Name: Working at Facebook vs Google as a software engineer (pros & cons)
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T19:06:54.000Z
Duration: 10 min 56 s
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Hey, Tuck later and welcome back to another episode of the attack.

Wait now, Today I wanted to talk to you about the differences between working at Facebook versus working at Google.

Adverbs of degree

From the outside, it looks like these are both very similar cos they're both big tech giants.

But in reality, work at them is also quite similar.

But there are very stark differences as well.

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So first of all, we can talk about the work life balance.

Facebook is notoriously rumored to have bad work life balance and compared to Google Yes, it is true, I would say, and it's not really the fall of Facebook itself.

It is really more due to the way the whole system is set up.

So if we take a look at the tooling first of all Google.

They got Google calendar, Google docks, Gmail hangouts, Google sheets, Google slides and it's all integrated nicely together and all works great.

And in my mind, workplace is one of the key contributors to high stress because you're essentially organizing all of your information like a Facebook news feed, and you just keep scrolling.

It's like Imagine, you have e mail, but you're not able to sort the email.

It just appears randomly every time you open that, based on some relevance ranking algorithm that just isn't that good.

So what happens is you just keep scrolling until you feel that you've read enough.

But maybe you didn't you don't know, and you could be missing out on some key nugget of information such that there's always more to read.

You may feel like you've read everything, and then after 10 stories that have been repeated, you find one story that's actually knew and then just comments that appear all the time as well.

So it's just really difficult to organize the information and you just start, keep re reading the same stuff over and over, and you can't figure out when you can actually stop reading up on information.

There's no end, and that's essentially what they tried to do with their products as well.

They just make it so you just been countless numbers of ours just going through your Facebook news feed.

It turns out it's not that great of an idea if you do it for work.

Google, on the other hand, the reason Gmail is a great communication to a Facebook does not use email much, really.

So what happens is that you're on messenger all the time, and people are just pinging you all the time over messages over chess at all hours of the evening.

You know, it's not uncommon at 9 p.m. To get a ping from your manager about something that he figured out, and he just wants you to take a look at that.

And so, anyway, due to the tooling their issues, the other thing is, even if you're right, really nice engineering document design, doc proposal.

Nobody is really going to come in on it because they rather comment on the work place news feet portion, where people can like heart, smiley face, poster applies and stuff like that.

But what happens is that at least the conversation's not occurring on the same document.

That makes it harder to sort through ideas.

And for those people who do manage to comment on the document, it just spreads out.

Comments all over the place scatters all the information, and you're left kind of thinking through miscellaneous threats all over the place, trying to piece together a puzzle.

And so, because of that scattered mess of information, it becomes stressful to try and organize it because you kind of lose him control there, you know, stress.

Stress generally occurs when you feel a loss of control, and that's kind of what you feel at.

The company likes a Facebook where it's so organic, and there's just people going around trampling on each other all over the place.

There are good things and bad things about it, but it is generally more bottom up driven and organic chaos.

As I might like to describe it, Google is a little bit more like a structured normal company.

Actually, they're also kind of different.

And the performance ACSI kind of drives what motivates every employee.

Okay, so if we take a look at Google, they're driven by engineering, complexity, impact and leadership.

That kind of motivates over engineered to projects which sometimes you do see, like people might come up with crazy, complex frameworks just herself, Some simple problem.

And so, yeah, that's one flaw that now Facebook.

They're based on impact, better engineering people and direction.

So here's what's so difficult about this.

These four acsi are opposite one another, so that makes it very difficult to execute on all of these properly.

So to drive more impact, the more features that you're driving, the more products you're shipping, the better that goes.

But then, usually that comes at the cost of better engineering.

The coaches becomes mush as you're putting in all sorts of technical debt and hacks.

If we take a look at people and direction, these air also little bit country to one another, right, And not only that, they're also not well defined, such that it takes a while for you to even understand what these are.

But direction usually comes with leading initiatives.

But then people has to do with working well with another person.

And the problem is usually what happens is you have a bunch of people together.

Everyone wants to drive their own direction.

They want their own initiative and to leave their own projects.

And in order to do that, they're often trampling on one another and re doing the same work coming up with their own initiatives.

And it's not rare to see multiple teams executing on the same idea.

And nobody really wants to re use each other's code because they want to be the one who came up with the original idea to get that little point in direction.

But on the people's side, the more you trample on one of the others.

Code your people, your friendliness dissolves, so the way to do this is you have to be sort of passive aggressive.

You smile, you talk to another person and you kindly tell them that you're going to do the exact same work that they're doing on Lee, your weight and overall, in terms of engineering, this is just a disaster, right, because people are re implemented the same stuff.

No one wants to re use each other's code.

People are just trying to ship out as many features as they can.

And the more you push on one ACSI, the more another actually will begin to suffer.

So you're kind of in this constant state of stress.

The other funny thing, I would say, is that Google is very engineering driven, which I have to commend them for.

It's fantastic in that engineering culture, like all of the managers and project managers usually have some sort of computer science coding background like the product Managers at Google have just been impressive all the way through everyone I've met because they not only have that computer science background usually, but they have all of the people and communication skills to bring a project for a Facebook.

What happens is it's more product driven, which could be good than bad.

But what happens is you have managers who may not necessarily understand the code, and so their job is to slave drive.

Their job is to just push and keep pushing, and they don't really quite understand where I'm not sure if they have the empathy to really understand the plight of the engineer, right project managers as well.

At least they kind of looked down on engineers like, I think the sense has much respect because they weren't technical.

And so you had these NBA's running around the place.

And, you know, this is the age old battle between the engineering majors and the liberal arts majors who went on to get their NBA's.

They just don't get along that well, whether it's fantastic and by the way, I do post photos and stories on Instagram, so check me out there at Tech Lead HD link in the description below.

In terms of actual work environment, I say that Facebook probably has the edge simply because Google's food quality is just so bad, At least from what I've seen.

Like you would be lucky to get spaghetti on the dinner.

Normally, it would be like boiled cabbage and spinach for dinner.

Facebook actually puts a little bit of effort into their food preparation and serve you some pretty good, decent stuff.

Sometimes it's still not that great, right, But it's better, and they've got ice cream.

Overall facilities like coffee selection, desserts, even bathrooms, they're just better.

And then I would say that one of the biggest difference is is the actual product, right?

It's kind of like the feeling of being on the sinking Titanic and trying to figure out how to turn the boat around with Google.

It's not so much like Google has been dominating in a lot of products, and a lot of their brand and products are well loved by people.