Q&A: Facebook’s new chief in Seattle on 23 years at Microsoft and the future of engineering centers
Rajeev Rajan first came to the Seattle area as a
Microsoft intern in 1994, and ended up staying with the company for 23 years.
Four years into a new career at Facebook, Rajan is working to bring other
engineers to the region to continue to grow the social media giant’s sizable
hub of more than 7,000 employees.
Rajan
is currently vice president of engineering and head of Facebook for the Pacific
Northwest, the second largest engineering hub for the company outside of
Silicon Valley. He started at the company on its Marketplace platform,
supporting engineering before moving to support the video engineering team.
Rajan
— who replaced Vijaye Raji in leading the thousands of Facebook
employs who work in the region — is not slowing down the company’s amazing
growth spurt in the past 11 years. “We are going to be looking for real estate
all over the place,” he said.
GeekWire caught up with Rajan to discuss his long tech career,
Facebook’s continued growth in the Seattle region, the future of engineering
centers and remote work, and navigating Facebook’s much-publicized troubles.
Keep reading for our Q&A, edited for length and clarity.
Microsoft
vs. Facebook
GeekWire: 23
years at Microsoft is like a lifetime. Talk about the differences and the
similarities between Microsoft and Facebook, the culture and everything around
that.
Rajan: “I had a very wonderful time at Microsoft, super happy
there. I started as an intern on Windows 95, came right out of school. I was at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was actually doing a PhD
program, but then I happened by chance to come for an internship in the summer
of ’94, fell in love with the Seattle area and Microsoft and stayed on full
time. I did not actually go back and finish my PhD, I just joined the fun and
the party. I worked on many different things over the years — Windows operating
system, Exchange server, email, SQL server. Towards the end, the last few
years, I was part of the team that built Office 365, which was super successful
for the company.
“Along the way, they made me a distinguished
engineer and I left as VP of engineering. So I was doing really well and happy
there and with a great team. I happened to know somebody who knew [former
Facebook Seattle site lead] Vijaye [Raji], so Vijaye called me over to the
Seattle office for lunch. I was really struck by the energy I saw there and
just the office itself and the people I met. Vijaye suggested that I go to
Menlo Park and meet some leaders. So I flew down and met with some folks there.
I was again, super impressed with the Menlo Park campus.
“I guess inside me, I was thinking, ‘Do I do
another innings? Or do I finish it up at Microsoft?’ I felt like, perhaps I
could try a different thing. Back in the day in Seattle, Microsoft used to be
the only choice, or Amazon. And now we have much more opportunity in the
Seattle area. So I was like, ‘OK, let me try something new and different.’ Also
it reminded me very much of Microsoft in the ’90s. The company was much
smaller, I felt the same energy, Zuck is a little bit like Gates in terms of
the founder/CEO. I just felt that was sort of like Microsoft, but 30 years in
the future in terms of generational shift and things the company’s working on,
and also just the impact you can have on society in terms of the broad scale
set of what Facebook does seemed very appealing. The culture really was the
thing that attracted me and I felt like it should be a good change for me.”
Facebook in Seattle
GeekWire: Talk
a little about Facebook in Seattle — how many folks are here now?
Rajan: “Right now we have more than 7,000 people total in the
Pacific Northwest. We started in 2010, one of the first offices outside of
Menlo Park. It’s the biggest hub outside of Menlo Park for Facebook. We started
in Redmond in 2014 and then Bellevue in 2019. And so now we are all across the
region. We are super excited about our new Bellevue campus that is opening. The
buildings are ready to go and but for the pandemic, we would have opened up
already. We also bought the REI headquarters over
in Spring District. Given the buildings we already had and the REI
headquarters, we now have a nice hub, or campus, if you will. We think it could
be very similar to what we call the ‘classic campus.’ It affords an opportunity
for a lot of talent on the Eastside that previously might not have wanted to
make the trip across the lake to commute.”
GeekWire: Is
Spring District and what you mentioned in Bellevue going to impact South Lake
Union or are you going to stick around down there?
Rajan: “We’re going to stick around. We love the
South Lake Union area. We have a number of buildings there. We’re growing in
general in the region, Facebook as a company is growing quite a bit. And we’re
definitely looking to tap into the capacity in the Pacific Northwest. So we are
going to be looking for real estate all over the place. Eastside is great to
have a location, but Seattle, if we find good properties, we’ll expand there.
So we’re not looking to move out of Seattle, we’re looking to expand in all the
different areas.”
GeekWire: How important is Seattle to Facebook
overall? You mentioned it’s the biggest hub outside of Menlo Park. Why did it
become that way? What about Seattle made sense?
Rajan: “I think lots of things. First of all, I
think Facebook was one of the early companies to open a hub. Now every Silicon
Valley company, I think, has an office in Seattle… I think there are many
reasons that drove that, one was we knew that there’s a lot of good talent in
the region. It has all the elements of a great tech hub, which has proven to be
the case. And so because of our early start, we were able to start many teams
and products and projects in Seattle. For example, one of the first teams I
joined in Facebook was Marketplace. And Marketplace was completely built in
Seattle.
We are human beings. We get a
lot of energy from each other. So the office is definitely going to be a big
part of our future.
“When you look at some
of the Silicon Valley companies, they tend to start in the Bay Area and then
have maybe a smaller team in Seattle. Even Microsoft is famously very Redmond
centric. With Facebook, I think the philosophy has been we want to be distributed
across many different locations. So having more locations outside the Bay Area
was part of the strategy. We have Seattle, we have New York, we have Boston, we
have London, we even have one in Tel Aviv. So we have a few locations around
the world and from the beginning the philosophy was we want these locations to
really work and we want to be able to create products in these locations that
are not necessarily Menlo Park-based. We started Marketplace in Seattle, we
started Gaming in Seattle, we have a big presence in Groups and Community. And
we also have, now over time, all of the parts of the Facebook family of apps
represented in Seattle, from infrastructure all the way to the Facebook
products. Therefore, if you join Facebook in the Pacific Northwest, you can
work on pretty much anything that Facebook works on.”
GeekWire:
Anything that’s coming or products or services that you’re working on now that
are particularly noteworthy or that you’re excited about?
Rajan: “We do have a
big presence in Redmond and a little bit in Seattle around Oculus and the
Facebook Reality Labs. Obviously AR and VR are a big future trend for the
company as well as for the world. I personally run the video engineering team
and we did a few announcements recently, and Mark did a few announcements,
around audio. One thing that’s come out of COVID is we are all on these Zoom
meetings and it’s a little tiring to be on video all the time. So imagine you
had a meeting like this, it’s all audio, you’re walking outside, enjoying the good
weather and you’re just talking. We think audio has a big future.”
Remote work
GeekWire: Let’s talk a little bit about remote work and your
back-to-office plans, Seattle specifically. Do you have a percentage on who you
expect back and when and what your offices are going to look like in a
post-pandemic world? You’ve mentioned a lot of real estate.
Rajan: “I think the office is always going to be a big part of
our future. In terms of getting back to the office, we’re looking at the health
data locally. We are being super conservative with respect to what’s a good
timing for it. We’ll probably have some 10, 20%, some small percentage return
to office somewhere perhaps in the July timeframe if things work out right.
That small percentage is for people who are actually struggling to work from
home right now. We’d like to give them an opportunity to come back in a little
bit. But the really big return to office will be in the September, October
timeframe. We already signaled that to employees because we wanted them to make
summer plans and not be in a situation, ‘Are we going back? Are we not going
back?'”
GeekWire: [Amazon’s] Andy Jassy said something in an
interview about how the ability to innovate is just better in
person. Do you share that viewpoint?
Rajan: “Absolutely.
We are human beings. We get a lot of energy from each other — hallway chats,
whiteboard drawings, all kinds of things. So the office is definitely going to
be a big part of our future. Now I do think we’ll be competitive with the tech
industry in the world in terms of what is a flexible option. Maybe, I don’t
know, a day of the week you’re working from home, something along those lines.
Even for people who are working in the office, there’ll be some flexible
options.
“Then
there’ll be a set of people like Mark said, who will be completely remote. They
can choose to be completely remote. We think that’s a big future where you
could be not even staying in the Seattle area. You could be living in different
states and cities in the U.S. and you can work remotely from home. I do think
for those people, they will want to come into the office maybe once or twice a
month to meet people in person and get some connections, but for the most part,
they can work remotely.”
Future
of engineering centers
GeekWire: That leads us to the future
of engineering centers and whether you think the pandemic will have impacted
that, whether fewer companies will see the need to set up these satellite
offices away from their headquarters, with this rise in remote work. Or whether
we’re just going to have a short-term memory on that and we’ll get back to
business.
Rajan: “I think that
the aggregate demand for engineers is just going up. I think technology is a
good force for society in general. I do think there’s a lot more innovation to
be had, whether it’s AR, VR, AI, or all kinds of exciting new trends. So
there’s going to be a bigger demand for talent in general, which means that the
engineering centers are going to continue to grow and we’re going to need more
of them around the U.S. and around the world.
RELATED: Track the engineering outposts in the Seattle area
“But
I do think some of that demand will be met by remote work. And I think that
will afford a bunch of people the ability to work from other states or other
cities, who don’t have to be in the big city or in the big center, where
previously you had to be in Seattle or the Bay Area to work for Facebook. Now
you could be in maybe Eastern Washington or closer to Portland, you have more
choice on terms of where you stay and work. So we get that talent, but we’ll
also get a bunch of people who are in the major hubs.”
Future of Facebook
GeekWire: It’s been an interesting couple of years, the company
itself is dealing with a lot — the connection between social media and
adolescents or mental health; various conflicts that come up such as Israel and
Palestine; COVID-related misinformation; the Trump ban that reared its head
again. I like to have your perspective since you’re in Seattle. As an
engineering leader, how much of this, if any of it, affects your team and your
morale and how do you deal with it?
Rajan: “It’s definitely not easy. When you have all this stuff
being told about your company and so on, it’s not easy, but I think as
engineers we come in with the feeling of, ‘How can we make society better? How
can we make all the technology work for good?’ Any tool or any technology can
be used in good ways and bad ways, and we’re seeing some of the bad usages of
it. So we come in motivated with, ‘We think we can use AI, we think we can use
technology, we think we can use a combination of technology and people to make
this be a force for good.’
I think most engineers and
most people who work at the big tech companies want to do good and are finding
ways to use technology to help society.
“For example, when
COVID happened, we came up with this COVID-19 hub in the Facebook app where you
can find all kinds of authentic information — Where’s my nearest vaccination
center? What is the latest science on the vaccines or on masks? Things like
that. So we did our best to provide the right information to a lot of people,
so that once they get that information, they’re not getting misinformation from
other places.
“Having groups come
together on the platform to help each other is amazing, that really makes me
feel excited about all the good we are doing. And when I see bad effects, that
motivates me to go and say, ‘OK, how do we go fight this now? How do we make it
so that this does not happen?’ And so that’s kind of like the energy that the
company has. Yes, of course, it’s always tough when you see coverage that’s not
great, but I lived some of this at Microsoft as well. At that time we thought
we were building great technology for the world. So I think most engineers and
most people who work at the big tech companies want to do good and are finding
ways to use technology to help society.”
GeekWire: As more
pressure has come to bear on Facebook and Google and Amazon, and Microsoft has
sort of slid underneath all of that, what do you think about that?
Rajan: “I think Microsoft went through its moment and they
learned from it and they navigated some of those forces and are in a different
place right now. Every technology has its kind of flashpoint in terms of it
getting to critical mass and scale — Google with the search engine, Amazon with
its thing, Facebook with the tools we have built to reach people. So when those
tools reach a critical mass and become an important part of society I think it
leads to a lot of questions and discussion and what’s the right usage of it.
And so I think this is just a normal part of getting to critical mass.”
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