[jimnotgym]

> Engineering First Organizations

> Like Google or Facebook these are organizations where engineering trumps everything else. If you’re not in engineering, your pathway to promotion is limited.

Just browsing Facebook's board...

MZ-dropout SS-MBA Mckinsey etc PA-Accounting and Business studies NK- economics & management, Mckinsey again RK - lawyer PT- lawyer

Not being engineers sure held them back!

https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/default.as...

[PragmaticPulp]

I know as many non-engineers as engineers at Google right now.

The idea that non-engineers are sidelined is wrong.

[mathteddybear]

Yeah, especially that in the context of this article, the distinction between Engineering and Product is presented as

> Engineering wins by producing beautiful and scalable systems, in pursuing that they sometimes build too complex too quickly. Product, on the other hand, wins by putting new stuff in front of customers as often as possible.

[vmception]

Same, a lot of people relocated during the pandemic but to the same places, some Googlers told me they had never hung out with engineers at Google till then

[foobiekr]

The quality, in my experience, is very substantially lower. It is peculiar.

[fdgsdfogijq]

By now they are so big that engineering is not as important. But 10/15 years ago, engineering was definitely number one

[jimnotgym]

Thiel arrived in year 1. Sandberg in year 4.

Facebook has been an investor led organisation from the beginning.

[fdgsdfogijq]

Facebook has produced the best open source software seen in the last 20 years. React basically solved front end frameworks, and pytorch steam rolled tensorflow.

[jimnotgym]

So what? The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion...It is clearly not true.

The fact this structure can still produce good software is neither here nor there.

[disgruntledphd2]

> The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion.

Speaking as a DS who knows a lot of FB people, this is totally true. If you have a product team deliver something cool, the engineers on that team will normally (modulo variability) be rewarded a lot more than the DS people. Sometimes PM's get some of that, if the product is very successful, but the variability is lower and the mean is higher for engineers at that company (apparently).

[fdgsdfogijq]

Facebook rains money on engineers that produce value, more than anywhere else in the industry. Clearly you don't know about this

[joshuamorton]

Did anyone on the board get promoted within Facebook?

[nojito]

All startups are investor led organizations the moment they take on and raise capital.

[grey-area]

Board directors are not usually employees.

[jimnotgym]

1) not necessarily true at all. The board is usually split exec/non exec

2) not true in this case. Two of the people on my list are execs

[0xB31B1B]

Boards are usually filled with:

1) Founder/cofounders 2) investors 3) people who do not work at the company and are not investors that people in groups 1 and 2 think will be on their side during important votes

[grey-area]

I said usually, there are sometimes one or two but the board is there to supervise and thus is outside the normal corporate structure.

[jimnotgym]

In the UK corporate governance code it is quite clear that a board should have an exec CEO and a non exec chair. The chair runs the board the CEO runs the company. The board oversees the CEO. It would be extraordinary (and pointless) not to have some execs on the board.

[grey-area]

And it would be extraordinary and pointless if the board members were all employees, it has a separate function of supervision and thus is usually mostly non-employees outside the CEOs chain of command.