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Comment by battery_glasses | Hacker News Reader

The pay is near top and the engineers are talented. There are a lot of systems in place to get you to work near max capacity all the time with little slowdown time. There are lots of processes and political upheavals that make it hard to ship code. Some people love it.

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That sounds like a place you'd go if you were using work to distract you from a problem in your personal life.

Or distract that you're writing code for a platform that harms people

IDK, I wouldn't be able to be distracted from the fact that I'm working for Lord Sauron.

Please don't disrespect Sauron with this kind of comparison.

Or distract that you're writing code for a product that is lame and writing is already on the wall that it won't succeed.

Can you give an example of a system that’s in place to ensure workers are near max capacity most of the time?

Diff count/LoC count is recorded and made publicly available for all engineers in a graph that lets you easily compare metrics between developers and teams. This means if you are constantly comparing your output to the rest of the team.

The multi-axis performance review criteria that requires you to show deliverables on things like your impact on team-building or culture. This means that when you might normally get a couple week low-output time between projects, you are usually looking for something to fill in the non-coding axis, like organizing a team virtual offsite event or searching for a way to improve the codebase.

Organizing team activities and code quality initiatives are a good thing, but the explcitivity in which you need to show deliverable impact on all axis is something I found unique to Meta and very exhausting.

Doesn't that just encourage writing code for max LoC rather than efficiency or maintainability? Instead of generalizing a procedure you use in multiple places to make it a single function, if you write it out (slightly differently) each time you do it, then you get a higher LoC count?

I mean people there aren't stupid and there is a fairly high engineering bar, your code won't get through review if you're doing stuff like that.

Where it really digs is when you are 1.5 weeks into writing an in depth project plan, meeting with other engineers, coordinating cross teams, researching, reviewing code etc. you better have a good explanation why your delivery over time graph has a big flat spot.

> Where it really digs is when you are 1.5 weeks into writing an in depth project plan, meeting with other engineers, coordinating cross teams, researching, reviewing code etc. you better have a good explanation why your delivery over time graph has a big flat spot.

That's 95% of what I do in my company. I guess by Meta's standards I'm not working?

How are non engineers graded then? Is it just the “GitHub metrics” of merged LoC?

I know architects that spend most of their time writing design docs. Does that not get measured as a deliverable? That’s literally their job

That penalizes those implementing one line bug fixes buried in the codebase. Each one may be worth 10K lines of new code but numeric driven management will never know.

I've never experienced this at Meta. In fact I've worked considerably less intensely there than at my previous place, and I was considered a high performer in my team.

Were you on a product or a platform team?

Product. RP org.

Jesus Christ, I definitely dodged a bullet.

That definitely sounds like pushing you to be “productive” as much as your body allows without burning out.

It comes down to the extreme focus on performance review. It creates an environment where every engineer is pressured to move some metrics like time spent on app, number of videos watched, or ad revenue. Because you're compared with your peers, you have to work a little more than them to maintain a good rating and stay in the race.

yeah well put

and rarely shipping, to boot!

do they have bidets yet? Try google instead.

How many Michelin stars on the food?

But, I'm not joking. Google has bidets.

I don't honestly know why all of America doesn't have them, and my suspicions are it has something to do with timber shareholders.

It's actually rooted in America's puritanical roots. Americans were largely introduced to bidets during WWII in French bordellos. It didn't leave a good reputation coming back.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/the-b...

That explains the history but not the present. People aren't afraid to get rid of something stupid (see OSHA, anti-seatbelt lobbyists, chamber pots).

No, it's cultural; Americans just can't imagine not using dry paper to smear feces around after they use the toilet, instead of using water to properly clean themselves. I tried talking to people I knew about them during the pandemic when everyone was freaking out about toilet paper shortages, but it went nowhere.

I also suspect NIH is a big part of the problem. Bidets and washlets weren't invented in America or adopted there first, so Americans can't adopt them now since that would be admitting they weren't first for something. Americans are, as a whole, completely unable to look at what other countries are doing and learn from their example.

Uh… a bidet is not a substitute for using toilet paper.

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