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As far as my thoughts on Facebook engineering go, your experience will depend heavily on what group you join. It's very difficult to give a single description of life at facebook as it varies so much throughout the company. You'll find differences in work hours, independence, project difficulty, prestige, opportunities for advancement, and the kinds of people in those teams. For me personally, there were plenty of groups with projects that interest me. But there are also many more groups that I wouldn't enjoy. Some groups are much more structured/organized than others. In some heavily organized groups, you can easily get bored by being a small cog in a large company. Or you may be happy to be able to coast by working less than 40 hours a week while cashing a fat paycheck. In less structured groups, you may love the opportunity to create your own projects and jump from group to group. Or you may get stuck without any interesting project and have difficulty switching to a better role. Depending on what excites you, some groups have some really interesting work, while others are more mundane. The best way to get a feel for Facebook is to figure out what kind of groups would be interesting to you and talk to people in those groups. Before interviewing, I would recommend you find out which groups you like and try to get the recruiter to schedule your interviews with engineers on those groups (but there is no guarantee the recruiter will be able to do so). Some top candidates are able to pick their group before joining. However, most new employees will not be allowed to choose until after they've started at facebook and go through the 6 week on-boarding process. When facebook was smaller, it was easier to pick your group. But in the past couple years, new employees have complained that they didn't have too many choices and felt like they had to re-interview again after joining. Some people felt they were falsely promised being able to choose between many interesting projects, but ended up getting herded into a very small number of groups that most needed engineers. So you should definitely try to negotiate your role in more detail when interviewing and accepting an offer. Of course, many new college hires frequently don't know what kind of work interests them. Blindly joining facebook without a group in mind could still be a good way to get experience for a couple years. Once you have a better idea of what you want to do, you could either try to change groups or companies. |