Meta

A big tech company that still moves fast. You get to do lots of data science and analysis yourself on your own features to see if things are working or not. You have a suite of offices around the world to hang out from, even though I think now it’s mandatory three days at the office.

Building fbios takes about 20 minutes on a cold build, but it can be more or less. It's still not compatible with Buck 2.

Working with Objective-C++ is a nightmare, and the process to switch to Swift is long and low priority. It's definitely not as easy as it was for Android developers to automatically have their code switched to Kotlin.

Data analysis is messy if you don't set up the experiments perfectly. You end up presenting to people with incomplete data and having to come up with persuasive reasons for XYZ. It's all quite shaky and uncomfortable.

No matter what you do, some experiments you run will inevitably be unbalanced, and then you have to start over and wait another week.

There’s so much thrash. Barely a year in, and I already had four managers who coincidentally all had incongruous opinions about what I was lacking in order to get to the next level.

There was no harmony in what the company was working on from one day to the next. We were constantly shifting people around and launching products, not advertising them properly. Nobody would discover them, and then leads would just unship everything and then try again with something else.

It’s not a secret that Facebook is always second to everything. There’s this constant fever from leads to have instant results, as if products’ success was completely dependent on engineering quality and not things like nobody on this earth heard of it before and it was never advertised (re: literally everything in the communities org, which has since been nuked).

Extremely frustrating environment if you want to ship products and you believe in the vision. Great environment if you couldn’t care less and just like hanging out with people who talk about PSC, or getting ahead, or rock climbing, or whatever.