Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early

I reported directly to Cory for a spell when I worked at Facebook. His management skills and guidance made a big impression on my newly-started career and he was undoubtedly one of the most talented managers I reported to at the company. Right now I&#x27;m working at a 10-person company and a few of his points really stood out to me:<p>&gt; Describe culture in ways that make people think and debate rather than universally agree.<p>Very subtle and probably pretty important. Facebook&#x27;s cultural values were constantly under debate and if nothing else it made every employee consider them.<p>&gt; We gathered together for end-of-week whiteboard sessions where we listed our most critical open tasks.<p>This is a neat idea. We do high-level daily syncs here, but this might be a neat way to help build accountability and inspire more collaboration on tasks.

Colour me disappointed. It&#x27;s like the last 50 years of management and organizational research never existed.<p>Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave right now. Great marketing for first round, though.

<i>Management is the first hard thing that is easy to get right early.</i><p>This is very true. I&#x27;ve seen a lot of very talented engineers struggle without management. The &quot;I don&#x27;t enter timesheets, and I work on my own problems because I&#x27;m a damn good engineer&quot; mindset didn&#x27;t scale when the upper management didn&#x27;t know how long things too to do, and couldn&#x27;t agree on or document priorities.<p>Despite the emphasis on &quot;We don&#x27;t have managers&quot;, management is needed. It&#x27;s as simple as rules of behavior.

Disappointed. Thought it was about solving hard technical problems first, not cultural. Figuring out how to crawl 100 million pages a day is certainly, etc. Rather than how to establish a good culture. Managing 20+ ppl is a GOOD problem to have b&#x2F;c it means u most likely raised lots of funding, or got tons of revenue already.

&gt; Describe culture in ways that make people think and debate rather than universally agree.<p>Great point. As Ben Horowitz compares Square with Amazon, you wouldn&#x27;t be sitting at a desk made of a door since Square highly values design and Amazon highly values frugality. Also, I can only imagine the discussions at Facebook with the focus on taking huge risk for the sake of innovating.<p>I guess his sentence also applies to people you would hire - everybody would universally like certain things about a culture, but if you&#x27;re more risk-averse, I guess you wouldn&#x27;t fit in as well at FB.

I was afraid that this was going to be a post on solving hard <i>technical</i> things early. Which is a terrible idea, because it&#x27;s basically making large bets on your future direction before you have any data about where you&#x27;re going.<p>But this is actually pretty sensible. People learn culture mostly by osmosis, and the bigger you are, the harder culture is to change. If your organization is kinda screwed up at 5 people, it&#x27;s reasonable to bet that growth will magnify the problems, making it pretty screwed up at 25, and a big ol&#x27; mess once you cross Dunbar&#x27;s number at around 125.

hiphopvm is an incredible example of his logic at work