What Facebook Software Engineers Actually Do

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2021-05-23 10:30:06

But I spent almost a year on my last team without shipping a single line of code. I was essentially doing the job of a product manager and a tech lead rolled into one.

I was talking to users, clarifying the problem we wanted to solve, defining success metrics, brainstorming and prioritising ideas, forming a roadmap, aligning with other teams, scoping out work, and managing projects.

I started to really miss being able to just sit down and code all day without interruption. After all, that was the reason I got into this profession.

This is something I really love about working at Facebook. There’s huge variation in the work that software engineering teams actually do here.

You can spend your time coding, running experiments, analysing data, talking to users, planning and managing projects, interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and everything in between.

If you’re on a product team at Facebook, you get to write and ship a lot of code. But you usually don’t need to solve hard technical problems. So the actual code may not be that interesting. You’re just trying to get a product out the door as fast as possible so you can see how people use it and then iterate.