I interviewed with FB recently, met half dozen people at Sr Manager / Director levels in PM and PMM. I noticed that half of them seemed a little bit beat down or explicitly mentioned it being a tough time in FB. Can anyone corroborate this? Has morale been an issue for folks? Given Russians, targeting bias scandals, reporting bugs etc. As an outside my view is that it’s a great opportunity for me to bring fresh perspective and enthusiasm. But curious what insiders think.
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Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
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I’m Sooo Happy about Biden signing TikTok ban bill today!!
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Is raising two kids more stressful than raising one?
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I haven’t done shit today!
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Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
For the most part I think Facebook is a victim of the times. This fud will pass.
Facebook used to be fun but now it’s a stressor. My newsfeed is full of political propaganda. No doubt because I used to follow them a lot back in 2016. I used to use fb as ways to share with friends and family, then as a news aggregator. Now, I just go directly to the news outlet and paid subscription directly. It’s actually a much better experience.
Unfollow them? 🤔
It’s mostly from “so and so liked xxx posts” or from the subs of the news outlet (but mostly post political stuff). So I found its better to go to the news directly than being lazy and relying newsfeed to do that. Also most of my friends are in FB promoting businesses either their gyms, MLM stuff....I think for me, it has reached a fatigue level since I started using it from 2009.
Buying FB puts leap. This is beginning of end.
Lol
At the FB Seattle office it seemed the opposite, almost a cultish reverence for the "mission." This was a few months ago. Someone I know said that of all the tech workers she'd met, FB seemed the happiest.
If you believe FB is overall good, but struggling with unintended consequences you'll be happy at FB. If you think social media is inherently bad and haven't experienced the magic of connecting with people it won't be anything special but we do have tons of perks... FB groups kept me from suicide during an inflection point in my life. So I'm here to make it better.
I told them my honest opinion about Facebook. Which is that I think it unintentionally is perpetuating a more divided society and through it's platform allowing nefarious actors influence elections. But I also said I believed in their technology and I want to work where it's possible to have wide ranging impacts on society as a whole.
Aside from election, it’s promoting a belief that if I love apple, I want to see more apple instead of seeing banana. In real life, you see all sort of things and your exposure to many things change the way you think. So the unintended consequences are people become more invested on what they are interested in. People who love UFC and martial arts will think that UFC is more popular than NBA because that’s what they have seen in their feed. People who post about UFC will show in the newsfeed, the trending news is about UFC. However, if they go to says espn or other sports news or hanging out with many ppl, we realize that is not the case. I was under the same mistaken belief a few years back because of my hobby, I was bombarded with martial arts (gyms, sponsored pages, friends feed) so I thought wow Muay Thai is going mainstream. Turned out that my feed was fooling me or I fooled myself for spending too much time on FB.
What do you guys believe your “mission” is? What keeps you motivated aside from money? Is it the company, the product, or the problems that need to be solved?
I think Facebook (and more broadly tech) is the now the favorite punching bag by media, extech employees, government, etc. I remain optimistic about the future. We have a lot of smart people taking a very methodic approach to measuring and solving all of these problems. There are also no credible alternatives in the market for what we do for advertisers and users. Ultimately if shit hits the fan, I'll just go back to Google or even eventually agree to talk to one of the Amazon recruiters hounding me every week.
I completely agree with tech being the punching bag of the media. The best thing to do is to ignore the haters and join a company whose mission you believe it and do you best to help achieve your company’s mission.
Lose the sense of having a mission is horrible, which I feel for you. However, I do see a lot of negative effects of Facebook on myself and society. To avoid such negativity I have decreased my use in recent months because it is no longer fun but stressful instead. How do you think Facebook could solve this problem? I appreciate it as a tech company but really can't click with the vision behind it. For Amazon, it just needs to sale stuff to people, retail or computation power, which is easy for me to see the value of it.