[wfwefwef32]

Recently talked to 2 friends working for fb. According to them, the culture there is very toxic. For a master's degree, once get in, you need to get promoted in 22 months (I might misremember the actual number.) or you will have to leave. Debugging is never counted as a real work, so for quick promotion, nobody wants to solve bugs unless a bug becomes too obvious. And they also complained about no work-life balance. They got pushed to check-in code at 12a.m. for example.

[Shish2k]

I suspect that that's very team-dependant (in a company with thousands of engineers in tens of offices, most things are). Personally I got promoted based on debugging / code cleanups / reliability work, and I don't remember the last time I worked outside my self-assigned working hours (~10am-6pm) (Aside from on-call shifts, where I got one false-alarm on a weekend a few weeks ago). If one of my teammates messaged me asking for code review at midnight and it wasn't a "the site will be down if this doesn't land right now" issue, then I'd reject their code on the basis that we should all be in bed :P

My understanding of the "get promoted or leave" thing is "engineers hired as juniors are expected to get to mid-level in under 5 years (with a half-way milestone at 2 years)"; once you're mid-level it's up to you if you want to carry on climbing. Personally once I got there I switched to a "work more efficiently in fewer hours and keep the same overall productivity" approach instead of trying to get promoted into the senior levels, and that's worked out nicely so far :)

[programminglife]

> I switched to a "work more efficiently in fewer hours and keep the same overall productivity" approach.

Train me, please.

[electricslpnsld]

Trading anecdotes, I have a number of friends at Facebook (both at Menlo Park and the NYC office), and they complain about the opposite: lots of people just coasting and doing the minimum needed to get by, really hard to fire people, etc.

[imperio59]

This is part of why I left last year so... too true.

[DickVanDyke]

This is seemingly the case in a lot of places.

Unfortunately the number of lazy people far outweigh the number of hard workers.

[121789]

Anecdotally none of this even remotely resembles my experience there

[underwater]

What you’re talking about isn’t related to having a masters. All engineers are expected to progress beyond junior levels (get to E5) in a reasonable amount of time.

It’s not a great practice in my opinion. But in practice only a small percentage of engineers fail to make the grade.

[isof4ult]

This does not reflect my experience working here at all

[quotemstr]

What, exactly, is wrong with the expectation that people make senior level eventually? What exactly is wrong with being able to work at any time? I worked there for years, and if I was landing code at 12am, it was because I was excited about what I was doing. It was wonderful being able to work with people from all over the world on high-impact projects, and fixing important bugs was definitely high-impact. People who fixed vexsome bugs were heroes.

[asveikau]

>> you need to get promoted in 22 months ... or you will have to leave

> What, exactly, is wrong with the expectation that people make senior level eventually?

The problem is when you base too much on promotion systems and performance reviews, that end up as a form of bias and favoritism not closely approximating the truth. Some amount of people are doing useful work for you (like cleaning up after people you think are the high performers) that does not surface there, and when you crap on them, pass them up, bust their morale, make them afraid of their next review, etc., you risk losing their valuable contributions.

[bitL]

> you risk losing their valuable contributions.

Modus operandi in these companies is to rewrite/reintroduce whole products instead of fixing bugs from already discarded people. So if you lose a critical amount of worn out higher paid contributors, you just make a V2 or introduce a new product with a completely new fresh team that will get discarded after another 3 years. This requires fresh supply of motivated and hungry people willing to take sacrifices and a much smaller amount of people willing to exploit that.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

So that’s why Google is “reinventing” their chat every 2 years!

[iscrewyou]

"landing code at 12am, it was because I was excited about what I was doing"

I can't believe people put up with this. I really hope you got paid for that time.

[twoheadedboy]

Societal pressure to do everything it takes to get rich and succeed is a serious drug. I also contribute some of it in cases like this to the fact that some programmers are unfortunately just not well adjusted.

[evgen]

Either you were excited about what you were doing or you got an 11pm page from chuckr and consequently had a lingering doubt about your expected lifespan...

[outworlder]

I am finding it very hard to comment on this without violating HN guidelines and throwing ad-hominens. But I will try.

You see, the parent poster said:

> They got pushed to check-in code at 12a.m. for example.

This is ENTIRELY different than having you, overly excited about some project, deciding to work late and pushing code at 12am of your own accord. That's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Now, if you are EXPECTED to do it, outside major emergencies, then you have a problem.

[twoheadedboy]

What you call being "excited about working at 12am" I call "accepting being a corporate slave".

[glori3]

It’s perfectly reasonable to work at 12am, and there’s nothing in the parent comment to suggest that they’ve been working since 9am or so. Maybe they started working at 8pm. Modern work should be asynchronous. If your company cares about butt-in-seat time, it’s the one that’s wrong.

[quotemstr]

I don't think you can so glibly dismiss enthusiasm as Stockholm syndrome. Passionate people push the world forward, and mocking passion is a recipe for mediocrity and stagnation.

[twoheadedboy]

I think i'd just much rather spend the short time I've got left in my one existence doing things outside of work that actually make me happy and fulfilled, than being exploited for the benefit of the mostly rich and powerful and the illusion of "progress". If you truly get fulfillment from that stuff then more power to you, but I don't think the vast majority of people who are pressured to perform do.

Just because we have more "stuff" and more advanced "technology" doesn't make life more worth living. Happiness levels across society don't increase alongside productivity.

[quotemstr]

> I think i'd just much rather spend the short time I've got left in my one existence doing things outside of work

Okay. That's your choice. But having made this choice, don't complain when those of us who choose to devote more time to work receive greater rewards. There's nothing wrong with paying for performance.

[Aeolun]

Of course there is. If you are working 12 hours a day, how am I with my paltry 8 hours ever going to be considered for a promotion? I quite need it to keep feeding my family after all.

I can’t stop my bosses from judging based on time spent working (which is silly, but hey, we’re all human), but I sure can try to stop my coworkers from subscribing to such insane work hours.

[pisteoff]

Keep on living to work, brah. I'll feel less guilty clocking out early knowing you're there to keep things running. I bet you'll feel differently on your death bed.

[51lver]

There is something wrong with abuse.

[mancerayder]

On the flip side celebrating a culture where (allegedly) people are expected to toss out their personal lives and time (what is sometimes referred to as passion in some circles) is a race to the bottom. It means colleagues who DON'T do this are punished or replaced. Perhaps that's what you refer to as mediocrity, the unwillingness to put in long workdays that extend into night.

[quotemstr]

Do you think that I should be forced not to code after a certain time of day? I wouldn't work at a company that imposed this restriction.

[reaperducer]

I work at a company like this.

In fact, I need permission from my manager's manager's manager in order to stay past 7pm.

This company believes in a strong work-life balance, and this is one of the ways it achieves this.

Also, it "changes the world" in good ways, not by "connecting people" through bogus data siphoning addiction traps.

[fesoliveira]

Yes, and it shouldn't be up to an employer to set that limit, but to regulatory bodies. Having people spend 12-14h a day working is not good in the long term, and expecting people to do that otherwise they will be fired is draconic.

[scarface74]

I’m passionate about a lot of things, but not working at 12 midnight for a profit seeking company that I do not have a significant equity stake in.

[realreality]

Facebook is a cancer. It’s not “pushing the world forward.” It’s a phenomenal waste of energy.

Take those excited geniuses and have them work on preventing climate change from ruining all life on earth, instead of inventing new ways to profit off of people’s data.

[plaidfuji]

There’s already a community of excited geniuses that work on preventing climate change - they’re called climate scientists, and their solution is a steep carbon tax. It could pay for a public interest ad campaign for recycling and energy efficient practices, distributed and targeted by the excited geniuses at Facebook. That way we can brainwash the Paleolithic know-nothing American public into behaving in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet.

[codeinstyle]

Well, maybe this specific case doesn't apply to you, but enthusiasm and passion weren't the vocabulary used to describe many of my friends' experiences working late nights at fb.

[dgzl]

I think I see the disconnect. Yes, passionate people move the world forward, but that's not every person, or every coder, or even every Facebook employee. Plenty of engineers just want to make a steady paycheck and live their comfortable life outside of work.

If Facebook's a grind, then that's something the employee has to figure out.

[bitL]

I think she probably meant that being passionate without meaningful equity is equal to being a corporate slave - even if ultimately company/world benefits, the person gets discarded/sacrificed at some point in a hierarchical structure with limited upward movement, not profiting from it in the future.

[blibble]

> Passionate people push the world forward

we're talking about Facebook here