Meta

1. The people, always the people. It's a cliché, but they really do hire and nurture some of the best talent in the world.

2. The company has worked out how to make innovation work at global scale and to get everyone to collaborate effectively in the process, with surprisingly little siloism or corporate politics (at least not obvious at the lower levels). It's very interesting to watch; it's chaotic and inefficient, but it works (just).

3. You get to work on things that a large percentage of human beings use on a daily basis, including your mum. Or you get to work on the future of technology, which is also exciting.

4. The benefits, especially the breakfast!

1. It can be a very frustrating place to work. Near-constant reorganizations and reprioritizations make it hard to know what to focus on a lot of the time.

2. Too much middle management. Zuck has promised to flatten the organization, so we'll see, but there really are too many managers managing managers, directors managing managers, directors managing directors, VPs managing directors, etc. It feels like there are a lot of well-paid people just staying to feather their nest and not adding a great deal.

3. The Engineering Manager job is a VERY people-focused role, and you don't get much time for anything technical. This is odd, because they put you through lots of technical interviews and recruit a lot of very technically-minded people into the job, and then you never open an IDE again after the final day of bootcamp. Maybe you are okay with that, but it's something worth knowing before joining as an EM.

4. HR policy is becoming increasingly censorious, and it is stifling the previously open and fun culture. I'm sure it is motivated by good intentions of trying to keep the workplace respectful and mission-focused, but by the law of unintended consequences, perfectly reasonable posts are regularly taken down for spurious and unstated reasons, innocuous memes are blocked, common English words and phrases are suddenly verboten, and succor is given to the easily offended.

One problem is that the policy is quite frequently biased (officially-sanctioned political views are okay, anything else is not), but the more general problem is that it is having a chilling effect on company culture. We were once encouraged to "bring our authentic selves to work," but now it seems that is only true if your "authentic self" subscribes to one exact set of political views and acts in an anodyne and uncontroversial manner at all times. The ramifications of this stultifying shift in HR policy will have a negative compound effect on company life over the next few years.