Meta

• Free food
• Reasonably good compensation
• Reasonably flexible hours
• Lots of smart, capable people
• Work can be exciting

Working on product teams is trying because of the micromanagement of Zuck and other upper management. Many projects get delayed because they ask for random changes.

Working on backend teams doesn't have that problem, but they are typically second-class citizens and don't get as much respect as frontend teams.

Facebook is very large now and the bureaucracy is starting to accumulate quickly. It used to be that engineers could just do stuff, but now almost every change requires a great deal of pointless discussion or overhead. For instance, you now have to fill out a form just to log some data.

Very strong focus on some of the "hot" product teams means that the rest of the company doesn't get preference with respect to product managers, designers, etc.

Most frontend work is boring, mundane PHP. The only challenge comes from poorly-designed legacy systems.

Managers will often ask you to work on something you don't care about just because it's a priority for the company. This goes against the claimed philosophy of Facebook, but it's the way things are trending.

Keep the bureaucracy down.

Reduce the rate of hiring. The marginal benefit of an additional engineer decreases fairly quickly. Going from 500 to 1000 engineers is not going to come close to doubling the amount of work done.