The quote is from “Howl”
by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.
I'm speaking specifically to this quote which seems to have drawn from it and hardly seems separable in this case. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” As if the FAANG-type companies are somehow the centerpieces of modern intellectual activity, which is such a tech industry thing to assume.
For what it's worth, I don't work in the "tech industry" exactly.
Rather than being the centerpiece of intellectual activity as you put it, it would seem the vast majority of the "best minds" are employed in the field. Rather than more necessary pursuits, more people are applied to making us click advertisements and applied to the surveillance of our browsing habits and other activities. It's not just the FAANG companies. The city I live in is flooded with small ad-tech startups who are going to "revolutionize the world". On top of that, to hear the ad-tech teams are probably the only teams at FB that are working a crazy schedule speaks loudly. Very loudly.
And many people in ads are certainly not working that schedule, and discourage those around them from doing so since it slows everything down long term.
"Zero passion 10am-4pm" doesn't necessarily describe not working hard. You can only do three to five hours of sustainable deep work a day unless you're a freak of nature. Usually anyone saying they do more just pads it out with breaks on Hacker News or Facebook, or has failed to automate the repetitive work in their job. A focused, organized engineer can pretty well exhaust their sustainable capacity plus do their overhead in 10am-4pm. As for zero passion, why do you need passion? And what does it have to do with not slacking?
Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.
The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.
Slacking means doing the minimum required to get by. It doesn’t mean doing nothing and getting fired. I was replying to the parent comment idea that engineers at Facebook work hard because in my experience they do not. Which is fine. Slacking in many ways is optimal.
Yes, passion and slacking are not mutually exclusive. I am very passionate about the industry I'm in and the importance of the type of work I do, but....
I met two FB engineers a few years back. They seemed average, at most. But one quality stuck out (we spent half a day together at an event): They seemed to be excellent at following company rules.
That's what top schools teach you - conform 100% to the assignment requirements or there is no A/A+ for you. Also, most companies "get what they measure", so figuring out which metrics are visible and preferred is the way to go in large corps.
What does 10-4 have to do with anything? If you don't have significant equity, putting in more hours on a daily basis just makes you a tool in my opinion. There is more to life..
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