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Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump gl
by boredtofears 4y ago
Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD message board features faster.
(yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)
- malermeister 4y agoI quit Facebook because I was getting pings by Zuckerberg himself on button padding on one of his pet projects.
- abdabab 4y agoShouldn’t that take only a few minutes?
- malermeister 4y agoHaha, not in the codebase I was working in at the time. Paddings being manipulated programmatically all over the place. Also, what a clear signal the CEO is not focusing on what matters. This was during the time the Cambridge Analytica thing broke... There's really nothing more important that needed his attention?
- bayindirh 4y agoMaybe he needed something to direct his stress into and distract himself. I'm not saying what he did was right, BTW.
- malermeister 4y agoThat was kind of my read too. Focus on the small things you can control to make up for the loss of control over the big things. I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his coping strategy.
- bayindirh 4y ago> I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his coping strategy. That's a very fair need. Hope your life turns out better than you ever hope it to be.
- frankincense 4y agoAt a company the size of Facebook, the CEO should not be involved at that level.
- charcircuit 4y agoWhy not? It's his company. He can do what he wants.
- malermeister 4y agoShould not, not must not. He can do what he wants, but he shouldn't.
- onion2k 4y agoHis company pays design and UX experts a huge amount of money to come up with designs that work for users, not for him personally. Meta isn't Zuckerberg's toy. Ignoring that expertise, and designing for himself instead of users, is failing the shareholders by wasting money and not maximizing revenue. The parallel to Steve Jobs is a fair one, except that Steve was brilliant at design and UX and got things right. He wasn't bothered about tiny details like the padding on a single button but rather the design of the entire system, and he picked up on things that didn't sit in the overall architecture brilliantly. He also drove people to leave Apple, and that was a bad thing. Things aren't right or justifiable just because they're like things Steve did. Sometimes he got things wrong, particularly when it came to managing people.
- charcircuit 4y agoCEOs dog fooding their products and leaving feedback on them is not failing shareholders. Would you prefer a CEO to completely ignore everything their company makes and just trust others to tell him how things are going?
- jjav 4y agoA wise CEO doesn't bypass the product and engineering process he's delegated to be put in place. Bypasing the process not only interferes with someones sprint and product roadmap, but more importantly, tells the people who own the process that they don't really own it after all. Which leads to people quitting.
- trhway 4y agoIt takes a few minutes once, it takes a few minutes another time, ... and now you have an exec who is like Pavlov's dog got used to prompt completion of his/her caprices. That isn't a way to a happy life for you (well, until you a one of those who thrive in execs' attention). Instead you wait until second or third reminder (if it is important the exec would remind, if not - then there wasn't a reason to bother to start with, and given the ferret like attention span of a typical exec...), you similarly wait for reminders another time, ... and now you have an exec frustrated by such an impedance mismatch and who as a result would move their attention to somebody else to promptly care for his/her caprices :)
- bagels 4y agoIs this literally true?
- forgingahead 4y agoBut why was your padding work so shoddy?
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoHe's a low performer; it's just one of his immutable and context-independent properties. /s
- malermeister 4y agoCause i was modifying the shoddily built codebase of the feature we were modifying. Turns out "move fast and break things" doesn't make for maintainable code.
- kayamon 4y agoPadding work is hard and the benefits are often marginal.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoYou self selected because he turned up the heat on those buttons, and you know what? He’s okay with that (Being facetious)
- georgeburdell 4y agoMeta has done a lot of interesting work in the hardware space. In hardware, you just kind of accept, regardless of your company or its vision, that your work is ultimately used to facilitate the watching of cat videos.
- eru 4y agoAlternatively, your work is being used to process financial information and trades a few nanoseconds faster, or your work is being used by the military, ...
- xxs 4y agoNaturally, the nature of the 1st to ring the bell (i.e. HFT) poses an interesting concept. It's a very technical goal in itself.
- eru 4y agoDefinitely. And I don't actually disagree with HFT or finance in general, or sending cat pictures around. (I'm reserving my judgement on the military.)
- Cerium 4y agoFor a long time I thought that cat videos, HFT, and military tech were the options. I worked HFT for a while. Then I discovered medical technology. You can work on interesting hardware and software for devices that absolutely make the world better. It's great.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoDo any companies in the medtech space pay as well as the other options?
- Cerium 4y agoIn my experience, yes. I get paid a bit better than I would expect at Microsoft and a bit worse than if I went to Apple.
- threeseed 4y ago> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- water-your-self 4y agoHardly. A lot of what they do is likely filibuster.
- boredtofears 4y agoLike I said in my original comment: I'm sure there are a ton of interesting jobs at meta, no doubt - but they are the "meta" jobs of meta. In terms of driving their primary objective it's nothing that innovative from a technical perspective. Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology. Not self-driving cars, not better medical devices, not VR technology (well, OK, they bought their way into that). The prime directive at facebook is to keep people on facebook. They've definitely been responsible for pushing web technologies forward -- but all in the name of increased engagement. Let's not pretend there is an altruistic angle to this.
- savolai 4y agoNo, it doesn't seem like they're doing much to alleviate the damage to society they've done. Still your comment seems rather cynical. Yet, relative to the age of humanity or even modern society, they are still a new modality to humanity's interaction. One that facilitates also a lot of good that's happening in the world. There is still a ton they could do right if they chose to, to make that environment for communication a healthier one. Could they find willingness to reroot their design choices in a wider tradition of social psychology, for instance?
- elpescado 4y ago> glorified CRUD message board That's like describing SpaceX as "glorified fireworks"
- FullyFunctional 4y agoDid you just compare CRUD to literal rocket science?
- elpescado 4y agoBut launching rockets isn't rocket science. You build giant steel tube, fill it with some explosives and liquid oxygen, ignite it and, kaboom! you go to space. That's the theory behind it. Now, to put that into actual practice is whole different thing. The same with CRUD. CRUD is simple, but to do CRUD on ~Facebook~ Meta scale, that's a different thing.
- akhmatova 4y agoMeta-scale CRUD is fancy, to be sure. But the craft behind it is still not on the same level as building things that can, you know, blow up on the lauchpad. Or break apart up at 46,000 with you a schoolteacher and other crew members inside. While the nation watches. Stuff like that.
- hnfong 4y agoWhole nations _have_ been blown up by Facebook though.
- akhmatova 4y agoYup, they did (despite the perorations in the sibling comment). Precious.
- gabaix 4y agoAdd to this the devastating effects that they had on human minds, in particular on teenagers. When money is good, most people turn a blind eye. Stop the music and people will think twice.
- mike00632 4y agoLet's also not forget that Facebook knowingly facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people of Myanmar.