The Fugue

May was a busy month, and not in a “fast-track-to-finish-dissertation” kind of way. I zoomed to Florida for a family reunion, then zoomed across the country to San Fransisco for an interview at Facebook, then the next week zoomed over to NYC for an interview at Google in their Manhattan office. Then, lest the last week in May should feel left out, I zoomed up to Utah for an interview with AST. As May drew to a close and June entered the scene, I found myself with four offers of employment, including Google and Facebook (Boeing just did a phone interview). Wow! I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Now dear casual reader from yonder internet, I know what you’re thinking. It’s exactly what I would have thought a few months ago. “No-brainer. Work for Google.” But I found myself perplexingly unable to decide between Google and Facebook. It didn’t help that Google was in New York and my wife wasn’t keen on New York, and that the Google position offered was a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) which is, to grossly oversimplify, a glorified systems programmer. Not faced with an attractive competing offer like the one from Facebook, I’d have been headed to Manhattan to be an SRE in a heartbeat. But as it was I was torn.

I applied for the Facebook position on a whim. I had been on Facebook only a month or two and I noticed an ad on the side about how they were hiring. I clicked on it, looked at their careers page for awhile, liked what I saw, and decided to apply for a Machine Learning Engineer position. I came home and told my wife, who was instantly convinced I had lost my marbles. She is not a programmer, so how could she know that although I’m not a big social network guy and had only grudgingly signed up for Facebook a month or two before, I could be intensely interested in working on such a site.

Theoretically speaking, I love networks, and that includes graph theory, computer networks, and yes even social networks. I knew Facebook problems would be about networks and about scale. They would be hard problems. They would be fun problems. The perks page looked good, and I think it would be fun to be in Silicon Valley. So I applied.

Facebook called and had me do one of their pre-screening programming puzzles (you can enjoy them even if you’re not being considered for employment). I got a little obsessed and did 3 over the better part of a week. Then there was a phone screen, and then the invitation to interview on-site (This all happened over several weeks time, of course, and more or less in parallel with a similar process for Google, except that Google didn’t have a puzzle step).

I’ll skip to the end, lest I bore you. Facebook continually impressed me the more I interacted with them and the more I saw. I was similarily surprised at how enjoyable, useful, and private Facebook was as a user since I had signed up. Facebook skyrocketed from just another one of those pesky social networking sites to a daily habit and potential employer in a few short months.

Still, it can’t compare to Google right? Well, actually they try very hard to compare to Google. It’s quite obvious that most of the perks and benefits are directly inspired by Google’s, compensation was comparable, and I found that they have smart people working on hard problems just like Google. In addition, there are two things they have that Google doesn’t anymore: they’re still small and they’re pre-IPO. Of course, Google has more smart people and Facebook is more-or-less a one-trick pony. Publishing would probably be easier at Google. Here I go again… I was back and forth for a solid week. It drove me and my wife crazy. I talked to people at Facebook who had been at Google (at my request). I talked to people at Google. I talked to friends and family. I tried every decision making trick in the book. Both sides sweetened the deal a bit to make it easier for me to choose them (Google switched the offer to be in Mountain View as a Software Engineer, Facebook offered a bit more money). I just couldn’t make up my mind.

Well finally I did, and this is what it came down to: time off, impact, and stock.

Although both were generous with paid time off (PTO) compared to most US companies, Facebook offered more, especially in the area of paternity leave (my wife is expecting). As much as I anticipate enjoying either job, I enjoy being at home or on vacation with my family more.

Facebook is small—they’re hiring like crazy because they’re smaller than they want to be. Because of that, I feel that my wacky background in system administration, agileish pragmatic open-source programming, and high-brow CS theory and research would be more broadly brought to bear than in some team at Google responsible for some small part of one of the many wonderful Google products. I would have more impact—not on the world at large but on the thing that we are doing. Then there’s also the draw of quick seniority in a small and fast-growing company.

Finally, although both companies offered restricted stock units to vest over 4 years, Facebook’s offering has the potential to be worth several times what Google’s offering would. Or, Facebook’s offering could be worth about what Google’s would be. Or, in a really really bad scenario, worth less. I ran the numbers, pulled some probabilities out of the air, and decided at least as good as Google and possibly much better was the most likely scenario. Since they’re RSUs and not options, the only risk is in making less extra cash than I would have made at the other company. Google was the safer choice, Facebook the more potentially lucrative. I tried to leave this out of the decision making process as much as possible, because I didn’t want my decision to be about money. I wanted it to be about the work. But I have to admit there’s a draw here.

I believe more strongly now than I did before that Google is a fantastic place to work, and I would reapply there in a heartbeat down the road if my path takes me there. I wish I could just be in two places at once and work at both, at least long enough to know for sure where I really want to be. But life doesn’t work that way. I’ve decided to take the path that seems the most exciting and unsure out of a sheer sense of adventure. Google will be there in a few years if I want to reapply, and they may even want me then as they do now. The time to really make a difference at Facebook is now, while they’re small.

You may think I’m crazy to turn down Google. I think that sometimes too. One thing is certain: the next few years will be an amazing adventure that I never dared dream would come to me. Thanks to everyone who has helped me to this point in my life, especially my loving and supportive wife and kids, my parents who taught me to love learning, and my brothers who “let” me hog the computer when we were young (ha!).

Well, I think I have a dissertation lying around here that needs finishing.

When it comes down to it, the secret of productivity is to just do it. In our line of work, it’s not as simple as you’re either chopping a tree down or you’re not. So it’s easy to get distracted on tangential or unrelated tasks and trains of thought. If I didn’t know people personally who somehow manage to avoid this trap most of the time, I’d think it was impossible. For the rest of us, I present a nifty trick.

Grab two condiment bowls, shot glasses, rolls of tape, whatever. Now grab some glass “stones”, some pebbles, some M&Ms, whatever. The former are buckets. The latter are tokens. Put all the tokens into bucket A.

Now for every hour you work (really), move a token from bucket A to bucket B. Do this every day for a week and keep a tally. This will show you how much time you are working and how much time you are squandering. It will be depressing. Don’t let your boss see.

Now decide how much time you will permit yourself to squander. You might feel that should be 0, or maybe you feel you deserve an hour a day. No matter what you feel it should be, make a realistic goal at this point. It’s just like physical excercise you know. So figure out the ratio between work time and play time. 4:1 makes the math convenient, so let’s take that ratio. Now, for every hour you work you bring a token from A to B. It represents 4 quarter hours in bucket A, but only 1 quarter hour in bucket B. That is, you get to play 15 minutes for every token you have in B. Think of it as a bank account. If you don’t got no tokens in the play bucket, you work. If you do, you might keep working because you’re in the zone. But you might play, because you have the tokens to do so. So play, and play guilt free. The guilt-free recreation is as important as anything here. If you can’t bring yourself to give yourself permission to play at work, then split it up between stuff you hate and stuff you enjoy. You do enjoy some aspect of your work, no?

This is just a slightly-modified token bucket scheme, like that used in network shaping (e.g. Quality of Service). When I first came up with it, I was inspired by “token economics” which was suggested for potty training. When I had the system going for a day or two, and was working on a QoS presentation, it dawned on me that what I had here was a token bucket. That makes it all the more cool.

What good is it? I think it’s an effective tool for a couple of reasons: it’s simple, unobtrusive, and authoritative. It keeps you accountable, both to it and to yourself, and to anyone who looks on that knows what it means. It doesn’t nag you, nor is it susceptible to your rationalizations. It’s easy to reset or set aside when it doesn’t apply (when a deadline looms and you don’t have time to play at all). The only habit you need to get into is checking your account before playing. But if you fail to remember, you can always adjust the totals retroactively, in which case although you may have overdrawn you will still see the state of affairs, and have an opportunity for introspection.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my play bucket just ran out.