Say No

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I joined Facebook when there were around a dozen engineers. There wasn’t any formal organizational structure back then but co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was unquestionably the head of engineering. He had built and deployed most of the critical technologies himself over the course of the prior two years. He was always around and happy to be involved in any technical discussion, which was great because very little of our deployment was standard by any stretch of the imagination. It was so early that the company had only just started using source control; apparently a month or two before I joined they would simply edit files live on the Harvard server and shout out what file they were changing to avoid conflicts. As a consequence, the culture of engineering when I joined was prone to frequent interruptions. Thankfully we were small enough that it wasn’t a major problem. Most of us were involved in every major change anyways back then. Six months later (with nearly double the engineers) when

Say No I joined Facebook when there were around a dozen engineers. There wasn’t any formal organizational structure back then but co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was unquestionably the head of engineering. He had built and deployed most of the critical technologies himself over the course of the prior two years. He was always around and happy to be involved in any technical discussion, which was great because very little of our deployment was standard by any stretch of the imagination. It was so early that the company had only just started using source control; apparently a month or two before I j

Say No

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