Bad Tests Are Worse Than Product Issues with Dan Abramov

Mar 3, 2020

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We start this episode by Dan explaining to me how he landed a job at Facebook. Turns out that Dan, who is originally from Russia, wasn't so interested in working at a large cooperation at first. Only after he worked on React for a while he thought about this possibility because he thought it would be nice to work together with the people he already knew from his open-source collaborations.

So, one day, at a conference, he run into a collaborator, who ask him if he wants to interview, right there at the conference for a Facebook position.

Dan said yes, and the rest is history.

Well, not so fast. Obviously, I ask him all about his personal interview experience - and in addition, about what he expects from in a successful candidate when he is interviewing himself.

To my surprise, Dan explain that there are quite different types of interviews at Facebook for front-end and backend engineers. He says, the front-end ones are less computer sciency. So, he did that one.

Another topic I really enjoyed talking with Dan about, were the software engineering practices at Facebook. I still envision Facebook as this hacker place following the hacker mantra: "Move fast and break things." But Dan tells me that things have changed. At least slightly, and that they have now more rigor in their process. He also tells me about why at Facebook they prefer integration instead of unit tests, and how their processes are designed to empower engineers.

Dan tells me that Facebook has no strict code ownership, and that he thinks that's such an empowering move. He also explains that engineers have a lot of freedom and rights, but they also have to take the responsibility for their actions.

Another topic we deep-dive into is Dan's new JavaScript course, called JustJavaScript. He explains to me why he started to work on this course, and also about the new teaching concepts that he uses and experiments with to correct invalid mental models that intermediate developers have about JavaScript.

Finally, he talks about React's future - especially the new concurrency support.

Well, yeah, I really enjoyed talking with Dan, and I can say that talking to him definitely satisfied my curiosity a bit - at least for today.