Right, I could work at Facebook, where they seem to be betting the company on an idea that Mark Zuckerberg got after watching a sci-fi movie -- that I'm not sure anyone is remotely excited about.

That can’t possibly be true. Facebook can’t be customer-obsessed in the same way Amazon is, because Facebook’s customers are advertisers. This puts Facebook’s product teams and engineers in a position where they often have to avoid doing what would be best for their users in order to satisfy the needs of advertisers.

Amazon is largely free of this kind of conflict: Customers and users are the same group of people.

I'm suprised to hear Facebook is this way. Almost everyone in Facebook that I know is chilling 50% of the time :)

I'm at FB currently, maybe it's a problem on other orgs but my experience has been very good (2 years). It's not perfect but I haven't heard horror stories like this, and my manager and pms are happy to let eng set project estimates.

Hey so I have to ask, do you actually like what you do? I don't mean that in a rude way or anything. I just honestly don't know what people do at FB anymore. Do you work on the core platform or are you working on Mark's new idea?

Yoooo, not offended at all. I work on the backend that powers navigation. I do like what I do. Of course it’s not as sexy as a 0-1 project at a startup but there are plenty of interesting problems and I really like the people. What makes me happy might not work for others of course. There are always trade offs

not really and happy to help to disprove your misconceptions

It's really not