Politics aside, if you are an indie developer or have developed only on small teams, spending a year or two at a FAANG company will often greatly improve your effectiveness as a coder that you can then bring to your own projects or smaller companies. I'd recommend it, but don't get attached to the money and set an exit date.
The social/moral issues do take their toll, both as pangs of conscience and the general unpleasantness of people acting like everything Facebook ever did was 100% predictably bad and you're personally responsible. There are also certain pathologies in how planning and evaluations and promotions work. On the other hand, the work is generally very interesting and the opportunities for learning/advancement are huge (though I'd caution that some of what you might learn is very FB-specific). Also, one on one, people at FB are generally very smart and quite nice. The managers in particular really Get It when it comes to supporting engineers. So a lot depends on how well you can "build that wall" between the work and the company as perceived from outside, or whether you even want to do that.
P.S. Don't read anything into the fact that I'm "ex" because 90% of the reasons were specific to my own circumstances.
I joined facebook as my first job out of college. I didn't really have a plan and they offered the most money.
The good: There is a huge breadth of stuff to work on and good internal mobility. Whatever WLB, "impact," etc that you want, you can probably find it at fb. Getting tired of working on groups? You can work on some VR project. The tooling is really good so you can spin up whatever you want without having to think about infrastructure too much. They treat engineers well.
The bad: Morality for sure. Nobody's perfect, but facebook felt especially evil sometimes. Lying to regulators etc is seen as strategic. Not wanting to be outed as an fb employee is definitely true.
Might not be a bad move, think about where the equity will go in the next few years, etc. If you want to start a family and high compensation, it's certainly not a bad move. If you think about the larger picture of what you're doing, I'd think it over very carefully.
I don't think any FB employee (Except for Zuckerberg) would be comfortable with wearing Facebook-branded clothes at this time.
As for moral judgement, only you can make that call, people can be quite polarized about this subject so you'll get people answering that typically feel strongly one way or the other.
Some people respond negatively when they hear I work for FB, but their opinion turns when I give a bit more detail about what I do there. In that sense, I don’t think it’s harmed me socially.
See, there will ALWAYS be controversy in large companies. There was back then in IBM, there was in Oracle, there was in Microsoft, there was in Google and there is on Facebook. If you are trying to find a COMPANY that is a "innocent dove", you will have a hard time finding one that is not an NGO or Non For Profit. Or maybe go into one that is not VC funded and not publicly traded.
How would you feel if you knew your work started being used by authoritarian regimes to oppress their citizens speech and ability to organize?
How confident are you that Facebook wouldn't take that opportunity if it was presented to them? Same question, but what if FB's user numbers and usage have declined for a couple years and they are desperately trying to monetize any lingering network effects they can?
They currently have a friendly panopticon. Only the morals of their leadership and PR concerns are holding them back from changing the friendliness.
It's not a bad idea to join FB as an engineer. Just make sure you end up working on something that you wouldn't get to elsewhere, keep in mind that, like all organizations, it has its own unique pathologies, and set yourself up so you can walk away if you need to.
You won’t change the course of the ship but if you pick your team carefully you will have a good impact in the world.
PSC is very frustrating however. Be prepared for a lot of stress and spinning wheels to prove impact as you try to work on meaningful things.
You will receive a lot of hate on the internet for it, some people won’t hear any words coming out of your mouth once you say “Facebook”. That said the internet is a more hateful place then it used to be.
If you have choices, I guess it depends if you trust Mark Zuckerberg and his vision is something you want to spend your energy on.
However, if you are the type of person who has a strict moral compass, it will probably eat at you until you need to leave. From personal experience, I worked at a unicorn where everyone I worked with believed we were making the world a better place while on the inside I knew we were absolutely not. It’s a very alienating feeling that might drive you to hate your job.
On the flip side, Facebook could be a big payday which could be life changing for your family. I'm not intending to judge you, though society might. By that point you're probably part of the 1% so you wouldn't really care.
some classes of people are privileged enough to care. others prioritize career experience and making money.
not everything you hear is relevant to you. just like you're an engineer in a career partially because pretending to start a company in a garage to $100mm in VC money is not relevant to you, because that garage is not in the wealthiest suburb in a the country, a stone's throw away from Stanford University.
Other people can't supply your moral judgments for you. Some people think Facebook is immoral, others think it's great. Try to reason for yourself about what problems you have with Facebook and whether you want to support them.
Can't someone find a better organization that does net good for humanity, or at least doesn't cause as much harm? Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Tesla, SpaceX, etc. or Kiva, Goodwill, DWB/MSF, etc.
Facebook is easy to criticize because it is top of mind all the time. But unless you see out an org whose mission is focused on making an impact you agree with, all companies are basically equally evil if you dig deep enough. But outside of some regulated industries, they also provide things people want or they wouldn't be in business.
What other options do you have? Can you honestly say that whatever else you are looking at is more ethical than Facebook? It's a shitty fact of life that most money has blood on it.
Just don't go into the insurance industry :)
i'm on a product team. morale is fine. what you should really be asking yourself is if you're comfortable with the WLB. most people work 50-70hrs/wk. TC is good though so you get what you pay for.
in general you're better off asking this question on blind because it's unlikely you'll get a lot of honest/revealing answers here.
Yes, it’s a bad idea. Their product is shit, their engineers are shit, the leadership is shit.
Facebook is a good place to work. They take care of the people. Benefits are great. None of the stinginess of Amazon. Apple was awesome too, btw. But FB is very employee first. Dark Patterns ? I don't know of too many teams that work on such stuff. When you go through bootcamp, make a selection that you are comfortable sleeping on. I did. And I am ok with that. Don't base your decisions on your neighbors' morals. Ask yourself how you would feel. I am comfortable with the choices I've made.I can go to sleep peacefully.
Worst case : Learn, move on if it doesn't work. Grow there if it does.
The worst place I worked at ? The health care startup revolutionizing the world. Terrible man/woman management all under the pretense of "Changing the world is hard work". I left bitterly disappointed with my experience.
How are you going to change the world , when you can't even be reasonable, kind and nice to fellow co-workers ?
If we weren't, then why would be working for anyone or trading skill/our time and labor to someone else for a negotiated amount. One of which we can never purchase directly again and sadly is way disvalued in general.
But that said, if you've never worked at a Fortune 500, then you should regardless. It lends street creds that you've dealt with the corporate politics and endured the stack ranked rat race and how well you did with it.
My own questions about FB tho, that's another story. Since I'm SRE, i'm wondering: would I make a difference anymore than I have already? It's one things to say you keep the internet turned on at scale. It's completely different having done it for two(+) decades and know their place in the org chart relative to VP/SVP of your corporate division and theirs within companies with 30-100k+ people.
For those that have worked at FB, we hear the stories and we all know the problems we generate for our neighbors from gentrification as well as our peers just in enacting the will of our management chains, making "the right thing" harder to evangelize without risk or fear.
So why should anyone that's not a intern/college grad/entry level person work there that's not hooked on something special?
As everyone has said, it's just a website run on commodity gear... just at scale. Why pay the fucks to work there if you've already done annual doxing and close knife work necessary to not be at the bottom of the bell curve for the stack rank? Nobody is safe anymore unless you've made connections in college and elsewhere. An average IT career is 2 years so why do it beyond whoring and resume building?
- Allowing the proliferation and organization of a genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar
- Same type of thing in Sri Lanka related to spreading violence
- Allowing the mass distribution of disinformation & the corruption of public opinion in the 2016 US presidential election
- The absolutely massive level of surveillance/data gathering
- The release of this data to a political firm (Cambridge Analytica)
- Running emotion/political influence experiments on its users
If you are looking at companies from a moral/mission standpoint, stay far away from Facebook. They are a Pandora's box of ethical problems and have broken every guideline you can name.
P.S. I don't know about morale issues at Facebook related to this but I've read that the younger generation of CS graduates is less willing to work at Facebook and asking recruiters tough questions [2]. For further information on the temperature there it might be useful to check Glassdoor [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-...
They're a big company that doubtless works on many interesting problems, which puts it down to whether you agree with their operating philosophies.
All evidence to date says that they're 100% on board with promoting horrific content if it makes them more money.
You should not have to ask around to make your own moral decisions. Answer for yourself.
(I don't work for Facebook or have any desire to, personally, but that should not affect you).