Working at Facebook, one of the largest and most influential business phenomena of our time has its advantages and disadvantages. Keith Adams, a software engineer at the company, shared exactly what it is he likes least about working at the popular site.
Recently on the social media platform Quora, a user asked "What's the worst thing about working at Facebook?" Forbes then took the question and the response Adams provided, and put it on its site for the rest of the world's non-Quora users to enjoy.
Adams has worked at Facebook for about four years and shared that he used to work on the back-end, but now works on HHVM, Facebook's PHP engine.
"The worst thing about working at Facebook for me has to be oncall duty," he answered on Quora. "Most engineering teams run complex, frequently modified software and production. Since things have a way of going wrote, teams have a rotating responsibility responding to unanticipated emergencies."
Further giving insight into the operations within the software engineering team, Adams wrote, "These can happen at any time, day or night, and are of unknowable scope and severity, being oncall [sic] is a serious responsibility; many millions of users are affected every minute the site is broken."
Adams then shared that when it is his turn in the rotation, he keeps his phone charged at all time, makes little to no plans to be social, and even leave his phone (with the ringer on) on his nightstand for call emergency calls that are almost undoubtedly going come.
"While it can be satisfying to help get the site back in order when it's sick, it really is not for everyone," he said. "This part of the job just isn't fun for me; I find debugging under time pressure through a 3 a.m. haze stressful."
Adams ended his reply by sharing all the things he likes the most about being an engineer on Facebook. He said his position always him to contribute to Facebook's core, and observe feedback, as well as experiment with pieces of the company's foundation and take risks.
Other questions that were asked on Quora were "What checks are in place to prevent employees at Facebook from inappropriately looking at user's private data?" and "Why did Sheryl Sandberg leave Google for Facebook?"
Quora labels itself as "your best source for knowledge." It is an online social media platform that allows users to ask questions, and then other members can answer those questions and gain notoriety within the community based on the accuracy of their information.
