[rangledangle]

100% agree. The culture is a huge factor as well, but in some of the environments that I encountered before and after, that culture was there, but the tools didn’t allow the same cohesion.

To your point, other experiences have shown me the ego that rears it’s ugly head when trying to move that way in an env that didn’t have that culture. At FB there was a lot of candor, but in other environments I feel like I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings in code review, or even just watching what I say in slack messages. People take work too seriously in some companies. It’s so rewarding to have fun with it.

They used to say “Nothing at FB is someone else’s problem”

I hope they still do.

[no_wizard]

In part this is only possible at Meta because it incremental measured improvements would raise all boats. You didn't have someone being evaulated how well a project was planned (Product Managers), how well it was executed (Engineering Managers) and how well it was built (Engineers / IC). All 3 of these things can be extremely orthogonal to each other and human nature makes it so more often than good intentions of a person to even realizes.

Meta cut through that by focusing on measurable improvements.

The downside is it can create silos, a negatively competitive environment. IE, teams not sharing resources or credit etc because they are only looking out for themselves at the end of the day, because any measurement you don't capture is one you can't claim as yours.

I also argue it can breed short therm thinking. Meta even had special teams from what I understand that were "exempt" from the typical metrics driven review cycles because they'd create the wrong incentives.

I think the general ethos can be really powerful though, but I'd peg it to collaboration and value driven measurements (and value is loose here, I'm not strictly thinking monetary) rather than strict "user based metrics".