A great place to learn and grow, if you're lucky and find the right team
Pros
- If you find the right team, and you have the autonomy to self-improve and grow, Facebook is a great place for you to flex your wings, experiment, and improve. - By default, almost everything you ship is used by a lot of people - Benefits are really good
Cons
- You work all the time. It's impossible to truly step away from work. I had dreams about FB projects until about 3 months after I left. - If you don't end up on a good team, or with a good manager, you're out of luck in terms of "upwards" movement and "impact". It's really a dice roll unless you're privileged enough to select a specific team. - Facebook itself is a well greased machine. It self-enforces a lot of its own problems we're seeing the outcomes of today due to how it works. It's unlikely to change that anytime soon, so if you don't like how FB is unable to predict externalities in its work at its scale, you'll be upset working there - Working at FB is a bit like having blinders on. You're so dang busy and shipping things all the time, it is not conducive for you to think about the big picture and (related to above) the potential butterfly effects/externalities of your work. Many well-intentioned projects end up having disasterous consequences, but I'm confident that 99% of people out there, if they worked on the project, would've also been unable to predict the fallout. The prime example here is Instant Articles, which was a design-lead initiative to give select news partners the ability to make their articles load fast and render "natively" in the mobile apps (spun out of Paper after that got shut down). I can assure you that all the team wanted to make was a beautiful interface — it was lead by a product designer — and none of them would've wished to kill ad revenue/contribute to ruining journalism. You can argue that Instant Articles was one in many many steps FB took that ultimately shifted the ability to make money off of news ads from newspapers to FB itself, and lead to today's massive journalism layoffs and click-bait culture (if ya can't get clicks, ya can't get ad views, and ya can't make money). If you ever met the Instant Articles design lead, you'd know all they care about is a good design and polished interactions. But it turns out, just caring about that means you aren't thinking about the potential damage your product can do 4 years down the line.
