I am an Engineering Manager at Meta (aka Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus)
I have supported and grown a couple of teams here and built producta spanning across all Family of Apps.
I know many engineers here and not only are aspiring to work for Big Tech company like Meta.
I am starting a discussion: Ask Me Anything.
What do you want to know about the hiring and interview process, daily life of an engineer, culture and technology.
Write a comment and I will pick most popular ones and will write an article for. each of those comments.
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Top comments (10)
How do you (personally) feel about the way we're heading with companies moving towards mostly work in office, over work remote again? Do you think we'll ever find a good balance between office/remote and personal life and does Meta plan to play an active role in this?
Assume for a minute that you can predict the future. How much longer do you think React will remain the dominant FE library/framework?
Did you face issues with "overengineering" or do you have a strategy against it?
In every company that grows beyond certain point, i.e. +1000 ebgineers you might see over-engineering. I think the problem is not so overcomplicating on purpose but you need to build in increasingly complex ecosystem of teams, technologies and home-grown frameworks. On top of that you have immense cognitive complexity of increasing surface of the products and the technology. None of these problems are uniquely specific to Meta, they apply for all kind of companies with big enough codebase and large teams. Meta has a monolithic infrastructure which could contribute to some of these problems, due to lack of clear domain boundaries and isolation of services. Happy to wriye more on this topic, another really good question.
That would be very interesting, I would love to read more on this topic in the future. Especially on the consequences for onboarding new devs/engineers, long-term maintenance, costs/benefits and agility for releasing new builds.
On 1. Company culture, are you interested overall through the company across all roles i.e. PMs, Design, Data, TPMs etc or more focused on Engineering. Any clarifying questions would be really helpful here as this is quite broad topic.
I've read that Facebook does not use or encourage unit testing. Is this true? If so, do you think there would be any benefit to writing tests?
I believe this refers to one of the core principles that Facebook used to have “Move fast and break things.”.
It was updated around 2019 and scrapped in 2022 altogether.
Writing test and documentation for long periods of time was not seen as valuable work but that has changed a lot in recent years. There is more on that subject, a great question.
Last year Facebook started loosing audience and next capitalization. Do you think this can be attributed to heavy-handed censorship efforts?
How do people inside engineering organization feel about Facebook becoming a censoring machine?
Why Facebook video player is the worst player ever (not smooth, slow and more) ?
Great question but not right person to answer. I would keep the questions towards the work and culture topics.