After all, the company's interns make $25,000 more than the average citizen. And famously, employees on Glassdoor have voted Facebook
the No. 1 company to work for overall.
the No. 1 company to work for overall.
Not bad, right?
Wrong, according to some past and present Facebook employees, in a number of open threads on Quora.
Engineers, software developers, and anonymous sources who have spent time at Facebook discuss what they liked least about their experiences at the company.
To be clear, we're not saying these complaints represent the average experience. These are just the opinions of a small number of people. Every large company has its detractors, including Facebook.
1. "For six weeks out of the year, I'm on 24/7 on-call duty."
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.
2. "The wall does not exist at Facebook."
3. "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."
4. "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."
5. "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."
6. "Knowing that you're part of a large company trying to act like a young one."
One ex-employee says that even though Facebook is a huge tech company, it still tries to act like a young startup. "This is kind of like an Adam Sandler movie where he's old but wants to act like a teenager. Awkward," the former employee says.
7. "The complete lack of focus on my team."
"On the last day of my internship, the team decided that it was not worth completely rewriting the project," a former Facebook intern admits on Quora, after spending all of his time at the company redesigning and coding said project.
"If a more clear vision of the future of the product had been communicated to the team, I think I could have made many improvements to it, and impacted the company in a more positive way."
8. "You won't be making millions or building a new exciting company of your own."
You may be working for a cool company, but you're still working. In this case, you're working to fulfill someone else's dream.
9. "The tone of voice people used was belittling and self-righteous."
10. "Instructions were not clear, everything was a guessing game, and I was immediately set up to fail."
After being put on a rigorous 10-day performance plan, one former employee says his team didn't even bother to give him feedback.
"At that point, I quit on the spot."
This article was truncated from an article in Business Insider
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