Background: this guy was my manager when I was at FB. My day was similar, something in the realm of 10:30 to 6:30—hours are flexible, but there’s some accountability for meetings, and you generally want to overlap as much as possible with your coworkers.
Typically I would deal with emails, do code review (you can review pretty much anybody’s code if you want), write new code, do the weekly or bi-weekly release if it was my turn to be on call, sometimes pair-program, and of course enjoy the free food and facilities (arcade, gym).
The software development flow (task management, tooling, reviews, testing, deployment, monitoring, etc.) is all very well polished, and I miss it at Microsoft.
Confused by this. The flow is good at FB, but better and missed at MSFT? Or vice versa. Or they're both good?
Socially, it ends up being more like "someone who maintains and cares about this code should approve it" almost all of the time.
Btw, your day sounds like a day in a typical software company. During your interviews did you ask relevant (to the job) questions or usual "Google like" CS riddles?
Not a great day, all things considered, but.. free burrito.
I suspect some of the answers to your questions will vary depending on the org you are interested in (ie infra vs product). And also there's lots of FB engineers who frequent HN so I suspect you'd get answers if you had specific questions.