Facebook Reviews

Pros

good perks, great environment. high respect for engineers and high salaries. you can develop your ideas and own your project

Cons

you need to be prepared to work hard and compete with very smart people. unstable decisions at the management level.

Advice to Senior Management

lack of bureaucracy and the flat friendly organization sometimes has a downside that a lot of agreements and decisions are verbal and unofficial. which lead to unstable decisions. changes in design and waste of effort.

Pros

The ability to take an idea and turn it into a reality without the need for level after level of approval. Only really massive changes require any significant oversight at all.

People are expected and trusted to do good things for the company.

Projects are launched quickly, and road map cycles are very fluid. there is extreme urgency without the need for hard deadlines

Cons

the main downside is the long hours, but, truthfully it is fun, so I don't really mind that much.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep empowering folks to do the right things.

Pros

There are a lot of very smart people working at Facebook and this makes it a great place to work if you enjoy learning. There are regular presentations and tutorials from some of the best in the business.
The work is challenging and once you have proved yourself there is also good opportunity to move to other positions and projects. In fact, there is an engineering career track right up to the top levels so there is no pressure for dedicated engineers to turn towards management in order to get pay increases.
Add to this all the other perks such as 3 meals a day, laundry service, shuttle service, etc.. and this has to be one of the tops jobs in the industry.

Cons

The baseline expectations are high so this is not the kind of place for someone who does not love their work.

Pros

Attractive salary, friendly employees and perfect working conditions !!!

Cons

Not much, it's real fun to work here !!!

Advice to Senior Management

MZ is doing good job, no need is there to advise him !!!

Pros

- Good benefits (free food, health insurance, discounts etc)
- Fun job most of the times.
- Great facilities and office location.
- You really learn how to work in a stressful environment and to manage different tasks.
- Opportunities to grow and travel.
- It looks good on your CV when you look for another job.

Cons

- Despite the mission, the company is not transparent towards employees. Goals are not clear, there's lots of backstabbing and favouritism. Reviews are anonymous, managers extract the paragraphs that suit them best and nobody knows how their job is really rated.
-Management is terrible. Most managers are completely inexperienced, only focused on their career and and couldn't care less about their team.
-Hard work is not valued. It's all about the way you fake how much you find the company "awesome". There are managers who go to work at 11.30am every day and barely do any work, but because they are very good at faking their enthusiasm for the company, they are still there.
- They don't want people who are honest and straightforward. They claim "constructive criticism" is welcome, but it's a lie. If you want to progress, you have to fake that you are ok with everything. I was once told by a manager "criticism here is not accepted" (guess when I decided I wanted to leave the company..).
- Their attempt to brainwash people is frightening: employees have to participate in "wow moments" (they say," wow, I work for FB, the company does this and that"..yes, it's true..), fill in the "awesomeness index" and give stuffed animals to people who perform well.
- Work-life balance is very poor: working longer hours is the rule, your boss is on your Facebook, whatever you do is observed (remember Orwell's 1984? well, the guy was totally right).
- The job is quite fun but can be extremly stressful, as you deal with any kind of violent, pornographic, very graphic content and there's no concrete support whatsoever for employees. You might be told at 5.30 pm that there are still 500 reports about suicidal content lying in the queue (oh yes, you'll sleep very well that night..). No wonder most people suffer from insomnia, see psychologists and have stress related diseases.
- If you work in Dublin, bear in mind the main decisions are taken in Palo Alto and you're just the operational part of the company. You may work very hard on a project and discover at the end of the quarter that people in Palo Alto have already changed the policy without saying anything and your project is useless (..."All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others")
- They call fast-paced environment what is most often simply a chaotic and illogical schizophrenia of decisions and counter decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Be the example. Do you want to the company to be "open and transparent"? Well, be open and transparent.

Start thinking with your own minds and allow other people to do the same.

Finally, my last piece of advice is, read George Orwell and ask yourself some questions.

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".

Pros

Facebook during work hours. so fun

Cons

boring no duties for intern

Pros

great product, great benefits, great colleagues

Cons

incompetent managers are the downsides of FB.

Advice to Senior Management

follow the google management rules and stop hiring incompetent middle management from google

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.

Pros

In general, there is a high level of autonomy given to employees. We're treated like adults and given lots of responsibility. The perks are unreal compared to other places I've worked. The atmosphere is fun yet serious. We're very lucky to work here overall.

Cons

A stretched thin workforce makes for lots of pressure and heavy workload; it's hard to get everything done. Sometimes it's difficult to strike a work/life balance. There's a clique-ish aspect to the place, where the "cool kids" get the recognition and more opportunity to move around and advance.

Advice to Senior Management

You're doing a great job strategically. I'm happy with the overall direction of the company and our products. I just wish there were a little less favoritism shown by middle management.

Pros

The people are fantastic and hard working. One of the biggest things about Facebook is the amount of impact you can have in a short period of time.

Cons

At times, the company can look collectively lost. Management could do a better job at communicating with employees and being more transparent.

Advice to Senior Management

The leadership could use more transparency. More product managers are also needed to fully capitalize on Facebook's engineering potential.