9 ms·

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org tha

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.

newobj 4mo ago
that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.
- ironman1478 4mo ago
  I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish
- aylmao 4mo ago
  +1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example. Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.
busterarm 4mo ago
I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.
  - rozap 4mo ago
    My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.
    - PaulHoule 4mo ago
      That's back end. With the money they make they could have rewritten the front end so it doesn't have to reload everything whenever you upload an image.
  - petesergeant 4mo ago
    That's because they don't want you to use the web application
svachalek 4mo ago
I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- JacobAsmuth 4mo ago
  You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
  - jazzyjackson 4mo ago
    It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
    - rickypp 4mo ago
      I started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation
      - johannes1234321 4mo ago
        I believe that the initial idea there was to refer to notable landmarks and these company signs are readable from a distance. But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
        decimalenough 4mo ago
        This also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
        4mo ago
torben-friis 4mo ago
Probably well run compared to the rest of meta, not to the versions of themselves pre acquisition. Whatsapp is worsening by the day.
- junior44660 4mo ago
  They introduced desktop version, dark theme and multiple accounts post the acquisition by meta. Hate the ad and social stuff they're shoving down, though.
smrtinsert 4mo ago
If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.
toast0 4mo ago
Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P
cletus 4mo ago
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google). WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful. IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to). I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google. Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos). Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot. Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive). Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition. I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason. The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter. At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems. There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill. Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire. Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
somedude895 4mo ago
Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.
- vovavili 4mo ago
  That's the unfortunate outcome of running a business at scale.
  - boelboel 4mo ago
    Google has bad governance, same with many other big businesses in the tech related sector partially because of the extremely generous position founders were in during the 00s and interest rates. In industries with lower margins like chemical/material industry you don't get away with this because managers in these industries are way better at telling value from non-value. There's been activist investors ( e.g. Christopher Hohn) who tried getting Google to run a tighter ship but with the dual stock setup there's not much which can be done.
    - majani 4mo ago
      The 2000s were a startup winter after the dotcom bubble burst. In those days you were extremely lucky if you could raise over $100k in funding and in revenue $100m was the ultimate fantasy. ZIRP was the 2010s
      - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
        So in other words, "Thanks Obama"
vjk800 4mo ago
In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.
classified 4mo ago
A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.
zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
That wasn't my experience at all, I found the orgs I was in (infra) to have great culture.
throwsame12304 4mo ago
One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.

newobj 4mo ago

that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.

ironman1478 4mo ago
I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish
aylmao 4mo ago
+1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example. Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.

busterarm 4mo ago

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

PaulHoule 4mo ago
Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.
- rozap 4mo ago
  My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    That's back end. With the money they make they could have rewritten the front end so it doesn't have to reload everything whenever you upload an image.
- petesergeant 4mo ago
  That's because they don't want you to use the web application

svachalek 4mo ago

I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
JacobAsmuth 4mo ago
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
- jazzyjackson 4mo ago
  It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
  - rickypp 4mo ago
    I started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation
    - johannes1234321 4mo ago
      I believe that the initial idea there was to refer to notable landmarks and these company signs are readable from a distance. But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
      - decimalenough 4mo ago
        This also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
      - 4mo ago

torben-friis 4mo ago

Probably well run compared to the rest of meta, not to the versions of themselves pre acquisition. Whatsapp is worsening by the day.

junior44660 4mo ago
They introduced desktop version, dark theme and multiple accounts post the acquisition by meta. Hate the ad and social stuff they're shoving down, though.

smrtinsert 4mo ago

If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.

toast0 4mo ago

Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P

cletus 4mo ago

I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google). WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful. IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to). I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google. Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos). Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot. Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive). Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition. I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason. The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter. At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems. There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill. Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire. Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.

somedude895 4mo ago

Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.

vovavili 4mo ago
That's the unfortunate outcome of running a business at scale.
- boelboel 4mo ago
  Google has bad governance, same with many other big businesses in the tech related sector partially because of the extremely generous position founders were in during the 00s and interest rates. In industries with lower margins like chemical/material industry you don't get away with this because managers in these industries are way better at telling value from non-value. There's been activist investors ( e.g. Christopher Hohn) who tried getting Google to run a tighter ship but with the dual stock setup there's not much which can be done.
  - majani 4mo ago
    The 2000s were a startup winter after the dotcom bubble burst. In those days you were extremely lucky if you could raise over $100k in funding and in revenue $100m was the ultimate fantasy. ZIRP was the 2010s
    - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
      So in other words, "Thanks Obama"

vjk800 4mo ago

In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.

classified 4mo ago

A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.

zeroonetwothree 4mo ago

That wasn't my experience at all, I found the orgs I was in (infra) to have great culture.

throwsame12304 4mo ago

One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.