Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early
firstround.com
firstround.com
> Describe culture in ways that make people think and debate rather than universally agree.
Very subtle and probably pretty important. Facebook's cultural values were constantly under debate and if nothing else it made every employee consider them.
> We gathered together for end-of-week whiteboard sessions where we listed our most critical open tasks.
This is a neat idea. We do high-level daily syncs here, but this might be a neat way to help build accountability and inspire more collaboration on tasks.
Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave right now. Great marketing for first round, though.
If I understand him correctly this means that we should look back at prior research of management and draw inspiration from that instead of "reinventing management".
If you don't do it of course it's not going to have an effect.
This is very true. I've seen a lot of very talented engineers struggle without management. The "I don't enter timesheets, and I work on my own problems because I'm a damn good engineer" mindset didn't scale when the upper management didn't know how long things too to do, and couldn't agree on or document priorities.
Despite the emphasis on "We don't have managers", management is needed. It's as simple as rules of behavior.
That's why programmers are second-class citizens in the VC-funded startup world. Business guys want you to think that technical talent is important (at least, until you ask for money or equity) but they get away with treating it as a commodity because they can always back-fill (or, at least, think they can) with more expensive and skilled people later on.
The bottleneck is the connections to raise money. Connections don't guarantee funding (far from it) but ensure that, if you're rejected, the investors will (a) mentor you until you have something they will fund, and (b) use their network to find other opportunities for you, should the startup not work out. That makes the founders free of the personal financial panic under which it's actually extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to be technically creative.
The irony of posting that baseless assertion on Hacker News is also not lost on me.
Because the initial culture is how the company will grow. If there isn't a strong culture, they will hire a bunch of "specialists" that think scaling means porting to Java and using lots of XML
Great point. As Ben Horowitz compares Square with Amazon, you wouldn't be sitting at a desk made of a door since Square highly values design and Amazon highly values frugality. Also, I can only imagine the discussions at Facebook with the focus on taking huge risk for the sake of innovating.
I guess his sentence also applies to people you would hire - everybody would universally like certain things about a culture, but if you're more risk-averse, I guess you wouldn't fit in as well at FB.
But this is actually pretty sensible. People learn culture mostly by osmosis, and the bigger you are, the harder culture is to change. If your organization is kinda screwed up at 5 people, it's reasonable to bet that growth will magnify the problems, making it pretty screwed up at 25, and a big ol' mess once you cross Dunbar's number at around 125.
If you're a startup, tackling a huge problem that you don't know how to solve is very likely to lead to failure. You are correct in that.
But let's say you're starting a project. The technical part of the project is mostly straitforward, but there's this one part that you're not really sure anybody knows how to do. You'd better do that part earlier rather than later, or figure out a way where you don't have to do it. Find out how big the problem is when you still have time to do something about it. Find out if it will kill your project before you do a bunch of work that will be wasted because you can't solve the hard part.