webspiderus

yep

how do you feel about still having to use outlook because of concerns about a competitor that's not even doing social anymore? I've read FB SWEs be aghast about people uploading whiteboard photos to Google Photos to be searchable later, paranoid about Larry and Sergey poring over all the data while twirling their evil mustache.

Also, if impressing other people is not what you're optimizing for then you might not have a great trajectory at a company that's obsessed with i m p a c t and hallucinating metrics to measure it.

Some parts of working at FB as a SWE are awesome, some aren't, everyone's mileage certainly varies.

really, Picasa led to Google Photos as the previous photo product the company had ..

some of that team helped build the Google Photos app, but Google Photos was a product in its own right even before Bump joined the company and they were part of a (much) larger effort, of course.

The research fix may have been to train their data better but the blacklist of bad terms was as real of a product fix as it gets.

Well, to be fair they excluded high tens / low hundreds of potentially offensive terms from search before even launching and when this came out they just extended the list a little. Sometimes having product vision requires recognizing that the products you build come with limitations and potential for very real emotional reactions of very real human being users.

Sure, you can create a set of 'face templates' that may or not be linked to a profile, and then match against them as long as you have some meaningful way to use the matching templates without a profile.

unfortunately, it certainly doesn't seem like the company does this all the time. i got placed onto a team which has no bearing on my background experience whatsoever, and after approaching my tech lead and some HR people to continue the conversation, everyone else decided to agree that the 18 months guideline was "fair" and that the 20% projects were there to satisfy my need for interesting problems.

i had potential teams lined up (one of which I would've been allocated to initially, had they not hit their new grad hire cap), so it was certainly a very frustrating experience. perhaps they care more about established engineers than recent graduates?

that's weird, because my experience is exactly the opposite! I've spent about 4 months on my team so far, which has very little to do with my background, and after I realized just how bad the fit was, I started a conversation with my tech lead, his supervisors, and some HR people about moving to a team that would be a better fit (which had openings at the time).

3 weeks of conversations later, I was told that the 18 month rule was "fair" in everyone's opinion, and that if I'm really concerned about working on projects that are interesting to me, I should just find one to spend my 20% time on (easier said than done).

This is also not entirely accurate. I got my offer a good 5 months before I even knew which teams I had a chance to speak with before the allocation process, let alone before I knew which team I would be placed on.

I think this should also have the added effect of being overall faster, as doing lots of addition would be quicker than doing lots of multiplication (log notwithstanding).

As another sample, I'll say I'm far from feeling swindled. I was a bit disappointed that the publicly available ML class and its Stanford equivalent only differed in one optional discussion a week - but I certainly don't feel the time taken developing the class took away from the in person experience, and I do think Andrew Ng and the staff were more available for Stanford students than they were for those taking the class online (which I view as the justification for the Stanford tuition costs).

The cryptography class I'm taking this quarter is more to my liking in that aspect, as in addition to the video lectures (which I assume will make up the bulk of the public offering), there is another 2 hours of lecture and a discussion that cover additional material. In this kind of a set up, the added benefit for the Stanford students from an educational standpoint certainly seems more tangible.