10 Worst Things About Working At Facebook

Bangalore: Facebook, world’s largest social networking company, has been regarded as one of the best places to work.

Glassdoor, the career site recently ranked the 50 best companies based on employee reviews and corporate data it collected. Facebook emerged as the best company to work for. The 28 reviews on Glassdoor found that Facebook pays its average intern $5,602 per month, more than what average U.S. citizen makes.

However, some Facebook employees, both past and present, in an open thread on Quora, divulged the details about the worst things about working for the social network. Read on to know 10 awful things about working at Facebook as compiled by Business Insider.

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

Every year, for six weeks, Facebook puts engineers on on-call duty; where they 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 on the nightstand as I sleep." - Keith Adams, Facebook engineer.

#9 "The wall does not exist at Facebook."

Most of the companies place some sort of wall between employees to give them some personal space, but at Facebook the wall does not exist.  "At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one, which ends up with a professional workspace," says an anonymous Facebook engineer 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.

#8 "There is not a truly functional infrastructure."

Facebook, though started in the dormitory at Harvard University, has now grown into a huge company. Employees complain that infrastructure at social giant is not proper. They 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."

#7 "The complete lack of focus on my team."

"On the last day of my internship, the team decided that it was not worth completely rewriting the project," a former Facebook intern admitted on Quora, after spending all of his time at the company redesigning and coding said project.

"If a more clear vision of the future of the product had been communicated to the team, I think I could have made many improvements to it, and impacted the company in a more positive way."

#6 "It was probably my worst professional experience to date."

"As a contractor and back fill for someone on maternity leave, I was temporarily assigned as an admin with very little guidance or support, serving two of the worst leaders I've ever interacted with," claimed an anonymous former employee.

#5 "Forget the free food and drinks - the workplace is awful."

This one anonymous Facebook employee takes on the company’s workplace arrangement that makes you forget about perks like free food and drink. "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."

#4 On Zuck and Sheryl

In reference to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, an employee complains that the two spend way too much time on "extracurricular activities" (hint: "Lean In") and copying off the competition (like Poke, which bears a resemblance to Snapchat).

#3 "I've seen decisions being made by interns."

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."

#2 "Instructions were not clear, everything was a guessing game, and I was immediately set up to fail."

One former intern at Facebook says that the instructions from the team leads about the work were not clear. All that an intern can do is guess about what work their leader expects from them, ultimately ending up with half finished or wrong work.  The Quora post says, “After being put on a rigorous 10-day performance plan, one former employee said his team didn't even bother to give him feedback.  At that point, I quit on the spot."

#1 "Knowing that you are part of an overhyped public company."

Facebook, which was "supposed to be valued at over $200 billion by now, had a dismal public offering that left many employees feeling totally helpless as they saw the value of their stock collapse," an anonymous source wrote on Quora