Facebook Overview

Facebook is defined by our hacker culture - an environment that rewards creative problem solving and rapid decision making. We work in small teams and move fast to develop new products, constantly iterating and improving.

Our product development philosophy centers on continuous innovation in creating products that are social by design, which means they place people and their social interactions at the core of the product experience.

We encourage people to be bold. The phrase “this journey is 1% finished” is posted on our walls, reminding us that we’ve only begun to fulfill our mission to make the world more open and connected.

Bootcamp
Instead of being hired on to a specific team, engineers at Facebook spend their first six weeks in Bootcamp, an immersive, cross-functional orientation program. Between mentoring sessions and shipping code to the live site, engineers are exposed to different teams, learn company culture, and have the opportunity to solve problems from across the organization. Every new engineer at Facebook has access to the code base from day one and ships code their first week. After learning the ropes and working with future team members, engineers choose the team they want to work on at the end of Bootcamp.

Hackathons
Our open culture keeps everyone informed and allows people to move around and solve the problems they care about most. Hackathons, our cross-company all-night coding sessions, are one of the most popular times for engineers to start projects they’re passionate about. For eight to twelve hours, engineers get together in small, cross-functional teams to turn their ideas into reality by spending the night hacking out working prototypes.

The only rule of Hackathons is that the project can’t be something you work on in your day-to-day job. But often, a really good Hackathon idea will turn into an engineer’s day job. Timeline, Chat, HipHop for PHP, Video, and tagging in comments all began as Hackathon projects and are now major elements of the site.

Hackamonth
After engineers have spent about a year on a team, they have the opportunity to switch it up and spend a “Hackamonth” working on a different team and a new set of problems. At the end of the month, people can choose to keep working on their new project or go back to their previous team.

Open Source
Facebook was developed from the ground up using open source software. We also release large pieces of our own software infrastructure as open source.
 

1601 Willow Road, Menlo Park, California, 94025