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I find this type of work within companies (like google's famous 20% rule) an interesting contrast with non-tech companies. At a "normal" company if you attempt
by logicalmind 12y ago
I find this type of work within companies (like google's famous 20% rule) an interesting contrast with non-tech companies. At a "normal" company if you attempt to spend time doing something of this sort, you'd get immediate pushback from higher ups who would likely say "this is not our core competency". With the secondary excuse being that they would not want to release any work like this for fear that it would help the competition.
It does raise the interesting question of whether facebook employees are doing this work just to avoid the work that is the "core competency" of the company. Especially given the fact they don't gain a competitive advantage from releasing the work that facebook paid for into the wild. By this I mean, the company benefit would seem to be attract other talent. And the personal benefit for the devs is to get their name out there are something cool and interesting. Certainly, working on the best way to advertise to users is a lot less exciting/sexy than working on static type checking for javascript.
- nbm 12y agoDifferent people find different things exciting/sexy to differing degrees. Some people like building stuff that others can see. Some people like building stuff that others will use. Some people like building stuff that makes other people build stuff faster. Some people like building stuff that is highly reliable, really fast, really scalable, or really efficient. Some people even find improving advertising really exciting - they expound on how ads can be win-win, and even that they can only find their full effectiveness when they are, or something like that. I don't think anyone is "avoiding" any work - there's just tons of work that needs to get done, and people mostly choose to work on that stuff that interests them. One could say that product engineers "avoid" infrastructure work and infrastructure engineers "avoid" product, but I think that would be inaccurate in most cases.
- logicalmind 12y agoIt is a great luxury to be able to work on what you like, especially as a dev. Unless you're a well-known person, I don't think it's that easy to work on what you like, even at google. At least not anymore. Hopefully you guys at facebook can keep the MBA's off your backs long enough to do more cool stuff!