The 3 Meta (Facebook) Culture I liked
Meta (Facebook) is one of the most talked-about companies in the world, but what is it really like to work there? I worked there for 2 years and a bit from 2020 to 2022, and I wanted to share my experiences with you.
In this article, I’ll focus on 3 topics, Move Fast Culture, Power of engineers, and Transparency.
Please note that I worked in a team that builds internal infrastructure toolings. The processes and experiences of teams that build customer-facing products might be different.
Move Fast Culture
Meta is known for its “Move Fast” culture. Working as an engineer, I definitely felt this. They don’t care much about the processes and technical design documents. What’s valued the most is code that makes the business impact, and this culture facilitates fast delivery. This comes with variousa risks, but not making changes fast enough might put the company out of business too. I think many startups go with this approach but become conservative as they grow. I like that Meta kept it as its core culture. I’ll talk about engineering practices related to this in the next section.
Power of Engineers
The engineering teams have an extreme level of autonomy. Let me give you 3 examples.
Firstly, many projects don’t have technical design docs. They take an incremental approach where the team discusses the design, executes, finds new information, and iterates the process. I like it because, in most projects, we find more information as we execute, which changes the “best design”. However, I believe there should be a step at the end of a project that forces engineers to log the design decisions, which was missing when I was there. Past design decisions are essential for both understanding the system and planning the future strategy.
Secondly, many eng teams working on internal toolings decide when they do a release. As long as the eng team communicates with the stakeholders and users, they don’t have to get a bunch of approvals. Despite its faster delivery, this is definitely one of the risks I mentioned in the Move Fast culture section. If I were in the leadership team or a manager, I’d be fine with this approach only for eng teams with a solid and reliable leader.
Lastly, PdMs and designers are less common (at least for internal toolings). That means engineers get to decide what to build and how the UI looks. This is definitely faster, but again, it could go well or badly. I actually liked this a lot, the low communication cost definitely made me productive.
Transparency
They are very transparent. They have regular live streams from executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, where they answer all kinds of questions from employees. Employees can make comments and top comments get some reactions too. I saw Mark Zuckerberg answer many tough questions himself and I never felt that the answers were either scripted or dodgy. I liked this transparency a lot. It was before all the layoff waves though, things might have changed since then. A fun fact is that Mark Zuckerberg makes comments on his memes, like the one in this article.
Summary
Overall, I had a very positive experience working at Meta. I liked its Move Fast culture, the power of engineers, and transparency.
