10 Employees Talk About Working At Facebook And It Doesn't Sound All That Pretty

Facebook has often been regarded as one of the best places to work in the tech industry. After all, the company's interns make $25,000 more than the average citizen. And famously, employees on Glassdoor have voted Facebook the No. 1 company to work for overall.

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Not bad, right?

Not really, as according to some past and present Facebook employees, in a number of open threads on Quora.

Engineers, software developers, and anonymous sources who have spent time at Facebook discuss what they liked least about their experiences at the company.

To be clear, we're not saying these complaints represent the average experience. These are just the opinions of a small number of people. Every large company has its detractors, including Facebook.

1. For six weeks out of the year, I'm on 24/7 on-call duty

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During on-call duty, engineers are responsible for keeping the service up and running, come what may.

"For those weeks I don't leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have 'one too many' at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on the nightstand as I sleep."

¡ªKeith Adams, Facebook engineer.

2. Majority of management has little focus on creating a team

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Facebook's "make an impact" mantra makes the entire company's workforce focus only on personal wins, not on the success of the team as a whole, according to one anonymous former Facebook employee.

"There is very little value placed on a manager that has the ability to motivate the masses. This emphasis is also placed on the manager to be an individual contributor as well. The fact that you have people reporting to you seems to be just be something there, rather than your main responsibility," this employee says.

"While I would love to say that my manager(s) were the only ones who struggled with leadership, it's simply not true. Majority of the leaders there do. They are so focused on themselves and what should be tertiary issues of politics and who likes who, little time is focused on the people."

3. The wall does not exist at Facebook

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"At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one, which ends up with a professional workspace," says a Facebook engineer who chose to remain anonymous on Quora.

Because the culture of Facebook implicitly encourages employees to "be themselves," the company lacks the "professionalism" found at other firms, the engineer says.

4. Knowing that you're part of a large company trying to act like a young one

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One ex-employee says that even though Facebook is a huge tech company, it still tries to act like a young startup. "This is kind of like an Adam Sandler movie where he's old but wants to act like a teenager. Awkward," the former employee says.

5. Forget the free food and drinks ¡ª the workplace is awful

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"When you have huge rooms filled with rows and rows of picnic style tables with people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with six inches of separation and zero privacy, I am sorry ... That's how you keep cattle in the pen, not high-quality talent earning low-to mid-six figures."

6. Zuck and Sheryl imposing a 'holier than thou' attitude

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Referring to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook employee complains the two spend way too much time on "extra-curricular activities" (hint: "Lean In") and copying off the competition (i.e., Poke, which bears a resemblance to Snapchat.)

7. I've seen decisions being made by interns

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Philip Su, a software engineer at Facebook, published "Ten Things I Hate About Working At Facebook" on his personal blog last year in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to write about the things that separate Facebook from so many other companies.

"I¡¯ve seen decisions being made by lone engineers. Or an engineer and a designer over lunch. Or by interns," he writes. "All without telling their managers, even. This sort of autonomous decision-making suggests a complete lack of understanding of how corporations are supposed to work."

Su writes sarcastically (though we can't imagine the above scenario would work in corporations across the board), and his post provides an entertaining look at the inner workings of Facebook culture.

Of course, Su admits the politics are ultimately what creates the dynamism and drama that make work worthwhile in any company; Facebook not excluded."Without these, it¡¯s just code, code, code. Ship, ship, ship. I get tired just thinking about it."

8. Ungodly amounts of email from internal communications, 1,600 or more a day

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A former Facebook employee named Thomas Moore outlines a few grievances he had about working for the company. He says he received 1,600 or more pieces of internal communication a day.

Moore added that he doesn't like the "pseudo celebrity status of saying you work/worked for Facebook; I truly miss the days when people responded with 'Facebook? what is that?'"

9. You can never really leave work, even when you're on vacation

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Sunayana Sen, who worked for Facebook India, says that even when you're not at work, you're constantly getting pinged about it.

"Since there are Facebook groups for every team/workflow/project, notifications never end & you can never really leave work. Even when you're on vacation," she says.

10. There is not a truly functional infrastructure

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Employees say that trying to figure out how to do cool things with a team of 4,000 people is much harder than doing them with a team of 500. "We're growing so fast and have never emphasized organization, polish, or stability."