I'll attempt a serious, on-the-record answer. This is a question I get asked fairly frequently by interview candidates, so I've given it a bit of thought. For context, I'm a software engineer, and I've been at
The worst thing about working at Facebook for me has been oncall duty. Most engineering teams run complex, frequently modified software in production. Since things have a way of going wrong, teams have a rotating responsibility for responding to unanticipated emergencies. Since these can happen any time, day or night, and are of unknowable scope and severity, being oncall is a serious responsibility; many millions of users are affected every minute the site is broken.
My current team's rotation lasts for two weeks, and rolls around two to three times per year. For those two weeks, I don't leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have "one too many" at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on on the nightstand as I sleep. And yes, once or twice a year that phone does go off at some bizarre hour to rouse you from your slumber and go fight a fire in production.
While it can be satisfying to help get the site back in order when it's sick, it really is not for everyone. This part of the job just isn't fun for me; I find debugging under time pressure through a 3am haze stressful.
That said, I can't imagine any better way to preserve some of Facebook's most positive attributes: a willingness to change core pieces of foundation; short feedback loops between development and production; and freedom to experiment and take risks. Wanting to have all the fun ("hey, I get to write all this new code and see what it really does for real users, while I'm still young!") without the attendant consequences (actually being responsible for cleaning up the messes I make) has all the benefits that theft does relative to honest work. And having the team that writes the software responsible for fixing the problems the software causes alleviates a major cause of moral hazard at most other companies, where some other people are responsible for picking up after the ostensible A-team who is just responsible for writing their "brilliant" code.
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