What it's like to work at Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to work at Facebook?

thenextweb.com

25 pointsDjMojoRisin11 comments

Part of "move fast and break things" is a willingness to take big risks. The walls here at Facebook are lined with posters that say things like "What would you do if you weren't afraid?". Far from this being a meaningless platitude, Facebook is constantly willing to make massive changes to their product and potentially alienate users. It's quite a contrast to companies like Amazon and Microsoft which only experience change in a slow, evolutionary, and risk-adverse manner.

All companies take risks, including Microsoft and Amazon. I could argue Microsoft has taken numerous more high profile risks then Facebook has. Beacon vs. Zune, Facebook Messaging vs. Microsoft Communicator.

There is nothing special about the risks that Facebook takes.

Facebook also benefits from not having any real competitors (in the US, at least). If they fuck up and make a terrible UI change, it's not like the user base will protest and move to Myspace. If Apple fucks up the iPhone, there's a strong chance that the customer will switch to Android or WP7 or something as a result.

Facebook is special because if Facebook breaks the site for a release or two, it doesn't really matter, since the product is not business-critical to users (Microsoft software) and has a moat protecting against immediate revenue-losing defection (Amazon shopping).

At most large companies, if they break their main product (Vista, or a site outage), they will lose a lot of revenue.

More importantly, Amazon deals with real stuff. As in, if something goes wrong, real physical things and/or other people's money go missing. What're the consequences if Facebook status update gets dropped?

I say this all the time, Facebook's experience (and Google's, and whoever's) is simply not relevant unless you do what they do. All the people who would love to work at FB would be up in arms if their bank was run like that.

I have to say their photo browser is trying too hard to be edgy instead of usable.

I mean, if it's going to be a modal window, it might as well as have larger, high-res images. Instead, it's one of the most annoying experiences and provides no real advantage for me to view an album.

Here's a userscript to disable that theater view:

https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/97052

I think that it's really interesting that all companies that experience explosive growth, harp about their mantra to "keep the startup environment", but 99% of them fail, because they eventually give power to the management and not the engineers.

It's a false dichotomy. Engineers are people that do engineering work. Managers are people that manage projects and people. Even if you're from an engineering background (like a lot of the senior managers at Google) once you start managing people, you're a manager. It's not a matter of giving power to "the management," it's that by definition managers are the people that have power.

It's the engineers that generally come up with solutions, which management can't see or does not deem important because they are generally too far removed from the problem. Which is why having managers wield what gets done and what does not leads companies to operate in a very non-startup way regardless of how hard they try to avoid the inevitable.

Engineers ideas are not necessarily ranked by business value when you have more than just a few customers.

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