在 Quora 的工作體驗是怎樣的？

01-12

轉自quora:I joined Quora in mid-August of 2010, and my eight months thus far have been nothing short of awesome.

It constantly amazes me that I get to walk into work every day to a team of the most talented individuals that I"ve ever worked with. I love working on and thinking about the product, and as an engineer, my opportunities so far to work closely with Rebekah Cox and Joel Lewenstein have been great experiences. They"re both good at articulating their product design philosophies, and I"ve had a blast brainstorming ideas with them, iterating with them on product features, and picking up good design principles along the way. My engineering design choices typically get simpler and more refined after discussing the tradeoffs with talented folks like Kevin Der and Shreyes Seshasai, and from recently working with Tracy Chou, I"ve found that she does not cease to impress with her knowledge of machine learning. Both of the founders, Charlie Cheever and Adam D"Angelo, always seem to have keen product insights, and it"s been extremely helpful getting their input on product direction. I haven"t yet had a chance to work as closely with others on the team, but from chatting with them around the office, doing their code reviews, and hearing about their work at our weekly team meetings, I"m definitely looking forward to chances to work with them on future projects.

One part of Quora"s organizational structure that makes these opportunities possible is that who"s working with whom varies from project to project as opposed to revolving around clearly delineated teams. One concrete consequence of this project-based structure is that there"s a much larger opportunity to collaborate and work with different team members than I"ve found at other companies. Projects during my previous jobs at Google and Ooyala were typically organized around relatively fixed engineering sub-teams, so that the analytics team would, for instance, work almost exclusively on analytics projects. I"ve found the team-centric structure at other companies to be less fun because it reduces opportunities to work with talented members on other teams and to work on different flavors of projects, even though the approach might be more efficient at concentrating focus on specific areas.

In terms of the team culture, I share Shu Uesugi"s sentiments in his post On Continually Improving that one of the best parts of working at Quora is that everyone on the team shares the philosophy of continually learning and improving. One of Adam"s pitches to me when I was interviewing was that the team tries hard to optimize for learning, and this notion manifests in many of the things that we do. Engineers present the inner workings of core abstractions or the design motivations behind various feature implementations at weekly dev meetings and tech talks. More recently, I shared some demos on productivity tools that I use and focused on Emacs extensions like Magit, Google Tags, and Anything, since a majority of the current dev team uses Emacs. A bunch of us in the office also love to read, and we"ve been sharing interesting books and recommendations from our own personal libraries, which also reflects the shared culture of learning. We"re mindful that since we"re all in this for the long haul, taking time to invest in ourselves to optimize for the longer-term is critical for success.

Quora"s the first place I"ve worked at that uses continuous deployment, where pushed commits go immediately to production, and my experience with continuous deployment thus far has convinced me that, if at all possible, this is the way to develop web software. It"s a stark contrast to my previous experiences at Google and Ooyala, where weekly or at best semi-weekly pushes were the norm, and it"s a workflow that"s hard to fully appreciate until I actually tried it. The tight feedback loop is immensely gratifying and makes it easier and faster to continuously iterate on the product; I"m much more incentivized to build things incrementally than I would otherwise. It also eliminates coordination overhead: cross-push migration plans become significantly more feasible and less discouraging when I"m in control of my own pushes than when I need to coordinate with a push engineer on a weekly push cycle. It"s true that we"ll occasionally push bugs, but a healthy suite of unit tests mitigates some of those risks, and the much faster development cycle more than compensates for them. It also helps that we have engineers like Albert Sheu who work hard to shave even just a minute or two off everyone"s push times, and we"ll definitely try to maintain continuous deployment as long as we can.

I"m also excited that there doesn"t seem to be dearth of challenging problems in sight. Whereas on Google"s Search Quality team, I worked on the hard task of helping users find the right query or the right result, at Quora, there"s the similarly hard problem of finding and ranking the most interesting questions and answers to show to a user. But unlike web search, we also have control over the inputs to the system and need to design the right product to incentivize users to take actions that improve the quality of the content on the site, and that"s a hard problem as well.

As the team grows, the number of ongoing projects and potential project ideas also increase. We"ve held and will likely continue to hold One-Hour Project Days, where everyone on the team spends each of eight hours working on a series of one-hour long tasks, to help motivate us to finish up any code refactoring, small product polishes, or bug fixes that improve the code base or the site but that may have been deferred in favor of larger projects. Meeting notes from small group meetings circulated on the team mailing lists help to keep everyone abreast of what different team members are working on and what product directions we"re taking.

We all work fairly hard, and we"ve been doing things like occasional card or board games, movie nights, random Instagramming around the office, Cookie Fridays, and ad-hoc Friday happy hours to keep our environment fun.

Of course, no workplace is perfect, and Quora still has its own share of areas where I think that we could do better. But given our team culture of continual improvement, I"m confident that we have the right attitude to move in the right direction.

If this environment appeals to you, we"re always on the lookout for new engineers and product designers:

Quora (company): What is it like to work at Quora?