Mission & Value

CPO Chris Cox talked about Meta’s mission:

Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible

This finally made it click for me why Mark Zuckerberg is investing so heavily in wearables.

Chris also shared an “opportunity” chart showing data volume growing exponentially while human attention stays constant. The takeaway: there’s a massive opportunity to surface high-quality content. Better recommendation algorithm is one way to achieve this goal.

On Meta’s values: the one that resonates most with me is “Live in the Future.” It’s not that the others aren’t important, but this is one I haven’t really seen emphasized at companies I’ve worked at before. Humans are terrible at predicting the future (by Bill Maris), and therefore, this value matters a lot.

Bootcamp Live

On the afternoon of day two, we had Bootcamp Live — a mix of hands-on coding and experience sharing from Devs and EMs. A nice balance of getting our hands dirty and learning from those who thrive at Meta.

Meta clearly has a strong hacker culture. Example: the internal tooling setup task had us poking around internal tools and writing code to discover hidden passcodes. It felt like a scavenger hunt!

Dev Experience

Meta uses a monorepo, and VSCode is customized for dealing with very large codebase and has great CI/CD integration. I can spin up an on-demand dev instance right from VSCode, and the inner dev loop is very short — local file changes reflect on the remote server almost instantly.

Gatekeeper makes it easy to run experiments in a systematic way. Scuba is the go-to tool for querying and analyzing data. Given how data-driven Meta is, I’m glad they covered these tools in BCL.

AI

Metamate is essentially an internal ChatGPT — super useful for day-to-day questions.

The coding agents, though, have room for improvement. We can use Claude Code in the IDE, but it doesn’t connect to the internet, which limits its power. That said, it’s still handy for searching the internal knowledge base.

Devmate’s accuracy is a little below my expection. For example, one BCL task was to use Devmate to add some creativity to our first webpage. I asked it to generate a todo list, but instead of adding content to my own folder (where I have full permissions), it tried to write to the shared bootcamp folder, resulting in a permission error in the webpage.

There are other examples where context gathering, memory management, and multi-turn conversation quality could be better. But given how heavily Meta is investing in coding agents — the Manus acquisition being one signal — I’m confident these tools will improve.

Closing Word

Overall, NHO and BCL were a great experience. The rooftop park on MPK20 has stunning views, the food was excellent, and I got to meet a lot of sharp metamates along the way.