Facebook at 10: How it grew from a social network to a social phenomenon
Growing offline and supporting the community
While the social network has grown rapidly, so too has the company. Facebook has offices located around the world, including in New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Japan, China, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Latin America, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK, France, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Ireland, and throughout North America.
Opening up multiple offices isn’t that surprising – all large corporations do it – but in Facebook’s case, it’s a bit different as all the offices are working on the same project — a online network dedicated to connecting as many people together. Unlike Zynga and many other companies, there’s only one real product at Facebook: Facebook.
We had an opportunity to speak with Serkan Piantino, Facebook’s site director for its New York office, who told us that although teams are spread out throughout the world, everyone still has a focus on creating the best Facebook possible.
Tech company satellite offices are often run like individual startups, managing their respective products – how does that work at Facebook, where everything that they touch could impact other teams’ products? Piantino says that it boils down to where the central thinking resides — and that can depend on a variety of factors such as the personality of the team, the environment, and other factors.
Facebook New York was the company’s first engineering office to be established away from the West Coast and is run by Paintino. Opened in 2012, it has produced quite a few products that many people would be familiar with, including EdgeRank, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm which was replaced in 2013. The team also produced the new Timeline that rolled out last year.
Piantino, a long-time Facebook employee, was tapped for this role because he saw a need for the company to establish an outpost in America’s largest city by population, and one with a blossoming technology community. As the company seeks to attract top talent to add to its ranks, it’s going to need to make it possible for them to not have to upheave their lives in order to work there. Piantino says that the New York City area is the center of so many industries and is a “great crucible for the type of engineering that we do: iterative, collaborative, etc.”
Facebook’s products are so integrated with each other that they cannot be siloed into one specific office, which is why only the central thinking behind it is what’s assigned to an office. An example is Graph Search — this product was unveiled in 2013 to become the a social media search engine. The team behind it wasn’t based in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, or even in Menlo Park. It was created in London, but Piantino’s engineering team had some exposure to it.
Some times it makes perfect sense where to assign product thinking. Facebook New York is tasked with working on location, advertising efforts, photos, infrastructure, and other things. In other cases, certain other products may be better assigned to other parts of the world — perhaps sticker development would be in the Los Angeles office while server infrastructure would be done at its Prineville, Oregon facility.
Facebook wants to help bolster the technology ecosystems in the cities in which it opens offices. One of the things that Piantino was adamant about was the company’s role in helping to grow the community in NYC. He says that the office has been home to hackathons and events, formed partnerships with the likes of CS4HS NYC (an annual grant program started by Google), Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson and others to help promote computer science courses in the classroom.
Piantino believes that since Facebook is going to be around for a while, it’s going to put forth the effort to help make the city better. And while much of our focus here has been on New York City, this philosophy has also been demonstrated in the company’s other offices around the world.
A big part of Facebook’s culture is its ‘hacker’ approach, something that you’d see demonstrated via messages plastered all over its offices — it even has a path in its Menlo Park headquarters called Hacker Way. But it’s more than just a tag line, as the company practices what it preaches. Every year there are multiple hackathons put on by Facebook. Most are internal, but there are some in which it invites others to participate, such as for university students in 2012, Windows 8, and for the photography world when it teamed up with Aviary for the fourth annual Photo Hack Day.
Facebook has also given back to the technology community. It has been the backer behind the Open Academy, a program helping computer science students become better software engineers. The company has also contributed to the open source framework.
The biggest contribution is the Open Compute Project that Facebook launched three years ago. This initiative encourages participating companies to improve infrastructure, hardware, and server performance by sharing ideas with one another.
Other open source efforts include Presto, its homegrown SQL query engine,Origami, a free design prototype for the Quartz composer, and more spread across infrastructure, mobile, and Web.
Next: The Facebook Mafia?