Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
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Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
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Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#2I just passed the 3 year mark not too long ago, I wish I felt like that about my time where I am. What an experience that must be to come in at that time in Facebook and come from an amazing place such as Google too.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#3I just passed the 3 year mark not too long ago, I wish I felt like that about my time where I am. What an experience that must be to come in at that time in Facebook and come from an amazing place such as Google too.
A lot of staring at screens and eating free food.
There's more to life...
Oh wait, you get to wear a sombrero.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#4Interesting, but hard to consider a "look back" posted on an official Facebook blog as anything but necessarily whitewashed. (Not knocking.)
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#5The "break things" part of "move fast and break things" is something Google could learn a bit from. (Speaking as a Googler.)
We're great at adding 9s of reliability, not as great at sacrificing reliability for progress. You can only move so fast when everything must work.
This is the liability I guess of having a huge launch audience for even minor products.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#6One question I would have is, "how are things different now?"
A lot could look similar on the face of it, but the company has grown so much - in users, mission, employees - that that same experience may not apply at present, even if highly recognizable components remain.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#7I just passed the 3 year mark not too long ago, I wish I felt like that about my time where I am. What an experience that must be to come in at that time in Facebook and come from an amazing place such as Google too.
A lot of staring at screens and eating free food. There's more to life... Oh wait, you get to wear a sombrero.
A sombrero might have changed my last 3 years completely. What I mean though is that I wish I could have done more than I have done in the last 3 years, I don't feel like I've moved forward much.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#8I despise posts like these. I hate being so negative about it, but it doesn't say anything. "Facebook has smart employees. Facebook wants you to learn new things. Facebook has impact." None of it is novel or interesting.
I wish there were more of a culture of insider writing while the events were going on. When Facebook pushed Questions and then retracted it, I'd love to see a blog post about "Yeah, we pushed Questions because it rocked but once we shipped it everything exploded and shit went crazy. Here are the details and what we learned from it. [...]" That's far more interesting to me, and really compelling to someone looking to become a Facebook engineer.
Unfortunately, once you grow to a certain level, those things are no longer kosher. Plain talk is discouraged in an era of Corporate Speak. It's unfortunate.
But cheers on this guy's three years though.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#9I despise posts like these. I hate being so negative about it, but it doesn't say anything. "Facebook has smart employees. Facebook wants you to learn new things. Facebook has impact." None of it is novel or interesting. I wish there were more of a culture of insider writing while the events were going on. When Facebook pushed Questions and then retracted it, I'd love to see a blog post about "Yeah, we pushed Questio…
There's also the aspect of plain talk about concrete lessons learned being valuable to competitors in a way that feel-good self promotion isn't. While it'd be nice to be able to learn from peoples' mistakes the first time those mistakes are ever made, it's saving a lot of money and effort that your competitors will have to make to learn the same lessons.
Once the knowledge of what works and what doesn't is wide spread enough, it's no longer an issue, and you can write a feel good fluff piece about it without getting into the gritty details, and get most all of the beneficial karma from fans and community, without giving away too many tips to rivals. I'd argue that the reason it's not kosher to give away secrets of how you did something at a big place is that once you get big enough, there's always someone around who can argue that the secrets are inestimably valuable, and the benefits in the form of developing community are paltry by comparison.
Re: Reflecting on 3 Years At Facebook
#10I despise posts like these. I hate being so negative about it, but it doesn't say anything. "Facebook has smart employees. Facebook wants you to learn new things. Facebook has impact." None of it is novel or interesting. I wish there were more of a culture of insider writing while the events were going on. When Facebook pushed Questions and then retracted it, I'd love to see a blog post about "Yeah, we pushed Questio…
There's also the aspect of plain talk about concrete lessons learned being valuable to competitors in a way that feel-good self promotion isn't. While it'd be nice to be able to learn from peoples' mistakes the first time those mistakes are ever made, it's saving a lot of money and effort that your competitors will have to make to learn the same lessons. Once the knowledge of what works and what doesn't is wide sprea…
I'd rather be making those mistakes and pushing the industry forward than being the one taking the scraps from someone else's blog. You may mention part of the solution in your post, but the solution that takes one sentence to detail actually may have stemmed from weeks and months of detailed, considered thought.
Sure, the competitor may then bypass all your discussions and go straight to the "solution", but I'd argue the discussions and considered thought puts your company in a far better position to out-maneuver the competitor in the future for the very reason that you've been thinking about the problem domain much longer, and in a much broader sense. Getting to the result without the understanding doesn't yield long-term success.