Facebook Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Facebook full-time for more than a year

Pros – 1. Great benefits and perks
2. Passionate and dedicated employees
3. Fun and exciting environment

Cons – 1. No career growth and lack of internal career paths
2. Low compensation
3. Lots of politics within the company (many ex-Yahoos and AOL employees are in management)
4. Bad culture and habits brought in from ex-Yahoos and AOL employees are making a big negative impact on culture and morale at the company
5. Mark Zuckerberg, aka Zuck has received good ratings in the past but of late he has been very distracted and not focused on how the company is run internally, he should own it and step up by making management changes to course correct the ship before it becomes another AOL.

Advice to Senior Management – Do something to address the low compensation issues and morale/culture issues within the company, make changes to management particularly in the engineering and sales organizations since the same traits that they had at Yahoo and AOL are starting to show at Facebook as well.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Facebook full-time for less than a year

Pros – Perks, free and delicious food, free other stuff, 21 days vacation, good for resume.
Free schedule, nice office, gym onsite etc.

Cons – They say they're chaotic. IMO, it's a too fancy word for that. I would say that the code-base is a mess. The corporate value "move fast and break things" is understood too literally by some engineers. That's why the product is very unstable and the UI beyond two most frequently used pages is clunky. The job is boring. Things gets done extremely slow and the quality is very far from being perfect.
Too much of narcissism (we're building an awesome product, we provide really sick user experience, we're ninjas, batmans and supermans etc. etc. etc.). Maybe it's good for some people, but not for me.

Advice to Senior Management – No advise

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Facebook as a contractor for less than a year

Pros – I will give credit to fb, that when I first started, I was very impressed with how organized and efficient they seemed. Everyone did their job, everyone worked hard, and everyone deserved to be there. The first I could say for any organization I have worked for.

The free shuttle is great - the drivers are nice and professional! The food is delicious and healthy. You have no excuse for eating poorly, because you always have healthy options.

Cons – It didn't take long for me to realize what should have been the obvious. Facebook culture is largely superficial and materialistic. Now this may be more prevalent in my department, but I think it's fairly standard for the company. In my first days, I met with each person on my team and made an effort to learn their communication style and how I could support them. I even scheduled follow-up meetings to address any concerns. Each week my manager met with me and gave me vague, negative feedback, but never gave me any positive feedback. The criticism never felt constructive. I asked if I could be given specific examples of what I had done wrong, so that I could improve, and none were given. Instead I was given adjectives of my personality to describe me in a negative light.

I was let go, and again given a vague explanation. Only that I had done nothing wrong. I saw at least 5 other people in in my department get let go (who were good performers) simply because they didn't fit right with the team. I tried very hard to be accepted, but felt I was not given a chance. This company cares more about how popular you are than how much work you get done. Even though I often stayed the latest, it did not matter because I was invited to less parties, happy hours, etc. and did not partake in celebrity and colleague gossip.

Advice to Senior Management – Encourage people to be themselves. Having a more reserved and professional demeanor is NOT a bad thing. Take the time to get to know individuals for their uniqueness. Offer concrete feedback, and highlight what your employees have achieved as well. In general, treat people with respect and worry less about how much other people like you. I think fb could do better if it felt more like an office at times, and less like a sorority/high school/summer camp.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Facebook

Pros – Huge corporate upside potential (but might not apply to new hires as of 2012).

Fun work environment (free quality food, game rooms, frivolity encouraged, etc.).

High impact in terms of people using your code and recognition.

Good opportunities to try new ideas and move teams.

Cons – Brutally long hours for many, frequent pressure to delay or cancel vacation plans (even outside of release deadlines).

Harsh, unjust, and badly cross-team calibrated reviews coupled with frequent firings so that the stick is very close to the carrot.

It has now grown large enough that internal corporate politics have seeped in.

Management, at all levels, fixated on lots of shiny new features, no matter how broken, and lack of respect for necessary work getting done.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Facebook

Pros – - Free food
- Reasonably good compensation
- Reasonably flexible hours
- Lots of smart, capable people
- Work can be exciting

Cons – - Working on product teams is trying because of the micromanagement of Zuck and other upper management. Many projects get delayed because they ask for random changes.
- Working on backend teams doesn't have that problem, but they are typically second-class citizens and don't get as much respect as frontend teams.
- Facebook is very large now and the bureacracy is starting to accumulate quickly. It used to be that engineers could just do stuff, but now almost every change requires a great deal of pointless discussion or overhead. For instance, you now have to fill out a form just to log some data.
- Very strong focus on some of the "hot" product teams means that the rest of the company doesn't get preference with respect to product managers, designers, etc.
- Most frontend work is boring mundane PHP. The only challenge comes from poorly-designed legacy systems.
- Managers will often ask you to work on something you don't care about just because it's a priority for the company. This goes against the claimed philosophy of Facebook, but it's the way things are trending.

Advice to Senior Management – - Keep the bureaucracy down.
- Reduce the rate of hiring. The marginal benefit of an additional engineer decreases fairly quickly. Going from 500 to 1000 is not going to come close to doubling the amount of work done.

Current Employee – been working at Facebook

Pros – Good pay, if you negotiate aggressively
Good food
Good benefits
Location is good, California is a nice place to live although expensive
Lots of exposure

Cons – Management is constantly pushing you
You don't work at your own pace, you have to work at everyone else's pace
Need to stay after work everyday and go to work on weekends
People are very egocentric and their ego is entirely tied to how much code they write
I'm afraid of getting fired every single day

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Facebook

Pros – If you are a person who likes to work 10 hours a day and on weekends, then this is the place for you. The food is good, and the hardware they give you is top of the line, but really you can just buy it yourself. I'd rather be paid more. The work is OK, but pretty mundane. You're writing pretty basic PHP all the time.

Cons – The environment is just horrible to work in. I'm a top student form a top school, and people just have no lives here. The managers push you until exhaustion, and even then, there were several people on my team who were fired within a short time frame simply because they were 'under-performing'. I've never heard of any company fire engineers so enthusiastically.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Facebook

Pros – If you are in Engineering department, you are at one of the best place to work for.

Cons – Operations department management sucks, they don't treat to people in a respectful and fair way. If you want to be a good position in Operations, you need to be friend of some certain people.

Advice to Senior Management – Question and try to understand why you constantly loose people from Operations. Facebook Software Engineering departments might be ideal place to work for but not the Operations.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Facebook

Pros – Facebook is exploring some new ground with social networking and its cool to be associated to the innovation

Cons – People are often not treated fairly as Ego's get big fast when a company grows so quickly. They get you in the door with the "potential" of going IPO but your in you give up your life and soul with little career growth or monetary incentives. Its no wonder that three of the four founders have already left in less than 3 years and long term employees are looking to sell their shares. No potential of any amount of 'potential' earnings once they go IPO is worth being treated like second class citizens or just a fancier sweat shop.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't be afraid to higher some more seasoned and senior talent for leadership and management positions who can help create structure, processes and tools to help the organization grow and scale with the demand. Sooner or later the lack of these seasoned managers will be what drives profitability down and decrease the potential Facebook has to be come a fortune 500 company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Facebook full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – vision of its founder is strong

Cons – too much office politics
nepotism outweighs meritocracy
teamwork is limited, more individualism

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company