Refactoring Podcast Facebook, Dropbox & Modern Engineering Teams 📈 — with Aditya Agarwal
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May 24, 2024 Former Facebook employee #10 and Dropbox CTO, Aditya Agarwal, discusses early stage Facebook, differences with Dropbox, challenges of hyper growth, future of engineering management, and the value of being a generalist. Talks about finding company culture, technical CTO role, and the innovative environment at South Park Commons.
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How Aditya Joined Facebook
- Aditya joined Facebook from Oracle after meeting Mark and became one of the first full-time engineers tasked with building core systems.
- Early Facebook prioritized first-principles thinking over prior experience and pattern-matching.
Speed Over Conventional Process
- Early Facebook shipped without unit tests to maximize iteration speed and optimized for rapid recovery over prevention.
- They accepted making mistakes as long as they could fix them faster than competitors.
Learning By Doing At Facebook
- Mark asked Aditya to build a search engine despite no prior search experience and encouraged him to learn on the job.
- Aditya learned this established a belief that engineering is a generalist skill focused on core principles, not languages.