Read "Building FaceBook"

Document directory

• Team Cooperation
• Hacker path
• Tool Culture
• Career Development
• Knowledge reserve

This book was recommended by a friend on Weibo. He ordered the purchase on that day and spent a few nights reading it, the book focuses on the author's experience in FaceBook and his thoughts on angel investment and entrepreneurship after leaving. The following are some of my thoughts after reading this book.

Team Cooperation

The importance of any team is beyond doubt. One of the factors we often get assessed by the interviewer during the interview is the team spirit. Although my company has paid great attention to teamwork, I am more interested in one team and one development team. In Facebook, I raised this height to the whole company, everyone's goals are the development of the entire company. If the boss of a team thinks that one of the team's employees will be more helpful to the company in another team, they will not let the ox man work in another team, only when everyone has the same goal and strives to work in one place can the company develop. I remember a company I once worked for. The members of the project team had a very good relationship with each other, and the members of the PM team had a very good relationship, however, due to some performance systems of the company, the demand analysis, development, and testing often debate over the issue of the owner of a Bug. The Bug has already been fixed, this results in a large amount of internal consumption and the emotions of members are also affected. Therefore, in addition to the personnel's character and communication skills, the company also needs to have a good system support.

Hacker path

Hacker culture is actually a kind of pursuit of technology. In facebook, there is an activity called hackathon, which is held every three months. During the activity, everyone put down their work, many creative projects are developed based on your own interests. Of course, such similar activities are very difficult to hold in Chinese companies, probably for the following two reasons:

• For the purpose of project progress, bosses and leaders can't wait for employees to use them for one minute for two minutes. How can they use their work hours to let employees do things that seem meaningless to the project;
• Facebook is very strict. They have the idea that they refuse to work with mediocre people, and all of them are top engineers in the world, however, there is still a gap in the level of personnel in most companies in China. Even if some enlightened bosses can hold such activities, the effect may not be so good.

Tool Culture

As the saying goes, to do things well, we must first sharpen our tools. The reason why humans are better than animals is that people will use tools and good tools will greatly improve their work efficiency. Facebook will make the tool culture the ultimate, they have a dedicated tool group, which is the best engineer in the company. This is worth learning from both the company and the individual. My current company is doing well in terms of tools, as well as a dedicated tool group. Many of the tools released bring a lot of convenience to our work. In the second half of last year, I wrote a small tool to improve the convenience of repeated time-consuming steps in my work and finally promote it to the department. In our work, we should always think about the summary, find out the similarities and commonalities, and see if it can be tool-based. This gives us more time to do more meaningful things.

Career Development

As a technician, there are only two ways to develop a career: Management and Technology. Many Chinese companies have the idea of managing technology. Even developers who love technology very much, because management means higher status and higher salary, many people who are keen on technology will abandon their original intentions and do things they don't like in their lives. Facebook management and technology have different roles. No one has a high position or a low level. If you like technology, you can become a technical master, and your salary may be higher than that of management. I remember that in the past few years, I often saw discussions on the age and Future Development of technicians on the Internet. In the final analysis, it was caused by the domestic environment. I am a technology-loving person, one day, we hope that more developers will be available in China's software companies.

Knowledge reserve

As a technician, if he does not continuously learn to charge, he will be eliminated. There are two ways to learn. One is to learn the technical knowledge he is interested in, one is to learn work-related knowledge. Many companies encourage employees to learn work-related skills. I think the skills required for work are basic. In addition, they should also learn the cutting-edge technologies they are interested in, speaking of this, we have to mention English. Even if we are not a foreign company, we should at least have no reading barriers. Our English ability is directly related to our understanding and acquisition of new technologies. I remember one of my previous leaders said at a meeting that you should study your business, performance optimization, and other work-related knowledge in your spare time, and there is no need to learn anything that is useless like English, I have reserved my opinion on this. In short, we should try our best to broaden our horizons and continue to charge for learning. Wang Huai mentioned in his book that they will use ready-made open-source frameworks to develop internal tools. If you don't have enough knowledge, you won't be able to use any open-source frameworks, in this way, we can repeat the wheel.

There are also some opinions on investment and entrepreneurship in the book, because I have not covered it yet, so I will not comment on it here. Because of the large cultural differences between China and the West, we can learn from the book, and enrich our knowledge, which will become a future discussion.