Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

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Man, I can't imagine working in such an environment. It feels so detached to normal human interaction.

Couple questions as I don't (and largely have no intention to) work in Silicon Valley:

- Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the employee to switch teams?

- > Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change

Maybe someone who works at FB can clear this up but how does this work? A bot opens a ticket, dev attempts to change a dropdown field and another bot decides whether to revert or not? Or is there a human involved, and do they have override powers?

> Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the employee to switch teams?

1. This allows internal transfers to avoid reinterviewing. I think many would agree that going through the same interview process is not productive, especially with the types of interview questions asked at FB (predominantly Leetcode style). This reflects FB's standard hiring process for engineers, where engineers are hired into a "general" pipeline and not to a specific team, with the implication that once they pass FB's interview, they are qualified to work on basically any team. The performance requirements are there so that engineers cannot just change teams every time they perform poorly.

2. I think the incentives are intended such that the very worst case for a manager is being forced to fire an employee for poor performance -- it means the manager was unable to help the employee improve their performance. Having them transfer within the company reflects much better on the manager. In practice, this may not be true in all situations.

In the general / common case, this system is great for engineers in terms of internal mobility.

FB uses a Tasks tool. A task can have an owner, subscribers, tags, blocker/dependent relationship to other tasks, can be associated with one or more code diffs, etc. Bots have internal accounts in the same way human employees do, and for the most part any human or bot can make a drive-by change to any of your tasks.

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