I left Facebook six weeks ago, after working there for nearly four years. Working at Facebook is like working in a bubble.
The company, like its peers in the tech industry, is highly effective at distributing everything from technology to food on-demand to make employees more efficient. So reentering the real world has afforded me the chance to observe many trends that have been happening gradually over the past several years all at once.
The reactions of an “outsider” may pose some interesting business and productivity opportunities.
First, since I last was on the outside, subscription has become the default model for buying software, and the lines between software and services has meaningfully blurred. This is great in cases where you trust the provider to keep updating the software well. But it is less ideal when you don’t have the same faith. One net effect of this is that it is becoming increasingly important for software developers to build products that users trust will continue to improve rapidly over time.
The first two pieces of software I installed on my new laptop after leaving Facebook were Microsoft Excel and Photoshop. Years ago, I paid individually for each for them as one-off versions of code and functionality. I knew what I was buying and the price I was paying, and knew that I would have to pay again when the publisher produced a meaningfully better version that I would want to upgrade. This time around both Adobe and Microsoft heavily pushed me to instead pay them a few dollars a month for their services.
In the case of Photoshop I was thrilled about this. I would much rather pay monthly for the software and Adobe’s stream of ongoing improvements. Photoshop costs $120 a year at the monthly subscription rate. Since that’s roughly the same as buying a new license to a one-off version of the software every two years, the subscription seems like a fine deal. I also appreciate it being bundled via an Adobe dashboard which provides access to other integrated programs like Lightroom.
But I wasn’t so happy to pay the same subscription price for Microsoft Excel as part of Office 365. I love Excel. I think it is the greatest program ever made; however, I don’t trust Microsoft to actually improve Excel in a way I want. Since I don’t expect I will want a new version of Excel every year or two, the subscription ends up being more expensive than a traditional license.
Ultimately, I happily signed up for the Adobe subscription, and found a way to buy a one-off license to Office 2011, whose version of Excel suits me just fine despite being now more than three years old. The fact that I refused to buy a Office subscription was a little surprising even to me, given how much I use Excel. But the new business model comes with new expectations.
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Second, it is surprisingly easy to order phones online, but activation and service are still annoying. At Facebook phones were commodities. You asked for what you needed and basically instantly got it, all ready to go with the help of an awesome IT team. Based on terrible memories of Verizon and AT&T stores, I dreaded the task of getting and activating my own phone.
But over the last several years, the process around ordering a phone has clearly improved. I wanted an Android phone and quickly breezed by a RadioShack to look at models. I ordered what I wanted from AT&T online and the phone arrived the next day. It was a wonderful experience.
Dealing with service has not been as pleasant. Choosing a plan was hard. They are opaque and complicated with weird minimum commitments to maximize profits. It took me an extra day to get my line up and running because of some weird credit card authorization issue that was not well handled. I then got into a crazy situation with international roaming that resulted in my phone getting shut down when I returned to the US.
In short, buying phone service is an area ripe for disruption, at least from a consumer experience perspective, all the more so because commerce has become so easy.
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Third, tools and services for quickly building and deploying apps and websites have dramatically improved in the last several years; as a result, it is faster than ever to get meaningful software projects up and running.
This, in some ways, is to be expected. Things like Github, Amazon Web Services, Engine Yard and Heroku, were growing when I joined Facebook; however, it feels different now. You can now create and scale services that would have been extremely hard to build in the blink of an eye.
This seems like a real net positive for the world and helps explain why there are so many startups. It also removes some of the classic advantages big companies have had.
Don’t get me wrong; there are parts of the technology ecosystem where a Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other tech giants have built unfathomable advantages. But the cost and time associated with building technology to meaningful scale is rapidly approaching zero. The technology playing field is leveling fast and you see this reality reflected constantly in the app stores. I only expect this trend to intensify.
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Fourth, I underestimated the benefits of a corporate campus that reduces time-spent traveling between meetings and procuring food and services, among other things.
While I worked at Facebook, I had one big tax on time—a roughly 45 minute commute from San Francisco to Menlo Park every day. What I didn’t appreciate is the time I saved moving between activities.
At Facebook, my meetings, the gym and food were all within a one or two minute walk. Now, my gym is a few minutes ride away from where I am working. Food requires leaving a building. These little bits of friction add up quickly.
While a high-traffic commute can feel like a soul-crushing waste of time, I have to admit that I probably am not saving a meaningful amount of travel time staying in San Francisco, where instead I am dealing with piecemeal bit-by-bit friction among various activities that were once all in the same place.
Something similar applies to scheduling meetings. Within a company, calendars are often shared and there’s a convention around meeting lengths and formats; all of that makes it easier to book meetings. In the outside world, it’s far less efficient; one person randomly throws out times that could work along with a particular set of constraints, such as meeting locations. It seems like scheduling alone adds 20% to the cost of meeting with another human.
If you don’t work at a company that has a well setup corporate campus, it may be worth paying extra attention to planning your travel and simply not taking meetings to help minimize the ongoing tax.