Support roles often pay peanuts, but in tech companies they do expose you to the workings of your product in a way that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. That seems to be one of the key reasons Facebook makes all its senior engineers perform “oncall duty”, where they fix urgent problems with the site, for a two-week period multiple times a year.
Code picture from Shutterstock
A Quora post on working at Facebook highlighted the unavoidable duty as one of the worse aspects of the job. Being “on call” is a challenge most tech workers face at some point, but Facebook engineer Keith Adams notes that despite the challenges, it is ultimately helpful to developers and the company:
Wanting to have all the fun (“hey, I get to write all this new code and see what it really does for real users, while I’m still young!”) without the attendant consequences (actually being responsible for cleaning up the messes I make) has all the benefits that theft does relative to honest work. And having the team that writes the software responsible for fixing the problems the software causes alleviates a major cause of moral hazard at most other companies, where some other people are responsible for picking up after the ostensible A-team who is just responsible for writing their “brilliant” code.
Would you like to see that approach replicated in your organisation? Tell us in the comments.
Quora [via Business Insider]
Comments
2 responses to “Facebook Forces Senior Staff To Work Support And Fix Code: Is That Worth Copying?”
This is a fantastic strategy and one that should be emulated in some form at every sizable organisation. A senior or leadership team completely divorced from the actual operations of the organisation cannot possibly be well placed to make strategic decisions about those operations.
Those organisations that either place their management team on the frontline or take input from the trenches when making strategic decisions inevitably end up with a more productive workforce.
Wait, FB has support? I thought they only had FAQ’s that were utterly useless and never even came close to the problems you were having? Where do they hide this so called “support”?