I used to work at Facebook and I agree with this. Some anecdotal notes on motivation headwinds:
- Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and with offers to join— few people want to join product, and those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors behind this.
- I know plenty of people who just straight up don't like to work at Facebook. They "like their job" because they love the pay, the people and talking about the perks but dislike their projects and dread Mondays. Some are coasting while they can, some are figuring out their departure, and others are tortured week-to-week blaming themselves for their lack of motivation and trying to salvage some productivity.
- To some degree it feels like the more you care about something, the harder time you'll have, and the more your motivation will be hit. A lot of the battles are uphill battles, because a lot of the things people who care want to do are not considered impactful (or have negative impact).
Of course, there's plenty of people that don't feel this way at Facebook and a lot of pros to working there, but I did notice these patterns after working there, especially towards the end. Either I was paying more attention or they did seem more common than at other places I've worked at before.
Honestly, a lot of these things describe Google too. Most people don't want to work on ads (the core business). Since it's a bigger company, there are more product roles that aren't ads.
From my personal experience, what you're describing - lack of motivation, people applying only for the exciting (oculus) ventures or infra, and people only being there for colleagues and perks - doesn't sound too different from most large tech companies. Of course, the difference could be in scale, but I see many of those symptoms in the big tech I work at, and we don't even sell our souls to the devil like Facebook does.
Can you talk a bit about how facebook measures impact from their employees? How is it defined? How closely do you think it tracks real impact. How often do people figure out how to game it, and how is it usually gamed? Do you think it is possible to modify the definition of impact such that an ethical component can be added to it?
I'm not GP, but I did work at Facebook until just over a year ago (two teams over ~3.5 years). For practical purposes, impact means measurable change of some metric(s). That can be latency, reliability, number of interviews done (really), efficiency, whatever. In theory non-measurable impacts are valued too, but in practice only if your boss and their peers org-wide who participate in "calibrations" are sympathetic. It's an uphill battle TBH, and not unrelated to why I left.
And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.
I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.
- Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and with offers to join— few people want to join product, and those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors behind this.
- I know plenty of people who just straight up don't like to work at Facebook. They "like their job" because they love the pay, the people and talking about the perks but dislike their projects and dread Mondays. Some are coasting while they can, some are figuring out their departure, and others are tortured week-to-week blaming themselves for their lack of motivation and trying to salvage some productivity.
- To some degree it feels like the more you care about something, the harder time you'll have, and the more your motivation will be hit. A lot of the battles are uphill battles, because a lot of the things people who care want to do are not considered impactful (or have negative impact).
Of course, there's plenty of people that don't feel this way at Facebook and a lot of pros to working there, but I did notice these patterns after working there, especially towards the end. Either I was paying more attention or they did seem more common than at other places I've worked at before.