![]() ![]() Every software company tries to do this, but FB seems to have been more successful with it. They have a lot of cool internal tools, and what they've built is really impressive, and more importantly, it helps your team build products faster without having to solve problems that someone else already solved. They have really good infrastructure and really great ways to share the infrastructure and code. Of course, it is true that FB wants to make the audience more accessible to advertisers as well, but there are a lot of people at FB who care about privacy and security. The thinking is that if they can make FB easier and more fun to use, then more people will use it for more time each day (which will also have a network effect of attracting even more people to use it), then the advertising dollars will follow. ![]() I saw a lot of empathy towards users, and a lot effort spent to improve or things or fix broken things with no direct financial benefit. From within the company, it didn't feel this way at all. ![]() It seems like popular opinion has it that FB is arrogant and only cares about its users insomuch as they represent $-signs. I also think they are way more empathetic to their users than most people give them credit for. Even with the differing areas (including advertising and such), they do a good job of keeping their eye on their mission of connecting as many people as possible. One cool thing about Facebook, in contrast to other comparable companies (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, though in truth, FB is much smaller), is how they have a pretty singular focus. You don't get much credit for working hard or being smart if you don't produce valuable output. You're given a lot of freedom, but it's also a responsibility to make sure you're doing things that are valuable. It's a great place to work as an engineer. At the higher level, since the company trusts employees with access to so much information, keeping such info confidential from the outside world is taken seriously. The flipside of this openness is that you of course, have to be willing to receive the feedback, you have to recognize that while openness and feedback is highly encouraged, decisions have to get made, and actions and data are more valuable than words. You feel comfortable giving feedback to each other about each other, about product decisions, about management, etc. This culture applies at a lower level too. This is much different from previous companies I worked at, where discussions on internal email lists would be shut down by some lawyer saying that there's certain things that can't be discussed, and important data is divided up to groups and individuals on a "need to know" basis, etc. I think the idea is that if everyone is on the same page or at least, differing views are heard, the company will be stronger, and solutions may be offered from a place you didn't expect. You can ask questions about them directly to Zuckerburg at the weekly Q&A. At a company wide-level, secret projects, public incidents, important non-public business metrics and the like are all openly discussed. It might be easy to roll your eyes when people from Facebook say how open their culture is, but it's true it's more open than any other place I've worked at.
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