FaceBook - by Marty Ko
Unless you know someone or have a meeting on Facebook, it’s basically no way a visitor goes inside the HQ of Facebook. We are lucky to have Jimmy and Yuan Yuan to arrange this company visit for our team. A big round of applause to them!
I know that these silicon valley companies are crazily huge with beautiful interior design. Even though I have mentally prepared to visit these companies. When I was actually staying in the place, my mind still gets blown. However, my first impression of Facebook is not about it’s interior but how crowded it is. So many people were walking around the office and I felt like I was stuck in a shopping mall since there are coffee shops and snack bars midway through the meeting room. Since I used to work in the tech department of a bank so that’s basically the complete opposite of a bank office.
Facebook is very well known for one of their marketing slogans: move fast and break things. My interpretation of this slogan is to launch something as soon as possible in order to stay ahead of competitors without thinking too much about all the potential consequences if something failed. In 2018 they definitely “break” lots of things like trust from customers and privacy policy. There are different kinds of privacy issues that Facebook was dealing with as of 2019. One of the most famous ones is about the Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested personal data from Facebook to profile and target users for various political campaigns. For the rest of them, you can refer to a roundup article over here.
During the interview session, I did raise this embarrassing question to them: Are there any major changes toward your workflow or business strategy after various privacy “mistakes”. They admitted that they were moving much slower nowadays to make sure everything is properly aligned before releasing the product. But I was surprised that they are still very supportive of the company after these incidents(Of course, they do own a good amount of Facebook stocks.) But apart from that, they actually mentioned that media were misreporting the incidents about Facebook.
Another question always in my mind is about Facebook or even in general social media … are they moving to the way that they are expected, manageable or even the right direction? In the old days(I mean a few years ago actually), people actually use it for sharing their personal life online. But today it has become the major information source for most of the people and getting more and more political related. The speaker doesn’t answer my question directly but he agreed that social media has changed a lot and Facebook is just a tool and depends on how people use it. So basically they don't have any control over this issue.
In the end, one of the general questions that we always ask is: Do you ever think of working in a startup or even start one? They said they will consider it after spending a few years in Facebook. They said to create a successful startup is very difficult since in general startup are doing something that people needs and prove it works. And it’s very difficult to attract people to trust your business without a strong networking background. So it’s safer to work in a large corporation to accumulate knowledge and network first.