Level-up Engineering Knowledge Sharing: A Sneak Peek into Facebook’s Engineering Teams
Interview with Balázs Balázs, former Engineering Manager at Facebook about the knowledge sharing strategies he's used over the years with his engineering teams. You'll get tips, tricks and real stories from behind the scenes about how knowledge sharing works with real people, rather than how it should work in an ideal situation.
In this interview we're covering:
- Picking the right methods for sharing knowledge in your team
- The best knowledge sharing methods in engineering teams
- The rules of using documentation
- The best methods to help junior engineers grow
- Onboarding software engineers to your team
- Making time for knowledge sharing
- Tools for knowledge sharing in engineering teams
- Encouraging engineers to partake in knowledge sharing
- The key to Facebook's success in sharing knowledge
Excerpt from the interview:
"Facebook has offices all over the world and employees get to travel to other offices for free with business reasons. As it turns out, software engineers are very innovative when it comes to figuring out business reasons for free travel.
My team was based in London, and we worked with a team in New York for a while. We were struggling with effectively analyzing data. One of my engineers came up with the idea to fly our team to New York, and hold a data week, where the two teams analyze data together.
I'm pretty sure that the motivation was to get a free week in New York. Still, it was the most productive week we’d had for a long time. It took a lot of preparation, but people didn’t mind, because the traveling made it fun.
This is just an example; there are far more affordable ways to make knowledge sharing fun..."