Facebook has often been regarded as one of the best places to work in the tech industry. After all, the company's interns make $25,000 more than the average citizen. And famously, employees on Glassdoor voted Facebook the No. 1 company to work for overall.
Not bad, right?
Wrong, according to some Facebook employees, both past and present, in a number of open threads on Quora.
Various engineers, software developers, and anonymous sources from Facebook's front lines divulge the details on the worst things about working for the social network.
To be clear, we're not saying these complaints represent the average experience. These are just the opinions of a small number of individuals. Every large company has its detractors, including Facebook. Here's what they have to say.
During on-call duty, engineers are responsible for keeping the service up and running, come what may. "For those weeks I don't leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have 'one too many' at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on the nightstand as I sleep." —Keith Adams, Facebook engineer.
"The wall does not exist at Facebook."
"At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one, which ends up with a professional workspace," says a Facebook engineer who chose to remain anonymous on Quora. Because the culture of Facebook implicitly encourages employees to "be themselves," the company lacks the "professionalism" found at other firms, the engineer says.
"Majority of the management staff has little idea or focus on creating a team."
Facebook's "make an impact" mantra makes the entire company's workforce focus only on personal wins, not on the success of the team as a whole, according to one anonymous former Facebook employee. "There is very little value placed on a manager that has the ability to motivate the masses. This emphasis is also placed on the manager to be an individual contributor as well. The fact that you have people reporting to you seems to be just be something there, rather than your main responsibility," this employee says.
"While I would love to say that my manager(s) were the only ones who struggled with leadership, it's simply not true. Majority of the leaders there do. They are so focused on themselves and what should be tertiary issues of politics and who likes who, little time is focused on the people."
"There is not a truly functional infrastructure."
Employees say that trying to figure out how to do cool things with a team of 4,000 people is much harder than doing them with a team of 500.
"We're growing so fast and have never emphasized organization, polish, or stability."
"Don't complain to me about Facebook just because I work at Facebook."
The spouse of a former Facebook employee says her husband was the recipient of many complaints about the site from friends and family, just because he was employed by the company.
"As a Facebook spouse, I was often asked for help on how to use the privacy settings solely on the basis that, being married to someone who works at Facebook, I must know."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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