Say you are a hacky coder , does not care much for unit testing or code robustness butba feature you wrote happened to increase user engagement. Is that still preferred over an excellent coder but wrote a feature that didn't increase engagement?
If you are an excellent coder but not able to drive impact/engagement/revenue, might I suggest academia
Academia isn’t about great coder... The long term impact of great code is hard to quantify and thus value immediately. Similarly crappy code that launches is only judged for the immediate value without much consideration for longer term implications (bugs, maintenance, scalability, etc.) I think it is the same everywhere but I heard the culture at Facebook exacerbates the problem significantly
Totally the case. Write unmaintainable fragile shit and move on to get promoted fast
+1 And when they are promoted, people under them don’t want to maintain that fragile shit. They are the only one who knows the messy details. They become even more valuable and demand higher pay hikes.
Damn so many non fbers seem to know it all? Your code wouldn’t make it past code review and you’d probably get dinged in engineering excellence and maybe pipped if it were bad quality. For context an e5 on my time wrote terrible code (commented lines in diffs, broken functionality, etc) and he was fired. I think over time every codebase turns into a shitty mess that people have to maintain
Having high impact doesn’t necessarily means cutting corners with quality.
"Impact" includes better engineering. Plz don't be biased
It means writing shitty code that works and creates impact. And then fixing the shitty code to make it better next year to create better engineering impact. And then rewrite the whole thing because the previous thing was crappy beyond fixable and create impact by providing more employment and growth for the team.
+1 sounds like one of the few experienced engineers in FB.
WDYT?