interview, no matter who the company was. I wouldn't want to put my family through the difficulties of moving there only for me to get let go soon after arriving.

The best thing I can say is that when interacting with other people, subtle course correction early on has a big effect in the long run. When I've tried to influence other people to change practices (in my case it was building more testable code), I've found that making the right path the easiest path is the best way. There are a lot of ways to do this. Code review is an easy one if you're not doing it already. It gives everyone the power to have influence over the code before it lands in the repository [1]. Building tools that make the right thing easy is also useful. I spent about a year making development tools to enable rapid testing of some of our JS modules, as well as doing a little bit of static analysis to automatically detect and fix certain classes of errors. By doing these things, every engineer gets guided to the right path without needing to reach out to anyone and without a huge cognitive overhead (like reading an interface guideline or something like that).

[1] http://www.phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/User_Gui...