Every engineer wants the opportunity to express themselves creatively in their work, and every company has a large number of unfulfilling tasks that must be done. Can engineers find satisfaction in their work whilst also achieving company objectives?
In the following excerpt from Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software, coming out July 6, I discuss this with Pete Hunt, a former Facebook Engineer.
As I interviewed Facebook engineers, I imagined myself as an employee at Facebook. How would I respond to the environment of the company? Would I have enough individual expression through my engineering work to feel creatively satisfied?
I needed to know more about how corporate goals clash with the requirements of individuality, and I knew that I could trust Pete Hunt to give me an answer less colored by allegiance to Facebook.
After leaving Facebook, Pete started an anti-spam company that was eventually acquired by Twitter. Pete is an entrepreneur and a musician, and his Facebook photo features his towering frame and a mop of curls sitting over a goofy, smiling face. Pete is an artist at heart, and he knows how unpleasant it can be to be an artistic engineer trapped in a cubicle doing software maintenance.
When I ask Pete about how realistic it is for an engineer to be happy with their assigned tasks 75 percent of the time, his expression turns from a goofy smile to a gravely honest frown. “If I’m managing an engineer, I expect them to be mature,” says Pete. “And with some projects, it’s not going to be the most interesting thing in the world, but we need you to work on it for a while, and we need you to have some patience and not be a diva about it.”
Pete explains that at Facebook, the product surface area is huge, and there are thousands of problems to explore. Engineers are given the freedom to find something that interests them. An engineer with a strong track record can even decide to run their own experiment.
But in the end, everybody needs to justify their presence at the company in terms of real business impact.
Low performers are fired from Facebook pretty easily. Facebook tries to give these engineers the time they need to find an engaging project within the company, but it simply doesn’t always work out.
Engineering satisfaction is in the eye of the beholder. Some individuals are happy doing software maintenance, and some individuals will never be happy even if they are working on the product of their dreams.
Whilst you are waiting for Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software, learn more about how modern data infrastructure works on our YouTube channel.