

What it's like to work at Facebook? - DjMojoRisin
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/05/15/what-its-like-to-work-at-facebook/

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thurn
Part of "move fast and break things" is a willingness to take big risks. The
walls here at Facebook are lined with posters that say things like "What would
you do if you weren't afraid?". Far from this being a meaningless platitude,
Facebook is constantly willing to make massive changes to their product and
potentially alienate users. It's quite a contrast to companies like Amazon and
Microsoft which only experience change in a slow, evolutionary, and risk-
adverse manner.

~~~
c2
All companies take risks, including Microsoft and Amazon. I could argue
Microsoft has taken numerous more high profile risks then Facebook has. Beacon
vs. Zune, Facebook Messaging vs. Microsoft Communicator.

There is nothing special about the risks that Facebook takes.

~~~
lurker14
Facebook is special because if Facebook breaks the site for a release or two,
it doesn't really matter, since the product is not business-critical to users
(Microsoft software) and has a moat protecting against immediate revenue-
losing defection (Amazon shopping).

At most large companies, if they break their main product (Vista, or a site
outage), they will lose a lot of revenue.

~~~
gaius
More importantly, Amazon deals with real stuff. As in, if something goes
wrong, real physical things and/or other people's money go missing. What're
the consequences if Facebook status update gets dropped?

I say this all the time, Facebook's experience (and Google's, and whoever's)
is simply not relevant unless you do what they do. All the people who would
love to work at FB would be up in arms if their bank was run like that.

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DjMojoRisin
I think that it's really interesting that all companies that experience
explosive growth, harp about their mantra to "keep the startup environment",
but 99% of them fail, because they eventually give power to the _management_
and not the engineers.

~~~
enneff
It's a false dichotomy. Engineers are people that do engineering work.
Managers are people that manage projects and people. Even if you're from an
engineering background (like a lot of the senior managers at Google) once you
start managing people, you're a manager. It's not a matter of giving power to
"the management," it's that by definition managers are the people that have
power.

~~~
DjMojoRisin
It's the engineers that generally come up with solutions, which management
can't see or does not deem important because they are generally too far
removed from the problem. Which is why having managers wield what gets done
and what does not leads companies to operate in a very non-startup way
regardless of how hard they try to avoid the inevitable.

~~~
mentat
Engineers ideas are not necessarily ranked by business value when you have
more than just a few customers.

