Was an eye-opening experience in several ways.
- I experienced the upsides of well-funded and large-latitude orgs. Got a first (& perhaps best to date) taste of truly solid, testing infrastructure, release engineering, and dev workflow tooling.
Became a pretty big fan of Phabricator's approach to code review & essential trunk-based development.
- Saw the dangers of "growth/engagement focus" and over-reliance on user data up close as well.
Was on the Messages/Messenger team before & during the launch of the fixed-length sidebar and ticker design. (A few weeks out of a UX design class the semester before,) I correctly identified several likely severe user concerns before launch and suggested remedies (that were all implemented eventually, presumably after others after suggested them) but was told intuition & qualitative feedback was meaningless and whether people used it more was all that really mattered.
- Found that in general, that my narrow job as a software engineer was unexciting to me vs the many interesting product & socio-technical things going on in the relatively open/transparent organization (then about 600 full-time engineers)
- In the end, sans offer, I didn't move to SF right after college as I likely otherwise would have. And I suspect I am a very different person for that reason.
This unremarkable photo was taken in Building 1601 in Palo Alto around 1am during a Hackathon & seems to be the only photo from the summer I still have access to
