Never worked there, but from everything I have observed, the free lunches, full medical/dental/vision and high six figure salaries generally imbue people with a sense of well being. The nice offices and decent working hours also help. The trip is that Facebook also has some mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer that some people really buy into. It's a good mission too and a lot of people really do enjoy using their products so it's not all that crazy to thing for someone to associate with. Why would anyone feel bad about making the world a more connected and open place for ~$300/hr? Hence the oppressive optimism.
Facebook is one player in a large ecosystem of workers and companies, in which things like lunch and nice offices and health insurance are simply table stakes, and total compensation levels are broadly comparable. Until recently, Facebook did pay at the upper end of that spectrum, which was some combination of their stock doing well and people souring on social media as a force for good in the world. Certainly relative to peak social media excitement ca. 2006, working there is now considered going off to be a cog in a vaguely evil faceless machine; they couldn’t get away with lowballing people the way SpaceX or even Google can.
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
Yes, the atmosphere at most big tech companies is this way. Everyone writes their emails with a plastered-on fake smile.
The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.
It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.
I'd say it's more a cultural echo of a time when it felt like anything was possible, and you were making stupid money to work on whatever you felt like working on, and everyone you interacted with was super competent and happy to help you out.
It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.
Yeah the book "The Circle" (now of course a major motion picture :) really captured that culture well, I thought. A lot of these companies are really like that.
It’s possible to deliver criticism in an optimistic way, if it’s impersonal and concrete (according to M Seligman). BTW, that’s also a standard for academic criticism. But there is a difference between allowing only optimistic criticism and banning criticism at all. That’s the problem with both tech culture and academia these days.
blululu|3 years ago
closeparen|3 years ago
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
SoftTalker|3 years ago
That instantly becomes political because not everyone agrees on what "nicer" is.
harrisonjackson|3 years ago
csande17|3 years ago
The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.
It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.
adamsb6|3 years ago
It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.
GekkePrutser|3 years ago
baby|3 years ago
mathgladiator|3 years ago
At least, the kool-aid tasted great.
jbverschoor|3 years ago
I guess they don’t value x1000 talent
doktorhladnjak|3 years ago
The hope is that it creates a can-do culture. Downside is that it can create a culture where no one feels safe criticizing bad ideas.
sesm|3 years ago
ac29|3 years ago