Mutual Satisfaction: Finding the Balance Between Individual Fulfillment and Company Impact

The following is adapted from Move Fast by Jeff Meyerson.

“Yes, it’s Facebook. The work is fun. But there’s stuff that you
don’t want to do, and it needs to get done.”
— Nick Schrock, former Facebook engineer

Every employee wants to feel creatively fulfilled in their job, and every company has a large amount of unfulfilling work that needs to get done. How can a company satisfy the needs of the individual employee while also making progress on company objectives?

Tom Occhino has worked at Facebook for eleven years. Today, he is the engineering director of the React group, an open source infrastructure division of Facebook that includes React Core, React Native, and other related projects. Tom is friendly and encouraging, with the winning smile of your favorite high school guidance counselor, and he has earned the respect of the React group through a combination of technical knowledge and empathy.

“I optimize for engineers doing work that they love.” Tom believes that engineers should be spending 75 percent of their time at work on things that they are passionate about, because engineers do their best work when they are creatively satisfied.

From Tom’s perspective, management cannot blindly assign work based on what needs to be done. Individual preferences need to be accounted for. People do their best work when they don’t feel like they’re just another cog in the machine.

Tom Occhino’s team is staffed with some of the best engineers in the world. But even so, it’s never the case that everybody is perfectly happy with everything that they’re working on and the team is having the maximum possible impact on Facebook.

There are exciting greenfield projects to build, but there are also boring bugs. And unfortunately, someone is going to have to fix those bugs. As Tom says, “Engineering work is a stable matching problem and it’s in constant evolution.”

If an engineer cannot find any work they enjoy within their current team, there is a well-defined process for moving to another. “We literally call it engineering mobility,” says Tom. “After an engineer has been on the same team for a year, we encourage them to take what we call a hack-a-month and try out the experience of being on a different team. If you don’t like that team, you can go back to your old team, or you can try something else.”

Tom is a popular manager, so much of his team will stick within the React group. Even within that single team, there are so many different projects at all areas of the stack that many engineers never get bored.

Over time, projects begin and end. Engineers get moved from project to project, from subteam to subteam. If Tom keeps these people satisfied, a sense of mutual respect develops between him and each of his direct reports. When he gives employees the kind of work they enjoy, Tom earns the trust of his fellow engineers. And when he earns their trust, he knows that these engineers will be willing to pick up unpleasant tasks when necessary. “If I come to them with an engineering crisis, they will support me. They will do the work that needs to get done, even if it’s not their number one choice.”

I have spoken to multiple engineers who have worked for Tom, and it’s clear he is an amazing manager. The React team sounds like a utopia of engineering satisfaction.

Could it be possible for a manager with the charisma of Tom Occhino to keep his team happy with their assigned tasks 75 percent of the time?
As I interviewed Facebook engineers, I imagined myself as an employee at Facebook. How would I respond to the environment of the company? Would I have enough individual expression through my engineering work to feel creatively satisfied?

Tom Occhino still works at Facebook, so it is possible he was not telling me the full story about how happy the engineers are with their work. I needed to know more about how corporate goals clash with the requirements of individuality, and I knew that I could trust Pete Hunt to give me an answerless colored by allegiance to Facebook.

After leaving Facebook, Pete started an anti-spam company that was eventually acquired by Twitter. Pete is an entrepreneur and a musician, and his Facebook photo features his towering frame with a guitar on stage, his mop of curls sitting over a goofy, smiling face. Pete is an artist at heart, and he knows how unpleasant it can be to be an artistic engineer trapped in a cubicle doing software maintenance.

When I ask Pete about how realistic it is for an engineer to be happy with their assigned tasks 75 percent of the time, his expression turns from a goofy smile to a gravely honest frown. “If I’m managing an engineer, I expect them to be mature,” says Pete. “And with some projects, it’s not going to be the most interesting thing in the world, but we need you to work on it for a while, and we need you to have some patience and not be a diva about it.”

Pete explains that at Facebook, the product surface area is huge, and there are thousands of problems to explore. Engineers are given the freedom to find something that interests them. An engineer with a strong track record can even decide to run their own experiment.

But in the end, everybody needs to justify their presence at the company in terms of real business impact.

Low performers are fired from Facebook pretty easily. Facebook tries to give these engineers the time they need to find an engaging project within the company, but it simply doesn’t always work out.

Engineering satisfaction is in the eye of the beholder. Some individuals are happy doing software maintenance, and some individuals will never be happy even if they are working on the product of their dreams.

For more information on how Facebook builds software, Move Fast can be found on Amazon.

Jeff Meyerson is the host of Software Daily, a podcast about engineering and software strategy. Over the last five years, Software Daily has featured more than one thousand interviews with engineers, CEOs, managers, investors, and industry analysts. Meyerson has worked as a software engineer at several companies including Amazon. He’s an investor in software companies targeted at developers. He writes music as The Prion, and you can find him on Spotify.