

Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early - dfine
http://firstround.com/article/Facebook-VP-of-Engineering-on-Solving-Hard-Things-Early

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CGamesPlay
I reported directly to Cory for a spell when I worked at Facebook. His
management skills and guidance made a big impression on my newly-started
career and he was undoubtedly one of the most talented managers I reported to
at the company. Right now I'm working at a 10-person company and a few of his
points really stood out to me:

> 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.

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spitfire
Colour me disappointed. It's like the last 50 years of management and
organizational research never existed.

Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave right now. Great marketing for first
round, though.

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comatose_kid
Would you care to add a little more detail to your opinion?

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mathattack
_Management is the first hard thing that is easy to get right early._

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.

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AznHisoka
Disappointed. Thought it was about solving hard technical problems first, not
cultural. Figuring out how to crawl 100 million pages a day is certainly, etc.
Rather than how to establish a good culture. Managing 20+ ppl is a GOOD
problem to have b/c it means u most likely raised lots of funding, or got tons
of revenue already.

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michaelochurch
You don't really need to solve the hard technical problems until you've raised
money or have revenue, either.

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.

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melindajb
Where is your data that programmers are second class citizens in the VC funded
startup world? That may have been true a decade ago, but one would be hard
pressed to argue that now, especially in light of the NVCA's own data.

The irony of posting that baseless assertion on Hacker News is also not lost
on me.

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hvass
> Describe culture in ways that make people think and debate rather than
> universally agree.

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.

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wpietri
I was afraid that this was going to be a post on solving hard _technical_
things early. Which is a terrible idea, because it's basically making large
bets on your future direction before you have any data about where you're
going.

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.

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AnimalMuppet
You're right, but people are going to take it wrong.

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.

~~~
wpietri
I think these are both aspects of risk reduction. When you say "a project", I
think you're saying, "Assume the business problems are solved." In which case,
yes, technical risk is next. Startups too are faced with technical risk. But
there's no point in solving technical problems until you have reasonable proof
that doing so is worth your time.

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falconfunction
hiphopvm is an incredible example of his logic at work

