38 ms·

On Leaving Facebook

600 points by earthboundkid 5y ago

anonimamente 5y ago
Wow; it's all about you: what you have to gain or lose if you leave or stay. Not a single mention of conscience about contributing to an enterprise that has and continues to do so much damage to the human psyche. That's really sad.
jackblemming 5y ago
This man had 8+ years at Facebook and they still made him do programming questions? What is wrong with our industry?
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  I was once asked a to present a bit-manipulation algorithm, during an interview for an NLP role. :-)
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Interviews are designed to be roughly the same experience for everyone. There's plenty of good legal reasons why, but separate from that, jobs, roles and so on are not standardized across various companies. While I personally know someone with 8 years experience at Facebook probably isn't a clown, the point of an interview is also to get a sense of how you'd work together and to ask eachother questions. A good interviewer will tailor their interview to the candidate, too.
  - donsupreme 5y ago
    I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Not coding interviews specifically for legal reasons no, but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. This is especially true the larger the company you are interviewing at - and the more generic the role is internally.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no' again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly, interviews will always be imperfect because few will respond in that situation the way they do at the office. This tends to hurt egos.
        snoman 5y ago
        That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does not discredit it in the way your tone implies.
      - astura 5y ago
        >If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically! You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        Sorry for the confusion, I was referring to everyone at the same level of seniority.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    with respect, this is just lazy, following the herd because everybody else is doing it. Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview) They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry. Many of my peers have found success and homes with outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are starting to trend away from it.
    - moosedev 5y ago
      > Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview) > They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry. I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        It definitely changed the game - or at least, made it something you can practice for easily in one place. But there's nothing particularly special about leetcode that you couldn't find in your college coursework. A lot of companies tend to optimize for college-level questions, but this isn't true across the industry. I used leetcode when interviewing for my most recent job too, by the way. Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies. I do my best to help keep the process at minimum consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy, but is incredibly critical to the success of your business. Happy to answer questions, though.
- code_biologist 5y ago
  I mean, writing code is a big part of the job? I bet they asked behavioral and system design questions too, even though I'm sure he solved business problems and designed systems in 8+ years at FB. Why interview in the first place, why not just give him an offer up front? Interviews aren't fun, but there's not something "wrong with the industry" if the questions are relevant to the work. He even complimented their choice of programming questions.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  I've seen enough experienced people who are great at system design and expect to be tech leads, but who are absolutely bad at coding. Do you want to hire someone for their ability to program or for their ability to think about the big picture only?
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    tbf it usually comes in a package.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  I have 38 years in hardware design, most of that doing ASIC design in Verilog. I've been with my currently employer 19 years, but if I found myself in an interview I'd expect them to ask me technical questions. If they didn't ask them, it would be a red flag. What if they asked me an "offensively" basic question? Great, I can make quick work of it, no insult taken. It has happened to me only once that I interviewed someone far more senior (and was a PhD) who got offended when asked about some simple technical issues. He deflected my questions, and so was flushed immediately.
  - wildrhythms 5y ago
    'Asking technical questions' is quite a bit different than shoving a code editor in front of a candidate's face, and the interviewer all but saying "The computer will decide your fate."
    - tasty_freeze 5y ago
      Asking an ASIC designer to create a 2-input XOR gate out of 2-input NAND gates is like asking a programmer to write a bubble sort. If someone asked me either one, despite being 38 years out of college, I'd do it without being offended.
  - tyre 5y ago
    It depends on the type of questions and whether they were relevant. The thing with these little coding quizzes is they rarely have anything to do with what the person will do day-to-day. Design a problem that's relevant to the work and it's fine.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  Anyone can put n+ years at Facebook on their resume regardless of whether they worked on Facebook or not. Maybe they’re banking on a background check not being run. And if I know anything about people, I’m sure there are people out there doing this. Frauds abound. Check this out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-tech-degree/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-t...
- rcheu 5y ago
  It's pretty easy to do almost no coding at larger companies as a more senior engineer and become quite rusty. It sounds like he was interviewing for a position which he's actually expected to ship things and code, so it's pretty reasonable to ask him to code in the interview.
  - astura 5y ago
    Where have you worked where senior engineers do hardly any coding? What else would they do all day?! Are you sure you aren't thinking of project managers? Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors write much more code than the juniors.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      Some senior engineers will be “coding machines” whereas others will be much closer to “architects” or “tech leads” where shipping a lot of code is not the most important aspect. To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in code reviews regularly, so it’s very unlikely they are incompetent coders.
downut 5y ago
Super successful people at Facebook need Facebook "prestige" to get... car loans? Huh. And you can get that prestige and success working a couple of hours a day. Huh. What a weird world.
- jonmb 5y ago
  The car loan line was a little odd. Anyone with a decent income and a high credit score can easily get a car loan.
- deep_lol 5y ago
  You can also afford to have an ultrasound!
jacobr 5y ago
Do you still ultimately do product engineering, picking tickets of a backlog, after 10 years at a FAANG if you’re not in management? Are the promotion levels mostly salary bumps? I spend some but far from most of my time writing code, I write RFCs, documentation, code reviews and emails, but don’t really know how this compares to positions at other companies. At some places a staff engineer seems to simply be a senior engineer who’s been around for a while.
ohforsure 5y ago
"Lots of talks and meetings, and very little progress forward" spoke to me. Just left a growth-stage tech company last week (now at a startup) for the exact reason. Was asking myself, "How many days of my life do I want to continue discussing progress vs. making it?"
ncr100 5y ago
I like this. Evolving a pragmatic view of one's relationship to work, and applying that to the next job, does help avoid early burn-out.
albemuth 5y ago
It was comforting to hear about a fb veteran struggling with LC hards
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I think if you don't specifically train for competitive programming, an average LC hard is going to take you many days, assuming you solve it at all. A lot of them depend on knowledge of algorithms that most people will literally never use for anything professionally, ever. As much as we like to talk about algorithms, it's pretty rare that anything more interesting than DP comes up at work unless you are doing optimization research or work in a niche domain like bioinformatics. Interviewing someone with an LC hard is a colossal waste of time unless the position you are filling is like "senior staff swe: performance and optimization"
astrea 5y ago
- packetslave 5y ago
  It's on his personal blog. Who are you to police what he writes about there? Blame the person who submitted it to HN, or the 25 people who upvoted it to the home page. Or, you know, just shut up and get over it.
  - wanderer_ 5y ago
    Plot twist: it was the Zucc
  - astrea 5y ago
    - mfringel 5y ago
      Making an assertion and sticking a question mark at the end isn't questioning anything.
      - astrea 5y ago
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Was wondering that too.
trangon 5y ago
I’m curious what the author will do if they encounter the same issues at their new company.
- danuker 5y ago
  I would guess, move back to Facebook. People are paid for a reason: coding is dull.
pkdpic 5y ago
Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being a user. Just for personal interest. Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though? Any thoughts?
- renewiltord 5y ago
  I’ll hire at $400k cash comp for 2 yrs experience and I won’t skip you for Meta. The only problem is that, like most big tech companies, it has some people who are there as a retirement. Meta is better than Alphabet about that, though.
  - hiq 5y ago
    > it has some people who are there as a retirement. In which way does it transpire during interviews / once they join your company?
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    You hire people with two years experience out of college for $400k/yr package? Is this in SV? What kind of job, what experience is needed?
    - pkdpic 5y ago
      Yeah seriously hire me. Ive never heard of 400k for two years exp but Im into it. Are you talking about coding roles or management or what?
      - eclipxe 5y ago
        levels.fyi
    - Tempest1981 5y ago
      I read that as "if you're coming from a FAANG/MAGMA company, we'll compensate you extra for the RSUs you'll be giving up when leaving".
vanusa 5y ago
I opened up Leetcode and started chipping away at the problems in the “Hard” section. It took me days to solve some and I felt miserable. Self-doubt crept in, and I started to lose motivation. I hopped on 2 phone screens and failed both. It was humiliating and I felt like shit. As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-raff.
- float4 5y ago
  Are questions of the hard type really that common? Thought it was mainly medium.
  - grp000 5y ago
    When my mentor was going through MANAMANA interviews a several months back for senior/staff DS/MLE positions, he was getting mostly mediums and a handful of hards.
  - psyc 5y ago
    With a few exceptions, I generally can't solve hard leetcode problems. It never even occurred to me to feel bad about it! I've been a working programmer for 25 years, including many years at Microsoft and Facebook. I'm certain I've never encountered a problem at work that needed a 'hard' style solution, and if I hypothetically had, I don't even know how it would pass code review. I've solved almost all of the easy and mediums, though.
    - scollet 5y ago
      I'm definitely nowhere near 25 years. My perspective of "hard" LC problems is that they are typically distributed over a system anyways, where the optimal parts make the whole. That, or they are domain-specific analogs, like complex solvers, or involve graduate graph theory, etc. What is your perception? I haven't done LC in about a year and a half.
  - vanusa 5y ago
donsupreme 5y ago
"everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line." I once felt that way but after leaving FAANG years later, I realized how snobby something like this would sound.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Doesn't make it wrong, though.
  - dymk 5y ago
    It is wrong. They care about the number on your paystub, not the company name.
    - AlexCoventry 5y ago
      Surely they take the stability of your job into account.
      - dymk 5y ago
        Credit scores are based on how good you are at paying off your debits, and how consistent your paycheck is. They care about the numbers, not the names.
  - jumelles 5y ago
    It is 100% wrong.
- CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
  I’m not sure what this means. Getting a mortgage and a car loan was easy, a car loan approval took no time at all. Does working at FAANG speed this process up somehow?
  - bradly 5y ago
CincinnatiMan 5y ago
What does PSC stand for and what is it? I've seen it here and mentioned on Blind a few times.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  Performance Summary Cycle. FB’s semi-annual performance reviews.
  - packetslave 5y ago
    yup, at Google it's "perf". Same deal.
  - CincinnatiMan 5y ago
    Are they particularly stressful at FB? Capital One did these too when I worked there and I just assumed most companies did them, but maybe I'm wrong on that front.
    - romanhn 5y ago
      Yes, very stressful for both individual contributors and managers. IMO many of FB dysfunctions are attributable directly to PSC and its focus on impact. When promotions and even continued employment are on the line, short-term thinking takes over and every decision is optimized through the lens of the performance review. The great work life balance the author described is far and between in that company.
      - notacoward 5y ago
        3.5 years at Facebook, and concur with everything you said. I'll add two things. (1) You allude to it with "even continued employment" but it deserves to be explicit: "up or out" makes everything about PSC twice as bad as it already is. I wasn't subject to it myself (I was hired at a "terminal" level) but I saw it cause much grief for more junior folks. (2) Mandatory oncall can be "meh" on some teams but absolute hell on others. On my first team (small service) I was in a rotation that had as few as two members at one point. Oncall every other week. On my second team (large service) I was on three rotations for a while. In both cases things could get very intense. Not only no work/life balance either way, but also no time for "impact" on your PSC when you spend the whole time fighting fires, plus cleanup the next week, plus working on follow-up tasks after each SEV review. The combination of these two factors led to many people deferring everything they could from their own shift into the next, plus never working on cleanup or follow-up tasks, because that's the behavior PSC rewards. The intent behind PSC was good - to be quantitative and fair - but in effect I agree that it drove much of FB's internal dysfunction.
underwater 5y ago
I started at Facebook a little before Alex, but left five or so years ago. It remains a highlight of my working life. It's a little sad, but expected, to hear it's become just another tech co. I'm interested to know why you didn't use your network more when looking for new opportunities. Amjad of Replit is an ex Facebook employee, after all.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  If it was so great why is everyone an ex-employee?
  - underwater 5y ago
    During my time there it grew massively and went public. A company with 1,000 engineers is always going to be different from one with 10,000. The scope of work narrowed a lot. There was a shift to focus on review cycles instead did shipping cool stuff and avoiding being crushed by competitors like Google. Towards the end I fell into the trap of fixating on perf reviews and came close to burning myself out after switching roles. Even in the era that I enjoyed, I met people who had a bad experience. Either due to projects that didn't pan out, bad managers, or just not being a good fit for the culture.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      What are the attributes of a successful facebook employee or what type of person fits the culture? Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership?
      - xixixao 5y ago
        > Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership? Absolutely. I would say successful employees find an intersection between their interests+skills and what is needed. That might seem generic but it’s important to realize and spend time focusing on.
dahdum 5y ago
I didn’t see retirement addressed, that would be among my top priorities personally. Unless he’s already financially independent and can retire at will, taking a 30% paycut off FB’s top 5% comp could mean delaying retirement by many years. Given fixed living costs, retirement savings could easily drop by much more than 30%. I’m not disagreeing with his choice, it’s a personal one and he may not want early retirement, but I would find it extremely difficult.
- eropple 5y ago
  If you like what you do for a living, retirement is less of a factor. And "30% less" is still a truckload of money. I've never worked for a FAANG and I don't live in a particularly cheap area, nor am I particularly budget-conscious, but a comfortable retirement isn't even close to being a problem at an early age.
  - chii 5y ago
    Retirement at early age doesn't mean you stop doing things - it means you get to do things without having to regard financial consideration.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Yes. So does a career where you make stupid money almost no matter what you do. I've made less money than most of my contemporaries. I've also taken much more time off to do other things and had much more fun along the way. Sustainability is a real thing. You don't have to wait until "FIRE status" or whatever the cool kids want to sell you podcasts about in order to have a life.
- jjulius 5y ago
  It's entirely circumstantial and boils down to, "Is it worth sacrificing my [mental health/happiness/whatever] just to retire a couple of years sooner"?
  - dahdum 5y ago
erehweb 5y ago
Was interesting that the writer says little about FB's mission and impact on the world - seems like it was not really important to them as a positive or negative. Perhaps part of this is due to writer's spending more time in tools rather than something like NewsFeed?
- Aperocky 5y ago
  Sometimes Encapsulation is a good idea, even in life.
- moonshinefe 5y ago
  It's actually why the blog post bothered me, despite everyone heaping praise on it here. "Then there’s the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in media lately, but in everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line." That's the money quote, this person is only thinking about themself and really doesn't consider how their work impacts society or what company they're helping as a priority issue at all. I don't know why people like this are the way they are, it seems to border on sociopathy or greed or something to me ("screw you guys, I got mine.") At times they must have just buried their head in the sand over all the Facebook scandals including helping a freaking genocide. It's crazy, and reminds me a little of "American Psycho" to be honest.
  - wanderer_ 5y ago
    Yeah, I find this view to be pretty unfair to the author. He was not directly responsible for things like data policy or anything at Fb. As he said multiple times, he found fulfillment from working on projects with a small group, and from distancing himself from the higher corporate debacles. I don't think he is morally at any fault. Here's another way of looking at it: Fb is so damn big, there's no reason them looking bad to the public should condemn every software developer on their payroll.
    - moonshinefe 5y ago
      This person was helping Facebook make money while the news was filled with stories about them manipulating democracy, enabling genocide and ruining people's mental health. That's cool they were working on tools that weren't directly related on a small team, but the money all funnels to the top and enables this stuff. They knew full well from all the news unless they were completely burying their head in the sand. So no ethical responsibility? I strongly disagree. They could've quit at any time and found dozens of jobs elsewhere with a resume like that. Judging by the post they did after nearly a decade, and only because purely selfish reasons. I was maybe a bit harsh, but come on..
andrew_ 5y ago
I just do not understand why somebody with 20 years of experience would invest that kind of time in leetcode. just say "no" and be done with the BS, and with the kind of financial success the author has enjoyed previously, wait for the right company to come along that doesn't require it. That's the only way the industry is going to fix itself; enough people start saying no.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  For me, it's either imposter's syndrome or I just suck. Regardless, I'm worried I won't be able to find a job.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    It’s the same for me. I’d like to have that kind of confidence, but the bottom line is that I’m extremely replaceable.
- thebean11 5y ago
  But why? Sure it’s boring, I certainly don’t enjoy doing Leetcode, but if the job requires it I’m not above practicing. It’s not like I’ll have to do it once I get hired.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  I am casually doing some leetcode in prep for a job search a few months down the line. I've never had to do these problems before, nor do I have a formal CS education (am a senior dev). While many of the hard problems are quite esoteric, IMO being able to easily power through most of the easy/mediums is 100% a sign of developer competency. Even if you don't remember the exact algorithm, being able to build it from the ground up quickly and accurately through reasonining seems like a pretty solid signifier of a quality developer to me.
- Handytinge 5y ago
  This seems like a very American problem, possibly a Silicon Valley specific one. Not once in my many years in this industry in multiple western countries have I heard of someone being subjigated to such a test. I had to google it to understand the article.
pm90 5y ago
Why would you need several offers if the new job will be paying less than your current position? Can’t you just tell them how much you make and ask them to match that in equity?
- localcrisis 5y ago
  You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go ±5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess we'll give you $800k then."
- ptero 5y ago
  I doubt many (any?) startups would match FB's 10-year senior engineer's total comp. That would burn up the startup's cash (and/or ownership) very quickly. I think the main draws at a startup for a post-FAANG senior engineer are feeling good about the product they build (more useful to the world than FB's ads) or the role/environment (less bureaucracy and org process). I am sure there are many exceptions, but I suspect that after 10 years in a senior role at a FAANG money stops being the most important thing you need from a job. My 2c.
  - trangon 5y ago
    I’d assume after ten years at FAANG, you’d have a decent amount of money saved up as well.
- ec109685 5y ago
  I wonder how he valued that equity when determine total comp.
localcrisis 5y ago
> I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower than I expected). That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?
elb0w 5y ago
It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just google them. So silly to me.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > a valid metric Not a great metric, but is there a replacement? Not everyone has github side projects to see how their code actually looks.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.
  - tofurocks 5y ago
    I don't understand what you mean here - would a company not want a well rounded developer ?
    - scollet 5y ago
      Harder to exploit experience.
    - tclancy 5y ago
      We are expensive, tend to tell the younger devs to tell each other their salaries and not put up with bad management.
    - lolinder 5y ago
      The large companies don't need tens of thousands of system architects. They need tens of thousands of coders who can do what they're told on small parts of a system without fussing too much about the bigger picture. I think that's what OP is referring to—leetcode filters for young developers who don't need to understand all the reasons why they're doing what they're doing.
moneywoes 5y ago
Hope you saw this about Replit OP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
- sofixa 5y ago
  As if someone with 10 years at Facebook would concern themselves with such trivialities.
fallmonkey 5y ago
"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part" This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
- Octabrain 5y ago
  I totally understand you. I also did something similar recently. In my case, I’m leaving a company I’ve been working in for six months where I’ve been earning a very good salary but the lack of technical challenges, learning and political battles combined with nobody requesting me to deliver anything simply made me feel bored and miserable. Now I’m about to start in a new position from a different place where the salary is not that good (although still pretty decent) but I know from friends that are working there that the environment is much more satisfactory. It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options? The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.
  - granshaw 5y ago
    It’s probably that he has to “be available” and so can’t make good use of the working hours where he’s not doing active work It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue
SMAAART 5y ago
> Most recruiters are terrible. They send generic job descriptions if there’s a matching word in your resume. I’m very surprised the market didn’t push the recruiter game up. There’s so much room for improvement! Yeah, why is that? Same for most Realtors.
- paulcole 5y ago
  It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but same for most people at most jobs. Most people aren’t that great at what they do. They do enough to get by and don’t make a ton of mistakes, but they rightfully don’t give 100%. Source: Me. Am not great at what I do. Don’t give 100%. Do make a number of mistakes. Do enough to get by but not much more.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Because to them it is a numbers game. They try hard to make the interactions seem personal but for the most part to them it is all business. It you're susceptible they'll have you relocate your family across country for an at-will contract knowing retention sucks. As long as they get paid they do not care for the most part. They will also spam the hell out of you for eternity no matter how much you tell them you don't want to do something.
- throwaway2333 5y ago
  Sales funnels. You can only nudge conversions to each successive "step" so much. Once you've reached diminishing returns, the only thing left to do is get more leads into the funnel -- grind the process out/pick up the phone and dial. Feast or famine jobs also don't lend themselves well to "long-term thinking." If something is working, don't break it, just keep on going and make that paper. If something isn't working, you don't have the time/soundness of mind to figure it out, just keep on going (or else you won't be able to pay your bills). Jobs are a commodity and the only selling point is price/pay -- making it one of the worst things to "sell" (the "best"/easiest things to sell are the antithesis of this).
AlexCoventry 5y ago
What's PSC?
- cryptoslug 5y ago
  Performance Summary Cycle- performance reviews every 6 months.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    Thanks.
rr808 5y ago
How many companies did he end up applying to? I'm really not sure what is normal. I just applied to 10 companies and did 5 interviews, I heard other people have done hundreds. Or is it best to go 2-3 a month?
ashtonkem 5y ago
> The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation in the market (we’ll get back to that). This makes a lot of other things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant without worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a nicer house, better stuff. That's very normal, and I don't want to condemn the author for this, but this is a trap. If you get used to the consumption that a 5% salary offers you, then you will have an extremely hard time finding a job that's not at the 5% or better compensation. And those other jobs might come with other tradeoffs that make them unpalatable in other ways. Avoiding the hedonic treadmill[0] is a good habit to get into if your compensation goes up. It increases your financial stability, and means that you can take a lower paying job if you decide that it'll make you happier in other ways. 0 - Technical term for how increased spending sets your expectations higher, and quickly stop bringing the rush that they first brought.
- dom96 5y ago
  I feel this but from a different perspective. As somebody that comes from a working class background, I cannot help but feel like taking any pay cut is a mistake in my life. It’s not that I consume a top 5% salary, it’s that I feel like any offer that isn’t an increase of my current comp is the company trying to screw me over.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Every time I get a raise I make a one time splurge purchase and then look at ways to reduce my periodic spending. Cancel subscriptions, re-play old games, that sort of thing. I figure my spending will naturally rise again (always has, anyway) but not as high as it would have if I let it if I wasn't so cautious.
jchonphoenix 5y ago
This reads as he's in the honeymoon phase of startup world. The politics he mentioned get so much worse in startup world the moment the startup hits a road bump
ur-whale 5y ago
I was expecting at the very least a little bit of self-introspection about the ethical problems of working for a company like FB and how that may have participated in the decision. Nope, article is 100% about author's own well-being and happiness.
- anonimamente 5y ago
  Exactly the point in my strident post below, that now has a negative value unsurprisingly given the content of many of the replies here. Is it unfairly rude to challenge the ethics of what people choose to do? Is the world not shaped by what we do or even somewhat by our mere participation with what others do? Nothing will get better, and perhaps even worse, if all we care about is our own personal gain.
Researcherry 5y ago
I wonder whether author uses facebook.
- notacoward 5y ago
  Funny thing: very few of the people I know from working at Facebook actually use the public site to any significant degree. I always found that odd.
endorphine 5y ago
Even though I have 10 years of experience writing, shipping, maintaining and operating production systems for 10k RPS scale and also having OSS contributions in some very popular projects, I'm still intimidated by the LeetCode-style problems. I'm planning to interview for a large company the coming weeks, and I'm truly disappointed that I struggle even on the Easy level. I guess I never needed to solve such issues in my previous jobs (backend, SRE).
- denysvitali 5y ago
  Don't worry. 90% of the interview processes are broken. Don't take it too personally :)
  - shric 5y ago
    I'd like to hear more about the 10% that are not broken :)
    - nfRfqX5n 5y ago
      Stripe asks some practical questions
    - denysvitali 5y ago
      I was just being conservative. From my personal experience 100% of them were. As an interviewer I try to be in the hypothetical 10%, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
gorgoiler 5y ago
This is an amazing piece of writing. I’m grateful to the author for publishing it, and for the poster bringing it to HN. It’s heartening to see high quality writing on a personal blog. Definitely subscribing.
dom96 5y ago
> To cut the chase, the best offer I got was roughly 70% of what I was making at Facebook. I’ve been there and refused offers because of that. How do you get past this feeling of a company screwing you over unless their offer is higher than your current comp?
iamsaitam 5y ago
Prestige in working for Facebook? I guess ethics isn't a thing for the op in their social circle.
yob22 5y ago
mFixman 5y ago
> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others. I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools. I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy. One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools. It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my experience. Phabricator is miles ahead of anything. Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day. However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.
  - mFixman 5y ago
    I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a lot on the last years. Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.
  - kyrra 5y ago
    Googler, opinions are my own. If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.
erwincoumans 5y ago
A very kind and insightful post. PSC = Performance Summary Cycle . At Google/Alphabet we call this Perf , performance reviews, every 6 months. Mobility at different parts of Alphabet is more difficult, you may even have to interview again, switching from X or Waymo or DeepMind to Google.
- didip 5y ago
  oh, I heard mobility at Google is trivial? I guess that’s just a myth.
  - vl 5y ago
    It's trivial to switch to the place nobody wants to go to. But interesting positions on the good teams are immediately filled, and there is a line of very strong people waiting for headcount or schmoozing with director trying to get there.
  - erwincoumans 5y ago
    Switching teams within Google is usually easier, but between different Alphabet bets may be more involving.
ricardobayes 5y ago
Out of all the sites I visit on a daily basis, facebook clearly has the worst user experience out of them all, and that's counting the ad-infested local news that have jumping elements before click. Not sure if I'm the victim of some test group, but the page loads so slowly, and stories become pretty much unresponsive. If I click exit on the first story, it just keeps playing at least 4-5 more stories before it eventually closes the page. I wonder if this is actually intended to make people look at more stories. Marketplace is another abomination which feels like it was thrown together by an intern. Useless filters, categorization of items super-bad, and again slow, slow, slow.
mrobot 5y ago
Don't work for these people.
yalogin 5y ago
I dread interviews. I am an engineering manager, a product guy and have a long track record of finding creative solutions to problems, convincing leadership at all levels and executing on it. However, I suck at coding and coming up with solutions on the fly. I need that extra time to think through because I don't have every possible tech solution in my TLB buffers, I need to page them from main memory or even disk sometimes. So I end up failing interviews by default, so much that I stopped trying to move. It helps that I am doing quite well in my current role and am happy, but missing out on growth up the ladder.
- onos 5y ago
  Same here, in that I’m relatively good at slow thinking - pondering something over many days or weeks etc till I find a good solution. I see prep for interviews as table stakes, and accept it as such. but I still regret that my slow thinking strength can shine in these contexts.
sharker8 5y ago
This post is missing the key detail: is this person taking risks with 'the house's money' (high net worth, can generate passive income) or not? The answer is probably yes having spent that many years at fb, but I found the tone of 'I'll cut to the chase, I took a pay cut' disingenuous. The real questions is 'is this person already high net worth or not'.
- golondon 5y ago
  I guess with 8 something years at Meta, if the RSUs were not spent stupidly, considering the stock appreciation and the refreshers, it would be safe to say this person's net worth is at least $2M.
vogt 5y ago
I found a lot of value in this. I rarely find the desire to comment on threads with input that amounts just to “great job!”, but to the author: I took a lot of tips and inspiration from this. Thank you for sharing.
logifail 5y ago
> [on health insurance] It’s very comfortable to know that you are likely not going to receive a huge bill for doing an ultra sound for a routine checkup. Just as a comparative data point from the other side of the pond (we're mainland 'yurp): our eldest is currently fighting off some kind of infection with swollen glands and abdominal pain and within the last 10 days I have visited: - our regular doctor twice - [the first time] was referred for ultrasound at another doctor, where he was seen immediately [then] - referral to a paediatrician, where he was seen the next day [and] - he eventually ended up having a complete check-up in the paediatrics department of our nearest hospital, including blood tests. None of that was much fun at all, as any parent will know, thankfully so far none of it uncovered anything bad (thank $deity), but happily all of it was funded from general taxation and deductions that everyone here contributes to. Which is a relief. Next time I'm tempted to whinge about how high the tax rates are here, I need to remember not to.
ncmncm 5y ago
NB, Replit is the outfit that did this: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  Replit's position there seems reasonable to me. Companies would be a lot less enthusiastic about hiring developers if it came with the risk that someone could take internal designs and open source them with no repercussions.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    If your company's value proposition can be replicated by an intern in a weekend, you have a much bigger problem than interns. Companies' enthusiasm for hiring developers worries me not even a little. Of much greater moment, IStM, is the character, or lack of, demonstrated by company officers. That CEO's final e-mail lays him all out. I will certainly not be applying to work at Replit.
- dragosmocrii 5y ago
  hmm, those emails are cringey
throwaway_merig 5y ago
Here's what I've experienced over the past few years. I went to work as a SWE at a large tech company and was paid handsomely, think SWE L5 level at Google. For almost 2 years, I had almost nothing to do, no software to write, no green fields to explore, no products to develop. I'm in a large unit and there's unit level funding with silly goals that the whole unit (hundreds of people) has to achieve. I have consulted here and there for specific projects, but for the most part I am left alone. Which means I have a lot of free time in my days and my vacations, official and unofficial, have been of the "gap year" or late 19th century bon viveur type: visits to major Asian capitals, beach life in Turkey, adventures all over the world. My ratings have been more than good, but I often wonder if I should stop this grand experiment in paid time off and take a new step in my career. But where? There are few companies that pay as much and it's pretty (or very!) stressful living. Then, I'd have to go on the interview circuit, studying for a couple of months to prepare (wtf!) being judged by half-asleep people who couldn't care less if I get into the company or not. And why? I enjoy my free time and have lots of activities, hobbies and interests that I love. Certainly the current state of affairs could end, but the same could be said of any "experience". Contrary to what many others in the tech industry apparently think, if I didn't get paid, I would never work one second for someone else. It's all a transaction and I'm not particularly passionate about my job. I don't hate it, but if it were to disappear as a profession tomorrow, I wouldn't cry.
deep_lol 5y ago
The author leaves so clearly work at FB sucks, yet he spends most of the article praising the company. There are leadership changes, reorgs and direction churn yet it is somehow very easy to follow the career ladder by "just executing the plan". People leave being burnt out and yet he somehow managed to only work "few hours" per day.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  A person that dedicates time to learning how to be efficient at their job can in some roles achieve more in less time.
  - deep_lol 5y ago
    I find it hard to believe. Learning also takes time and in software development you need to learn constantly. You can optimize some type of work, maybe you can code faster, but others are fast too! Remember, everyone around you passed the LeetCode test. How would you optimize meetings, communication with the team, reading/reviewing other peoples code?
    - 29athrowaway 5y ago
      > How would you optimize meetings, communication with the team, reading/reviewing other peoples code? 1. Having purposeful, moderated meetings with minutes and deliverables that can be evaluated. When you force people to deliver something, and when that something will be subject to open evaluation, meetings stop being "free" and people that see "meetings as a job" will quickly give their 2 weeks notice and go away to the next company that will sponsor their lazy lifestyle. Managers are employees too, and their performance is more important than the performance of the people they manage. 2. Communication with the team is solved by verifying communication. At the end of a meeting, ask a random person in the room if they understood the presentation. At the end of a standup meeting, ask a random team member what someone else was doing. You will be surprised with the results. And people will grow around this process by becoming better communicators, and by owning their responsibility as attendees. 3. For code reviews, you should start by automating as much as you can with static analysis, creating a coding standard and documenting good practices, then adding a human at the end to verify that humans are not cheating by suppresing rules. Also, make sure that the feedback is about the code, is fair and never gets personal. The main takeaway is: verify everything. Take nothing for granted.
bigyellow 5y ago
Guy works at Facecrook for a decade and all he can muster is a selfish article about compensation and his precious "work life balance". Couldn't even say a few words about the ethical ramifications of this "contributions" to society by working there. No soul, no mindfulness, just pure ego.
- Hakashiro 5y ago
  I get this all the time. I can only ever dream of joining Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, ethics aside, but because I’m an immigrant from a no-name university, nobody gives a fuck about us of course. Americans be like: “man, this 400k USD job is so boring, I need better work-life balance” Meanwhile Europeans have to make do with 60k EUR jobs with zero work-life balance but hey, at least we have free healthcare, right? Free healthcare that costs us half our salary. Cool.
romanhn 5y ago
> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations. I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.
- beering 5y ago
  On the flip side the huge number of new hires will drag down the performance bar. They can’t give bad ratings to too many people at once. The other thing is that for many people, getting a normal Meets All rating is totally fine. You don’t need to push yourself to Exceeds level.

600 points by earthboundkid 5y ago

Wow; it's all about you: what you have to gain or lose if you leave or stay. Not a single mention of conscience about contributing to an enterprise that has and continues to do so much damage to the human psyche. That's really sad.

jackblemming 5y ago

This man had 8+ years at Facebook and they still made him do programming questions? What is wrong with our industry?

AlexCoventry 5y ago
I was once asked a to present a bit-manipulation algorithm, during an interview for an NLP role. :-)
arcticbull 5y ago
Interviews are designed to be roughly the same experience for everyone. There's plenty of good legal reasons why, but separate from that, jobs, roles and so on are not standardized across various companies. While I personally know someone with 8 years experience at Facebook probably isn't a clown, the point of an interview is also to get a sense of how you'd work together and to ask eachother questions. A good interviewer will tailor their interview to the candidate, too.
- donsupreme 5y ago
  I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Not coding interviews specifically for legal reasons no, but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. This is especially true the larger the company you are interviewing at - and the more generic the role is internally.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no' again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly, interviews will always be imperfect because few will respond in that situation the way they do at the office. This tends to hurt egos.
      - snoman 5y ago
        That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does not discredit it in the way your tone implies.
    - astura 5y ago
      >If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically! You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Sorry for the confusion, I was referring to everyone at the same level of seniority.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  with respect, this is just lazy, following the herd because everybody else is doing it. Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview) They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry. Many of my peers have found success and homes with outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are starting to trend away from it.
  - moosedev 5y ago
    > Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview) > They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry. I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      It definitely changed the game - or at least, made it something you can practice for easily in one place. But there's nothing particularly special about leetcode that you couldn't find in your college coursework. A lot of companies tend to optimize for college-level questions, but this isn't true across the industry. I used leetcode when interviewing for my most recent job too, by the way. Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies. I do my best to help keep the process at minimum consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy, but is incredibly critical to the success of your business. Happy to answer questions, though.
code_biologist 5y ago
I mean, writing code is a big part of the job? I bet they asked behavioral and system design questions too, even though I'm sure he solved business problems and designed systems in 8+ years at FB. Why interview in the first place, why not just give him an offer up front? Interviews aren't fun, but there's not something "wrong with the industry" if the questions are relevant to the work. He even complimented their choice of programming questions.
kccqzy 5y ago
I've seen enough experienced people who are great at system design and expect to be tech leads, but who are absolutely bad at coding. Do you want to hire someone for their ability to program or for their ability to think about the big picture only?
- Aperocky 5y ago
  tbf it usually comes in a package.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
I have 38 years in hardware design, most of that doing ASIC design in Verilog. I've been with my currently employer 19 years, but if I found myself in an interview I'd expect them to ask me technical questions. If they didn't ask them, it would be a red flag. What if they asked me an "offensively" basic question? Great, I can make quick work of it, no insult taken. It has happened to me only once that I interviewed someone far more senior (and was a PhD) who got offended when asked about some simple technical issues. He deflected my questions, and so was flushed immediately.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  'Asking technical questions' is quite a bit different than shoving a code editor in front of a candidate's face, and the interviewer all but saying "The computer will decide your fate."
  - tasty_freeze 5y ago
    Asking an ASIC designer to create a 2-input XOR gate out of 2-input NAND gates is like asking a programmer to write a bubble sort. If someone asked me either one, despite being 38 years out of college, I'd do it without being offended.
- tyre 5y ago
  It depends on the type of questions and whether they were relevant. The thing with these little coding quizzes is they rarely have anything to do with what the person will do day-to-day. Design a problem that's relevant to the work and it's fine.
booleandilemma 5y ago
Anyone can put n+ years at Facebook on their resume regardless of whether they worked on Facebook or not. Maybe they’re banking on a background check not being run. And if I know anything about people, I’m sure there are people out there doing this. Frauds abound. Check this out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-tech-degree/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-t...
rcheu 5y ago
It's pretty easy to do almost no coding at larger companies as a more senior engineer and become quite rusty. It sounds like he was interviewing for a position which he's actually expected to ship things and code, so it's pretty reasonable to ask him to code in the interview.
- astura 5y ago
  Where have you worked where senior engineers do hardly any coding? What else would they do all day?! Are you sure you aren't thinking of project managers? Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors write much more code than the juniors.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    Some senior engineers will be “coding machines” whereas others will be much closer to “architects” or “tech leads” where shipping a lot of code is not the most important aspect. To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in code reviews regularly, so it’s very unlikely they are incompetent coders.

downut 5y ago

Super successful people at Facebook need Facebook "prestige" to get... car loans? Huh. And you can get that prestige and success working a couple of hours a day. Huh. What a weird world.

jonmb 5y ago
The car loan line was a little odd. Anyone with a decent income and a high credit score can easily get a car loan.
deep_lol 5y ago
You can also afford to have an ultrasound!

jacobr 5y ago

Do you still ultimately do product engineering, picking tickets of a backlog, after 10 years at a FAANG if you’re not in management? Are the promotion levels mostly salary bumps? I spend some but far from most of my time writing code, I write RFCs, documentation, code reviews and emails, but don’t really know how this compares to positions at other companies. At some places a staff engineer seems to simply be a senior engineer who’s been around for a while.

ohforsure 5y ago

"Lots of talks and meetings, and very little progress forward" spoke to me. Just left a growth-stage tech company last week (now at a startup) for the exact reason. Was asking myself, "How many days of my life do I want to continue discussing progress vs. making it?"

ncr100 5y ago

I like this. Evolving a pragmatic view of one's relationship to work, and applying that to the next job, does help avoid early burn-out.

albemuth 5y ago

It was comforting to hear about a fb veteran struggling with LC hards

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I think if you don't specifically train for competitive programming, an average LC hard is going to take you many days, assuming you solve it at all. A lot of them depend on knowledge of algorithms that most people will literally never use for anything professionally, ever. As much as we like to talk about algorithms, it's pretty rare that anything more interesting than DP comes up at work unless you are doing optimization research or work in a niche domain like bioinformatics. Interviewing someone with an LC hard is a colossal waste of time unless the position you are filling is like "senior staff swe: performance and optimization"

astrea 5y ago

packetslave 5y ago
It's on his personal blog. Who are you to police what he writes about there? Blame the person who submitted it to HN, or the 25 people who upvoted it to the home page. Or, you know, just shut up and get over it.
- wanderer_ 5y ago
  Plot twist: it was the Zucc
- astrea 5y ago
  - mfringel 5y ago
    Making an assertion and sticking a question mark at the end isn't questioning anything.
    - astrea 5y ago
sys_64738 5y ago
Was wondering that too.

trangon 5y ago

I’m curious what the author will do if they encounter the same issues at their new company.

danuker 5y ago
I would guess, move back to Facebook. People are paid for a reason: coding is dull.

pkdpic 5y ago

Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being a user. Just for personal interest. Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though? Any thoughts?

renewiltord 5y ago
I’ll hire at $400k cash comp for 2 yrs experience and I won’t skip you for Meta. The only problem is that, like most big tech companies, it has some people who are there as a retirement. Meta is better than Alphabet about that, though.
- hiq 5y ago
  > it has some people who are there as a retirement. In which way does it transpire during interviews / once they join your company?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  You hire people with two years experience out of college for $400k/yr package? Is this in SV? What kind of job, what experience is needed?
  - pkdpic 5y ago
    Yeah seriously hire me. Ive never heard of 400k for two years exp but Im into it. Are you talking about coding roles or management or what?
    - eclipxe 5y ago
      levels.fyi
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    I read that as "if you're coming from a FAANG/MAGMA company, we'll compensate you extra for the RSUs you'll be giving up when leaving".

vanusa 5y ago

I opened up Leetcode and started chipping away at the problems in the “Hard” section. It took me days to solve some and I felt miserable. Self-doubt crept in, and I started to lose motivation. I hopped on 2 phone screens and failed both. It was humiliating and I felt like shit. As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-raff.

float4 5y ago
Are questions of the hard type really that common? Thought it was mainly medium.
- grp000 5y ago
  When my mentor was going through MANAMANA interviews a several months back for senior/staff DS/MLE positions, he was getting mostly mediums and a handful of hards.
- psyc 5y ago
  With a few exceptions, I generally can't solve hard leetcode problems. It never even occurred to me to feel bad about it! I've been a working programmer for 25 years, including many years at Microsoft and Facebook. I'm certain I've never encountered a problem at work that needed a 'hard' style solution, and if I hypothetically had, I don't even know how it would pass code review. I've solved almost all of the easy and mediums, though.
  - scollet 5y ago
    I'm definitely nowhere near 25 years. My perspective of "hard" LC problems is that they are typically distributed over a system anyways, where the optimal parts make the whole. That, or they are domain-specific analogs, like complex solvers, or involve graduate graph theory, etc. What is your perception? I haven't done LC in about a year and a half.
- vanusa 5y ago

donsupreme 5y ago

"everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line." I once felt that way but after leaving FAANG years later, I realized how snobby something like this would sound.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Doesn't make it wrong, though.
- dymk 5y ago
  It is wrong. They care about the number on your paystub, not the company name.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    Surely they take the stability of your job into account.
    - dymk 5y ago
      Credit scores are based on how good you are at paying off your debits, and how consistent your paycheck is. They care about the numbers, not the names.
- jumelles 5y ago
  It is 100% wrong.
CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
I’m not sure what this means. Getting a mortgage and a car loan was easy, a car loan approval took no time at all. Does working at FAANG speed this process up somehow?
- bradly 5y ago

CincinnatiMan 5y ago

What does PSC stand for and what is it? I've seen it here and mentioned on Blind a few times.

kevinventullo 5y ago
Performance Summary Cycle. FB’s semi-annual performance reviews.
- packetslave 5y ago
  yup, at Google it's "perf". Same deal.
- CincinnatiMan 5y ago
  Are they particularly stressful at FB? Capital One did these too when I worked there and I just assumed most companies did them, but maybe I'm wrong on that front.
  - romanhn 5y ago
    Yes, very stressful for both individual contributors and managers. IMO many of FB dysfunctions are attributable directly to PSC and its focus on impact. When promotions and even continued employment are on the line, short-term thinking takes over and every decision is optimized through the lens of the performance review. The great work life balance the author described is far and between in that company.
    - notacoward 5y ago
      3.5 years at Facebook, and concur with everything you said. I'll add two things. (1) You allude to it with "even continued employment" but it deserves to be explicit: "up or out" makes everything about PSC twice as bad as it already is. I wasn't subject to it myself (I was hired at a "terminal" level) but I saw it cause much grief for more junior folks. (2) Mandatory oncall can be "meh" on some teams but absolute hell on others. On my first team (small service) I was in a rotation that had as few as two members at one point. Oncall every other week. On my second team (large service) I was on three rotations for a while. In both cases things could get very intense. Not only no work/life balance either way, but also no time for "impact" on your PSC when you spend the whole time fighting fires, plus cleanup the next week, plus working on follow-up tasks after each SEV review. The combination of these two factors led to many people deferring everything they could from their own shift into the next, plus never working on cleanup or follow-up tasks, because that's the behavior PSC rewards. The intent behind PSC was good - to be quantitative and fair - but in effect I agree that it drove much of FB's internal dysfunction.

underwater 5y ago

I started at Facebook a little before Alex, but left five or so years ago. It remains a highlight of my working life. It's a little sad, but expected, to hear it's become just another tech co. I'm interested to know why you didn't use your network more when looking for new opportunities. Amjad of Replit is an ex Facebook employee, after all.

ipaddr 5y ago
If it was so great why is everyone an ex-employee?
- underwater 5y ago
  During my time there it grew massively and went public. A company with 1,000 engineers is always going to be different from one with 10,000. The scope of work narrowed a lot. There was a shift to focus on review cycles instead did shipping cool stuff and avoiding being crushed by competitors like Google. Towards the end I fell into the trap of fixating on perf reviews and came close to burning myself out after switching roles. Even in the era that I enjoyed, I met people who had a bad experience. Either due to projects that didn't pan out, bad managers, or just not being a good fit for the culture.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    What are the attributes of a successful facebook employee or what type of person fits the culture? Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership?
    - xixixao 5y ago
      > Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership? Absolutely. I would say successful employees find an intersection between their interests+skills and what is needed. That might seem generic but it’s important to realize and spend time focusing on.

dahdum 5y ago

I didn’t see retirement addressed, that would be among my top priorities personally. Unless he’s already financially independent and can retire at will, taking a 30% paycut off FB’s top 5% comp could mean delaying retirement by many years. Given fixed living costs, retirement savings could easily drop by much more than 30%. I’m not disagreeing with his choice, it’s a personal one and he may not want early retirement, but I would find it extremely difficult.

eropple 5y ago
If you like what you do for a living, retirement is less of a factor. And "30% less" is still a truckload of money. I've never worked for a FAANG and I don't live in a particularly cheap area, nor am I particularly budget-conscious, but a comfortable retirement isn't even close to being a problem at an early age.
- chii 5y ago
  Retirement at early age doesn't mean you stop doing things - it means you get to do things without having to regard financial consideration.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Yes. So does a career where you make stupid money almost no matter what you do. I've made less money than most of my contemporaries. I've also taken much more time off to do other things and had much more fun along the way. Sustainability is a real thing. You don't have to wait until "FIRE status" or whatever the cool kids want to sell you podcasts about in order to have a life.
jjulius 5y ago
It's entirely circumstantial and boils down to, "Is it worth sacrificing my [mental health/happiness/whatever] just to retire a couple of years sooner"?
- dahdum 5y ago

erehweb 5y ago

Was interesting that the writer says little about FB's mission and impact on the world - seems like it was not really important to them as a positive or negative. Perhaps part of this is due to writer's spending more time in tools rather than something like NewsFeed?

Aperocky 5y ago
Sometimes Encapsulation is a good idea, even in life.
moonshinefe 5y ago
It's actually why the blog post bothered me, despite everyone heaping praise on it here. "Then there’s the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in media lately, but in everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line." That's the money quote, this person is only thinking about themself and really doesn't consider how their work impacts society or what company they're helping as a priority issue at all. I don't know why people like this are the way they are, it seems to border on sociopathy or greed or something to me ("screw you guys, I got mine.") At times they must have just buried their head in the sand over all the Facebook scandals including helping a freaking genocide. It's crazy, and reminds me a little of "American Psycho" to be honest.
- wanderer_ 5y ago
  Yeah, I find this view to be pretty unfair to the author. He was not directly responsible for things like data policy or anything at Fb. As he said multiple times, he found fulfillment from working on projects with a small group, and from distancing himself from the higher corporate debacles. I don't think he is morally at any fault. Here's another way of looking at it: Fb is so damn big, there's no reason them looking bad to the public should condemn every software developer on their payroll.
  - moonshinefe 5y ago
    This person was helping Facebook make money while the news was filled with stories about them manipulating democracy, enabling genocide and ruining people's mental health. That's cool they were working on tools that weren't directly related on a small team, but the money all funnels to the top and enables this stuff. They knew full well from all the news unless they were completely burying their head in the sand. So no ethical responsibility? I strongly disagree. They could've quit at any time and found dozens of jobs elsewhere with a resume like that. Judging by the post they did after nearly a decade, and only because purely selfish reasons. I was maybe a bit harsh, but come on..

andrew_ 5y ago

I just do not understand why somebody with 20 years of experience would invest that kind of time in leetcode. just say "no" and be done with the BS, and with the kind of financial success the author has enjoyed previously, wait for the right company to come along that doesn't require it. That's the only way the industry is going to fix itself; enough people start saying no.

bcrosby95 5y ago
For me, it's either imposter's syndrome or I just suck. Regardless, I'm worried I won't be able to find a job.
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  It’s the same for me. I’d like to have that kind of confidence, but the bottom line is that I’m extremely replaceable.
thebean11 5y ago
But why? Sure it’s boring, I certainly don’t enjoy doing Leetcode, but if the job requires it I’m not above practicing. It’s not like I’ll have to do it once I get hired.
ativzzz 5y ago
I am casually doing some leetcode in prep for a job search a few months down the line. I've never had to do these problems before, nor do I have a formal CS education (am a senior dev). While many of the hard problems are quite esoteric, IMO being able to easily power through most of the easy/mediums is 100% a sign of developer competency. Even if you don't remember the exact algorithm, being able to build it from the ground up quickly and accurately through reasonining seems like a pretty solid signifier of a quality developer to me.
Handytinge 5y ago
This seems like a very American problem, possibly a Silicon Valley specific one. Not once in my many years in this industry in multiple western countries have I heard of someone being subjigated to such a test. I had to google it to understand the article.

pm90 5y ago

Why would you need several offers if the new job will be paying less than your current position? Can’t you just tell them how much you make and ask them to match that in equity?

localcrisis 5y ago
You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go ±5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess we'll give you $800k then."
ptero 5y ago
I doubt many (any?) startups would match FB's 10-year senior engineer's total comp. That would burn up the startup's cash (and/or ownership) very quickly. I think the main draws at a startup for a post-FAANG senior engineer are feeling good about the product they build (more useful to the world than FB's ads) or the role/environment (less bureaucracy and org process). I am sure there are many exceptions, but I suspect that after 10 years in a senior role at a FAANG money stops being the most important thing you need from a job. My 2c.
- trangon 5y ago
  I’d assume after ten years at FAANG, you’d have a decent amount of money saved up as well.
ec109685 5y ago
I wonder how he valued that equity when determine total comp.

localcrisis 5y ago

> I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower than I expected). That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?

elb0w 5y ago

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just google them. So silly to me.

Aperocky 5y ago
> a valid metric Not a great metric, but is there a replacement? Not everyone has github side projects to see how their code actually looks.
voakbasda 5y ago
Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.
- tofurocks 5y ago
  I don't understand what you mean here - would a company not want a well rounded developer ?
  - scollet 5y ago
    Harder to exploit experience.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    We are expensive, tend to tell the younger devs to tell each other their salaries and not put up with bad management.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    The large companies don't need tens of thousands of system architects. They need tens of thousands of coders who can do what they're told on small parts of a system without fussing too much about the bigger picture. I think that's what OP is referring to—leetcode filters for young developers who don't need to understand all the reasons why they're doing what they're doing.

moneywoes 5y ago

Hope you saw this about Replit OP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

sofixa 5y ago
As if someone with 10 years at Facebook would concern themselves with such trivialities.

fallmonkey 5y ago

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part" This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

Octabrain 5y ago
I totally understand you. I also did something similar recently. In my case, I’m leaving a company I’ve been working in for six months where I’ve been earning a very good salary but the lack of technical challenges, learning and political battles combined with nobody requesting me to deliver anything simply made me feel bored and miserable. Now I’m about to start in a new position from a different place where the salary is not that good (although still pretty decent) but I know from friends that are working there that the environment is much more satisfactory. It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.
Aperocky 5y ago
> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options? The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.
- granshaw 5y ago
  It’s probably that he has to “be available” and so can’t make good use of the working hours where he’s not doing active work It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue

SMAAART 5y ago

> Most recruiters are terrible. They send generic job descriptions if there’s a matching word in your resume. I’m very surprised the market didn’t push the recruiter game up. There’s so much room for improvement! Yeah, why is that? Same for most Realtors.

paulcole 5y ago
It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but same for most people at most jobs. Most people aren’t that great at what they do. They do enough to get by and don’t make a ton of mistakes, but they rightfully don’t give 100%. Source: Me. Am not great at what I do. Don’t give 100%. Do make a number of mistakes. Do enough to get by but not much more.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Because to them it is a numbers game. They try hard to make the interactions seem personal but for the most part to them it is all business. It you're susceptible they'll have you relocate your family across country for an at-will contract knowing retention sucks. As long as they get paid they do not care for the most part. They will also spam the hell out of you for eternity no matter how much you tell them you don't want to do something.
throwaway2333 5y ago
Sales funnels. You can only nudge conversions to each successive "step" so much. Once you've reached diminishing returns, the only thing left to do is get more leads into the funnel -- grind the process out/pick up the phone and dial. Feast or famine jobs also don't lend themselves well to "long-term thinking." If something is working, don't break it, just keep on going and make that paper. If something isn't working, you don't have the time/soundness of mind to figure it out, just keep on going (or else you won't be able to pay your bills). Jobs are a commodity and the only selling point is price/pay -- making it one of the worst things to "sell" (the "best"/easiest things to sell are the antithesis of this).

AlexCoventry 5y ago

What's PSC?

cryptoslug 5y ago
Performance Summary Cycle- performance reviews every 6 months.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  Thanks.

rr808 5y ago

How many companies did he end up applying to? I'm really not sure what is normal. I just applied to 10 companies and did 5 interviews, I heard other people have done hundreds. Or is it best to go 2-3 a month?

ashtonkem 5y ago

> The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation in the market (we’ll get back to that). This makes a lot of other things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant without worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a nicer house, better stuff. That's very normal, and I don't want to condemn the author for this, but this is a trap. If you get used to the consumption that a 5% salary offers you, then you will have an extremely hard time finding a job that's not at the 5% or better compensation. And those other jobs might come with other tradeoffs that make them unpalatable in other ways. Avoiding the hedonic treadmill[0] is a good habit to get into if your compensation goes up. It increases your financial stability, and means that you can take a lower paying job if you decide that it'll make you happier in other ways. 0 - Technical term for how increased spending sets your expectations higher, and quickly stop bringing the rush that they first brought.

dom96 5y ago
I feel this but from a different perspective. As somebody that comes from a working class background, I cannot help but feel like taking any pay cut is a mistake in my life. It’s not that I consume a top 5% salary, it’s that I feel like any offer that isn’t an increase of my current comp is the company trying to screw me over.
notreallyserio 5y ago
Every time I get a raise I make a one time splurge purchase and then look at ways to reduce my periodic spending. Cancel subscriptions, re-play old games, that sort of thing. I figure my spending will naturally rise again (always has, anyway) but not as high as it would have if I let it if I wasn't so cautious.

jchonphoenix 5y ago

This reads as he's in the honeymoon phase of startup world. The politics he mentioned get so much worse in startup world the moment the startup hits a road bump

ur-whale 5y ago

I was expecting at the very least a little bit of self-introspection about the ethical problems of working for a company like FB and how that may have participated in the decision. Nope, article is 100% about author's own well-being and happiness.

anonimamente 5y ago
Exactly the point in my strident post below, that now has a negative value unsurprisingly given the content of many of the replies here. Is it unfairly rude to challenge the ethics of what people choose to do? Is the world not shaped by what we do or even somewhat by our mere participation with what others do? Nothing will get better, and perhaps even worse, if all we care about is our own personal gain.

Researcherry 5y ago

I wonder whether author uses facebook.

notacoward 5y ago
Funny thing: very few of the people I know from working at Facebook actually use the public site to any significant degree. I always found that odd.

endorphine 5y ago

Even though I have 10 years of experience writing, shipping, maintaining and operating production systems for 10k RPS scale and also having OSS contributions in some very popular projects, I'm still intimidated by the LeetCode-style problems. I'm planning to interview for a large company the coming weeks, and I'm truly disappointed that I struggle even on the Easy level. I guess I never needed to solve such issues in my previous jobs (backend, SRE).

denysvitali 5y ago
Don't worry. 90% of the interview processes are broken. Don't take it too personally :)
- shric 5y ago
  I'd like to hear more about the 10% that are not broken :)
  - nfRfqX5n 5y ago
    Stripe asks some practical questions
  - denysvitali 5y ago
    I was just being conservative. From my personal experience 100% of them were. As an interviewer I try to be in the hypothetical 10%, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.

gorgoiler 5y ago

This is an amazing piece of writing. I’m grateful to the author for publishing it, and for the poster bringing it to HN. It’s heartening to see high quality writing on a personal blog. Definitely subscribing.

dom96 5y ago

> To cut the chase, the best offer I got was roughly 70% of what I was making at Facebook. I’ve been there and refused offers because of that. How do you get past this feeling of a company screwing you over unless their offer is higher than your current comp?

iamsaitam 5y ago

Prestige in working for Facebook? I guess ethics isn't a thing for the op in their social circle.

yob22 5y ago

mFixman 5y ago

> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others. I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools. I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy. One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools. It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.

vlovich123 5y ago
Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my experience. Phabricator is miles ahead of anything. Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day. However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.
- mFixman 5y ago
  I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a lot on the last years. Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Googler, opinions are my own. If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.

erwincoumans 5y ago

A very kind and insightful post. PSC = Performance Summary Cycle . At Google/Alphabet we call this Perf , performance reviews, every 6 months. Mobility at different parts of Alphabet is more difficult, you may even have to interview again, switching from X or Waymo or DeepMind to Google.

didip 5y ago
oh, I heard mobility at Google is trivial? I guess that’s just a myth.
- vl 5y ago
  It's trivial to switch to the place nobody wants to go to. But interesting positions on the good teams are immediately filled, and there is a line of very strong people waiting for headcount or schmoozing with director trying to get there.
- erwincoumans 5y ago
  Switching teams within Google is usually easier, but between different Alphabet bets may be more involving.

ricardobayes 5y ago

Out of all the sites I visit on a daily basis, facebook clearly has the worst user experience out of them all, and that's counting the ad-infested local news that have jumping elements before click. Not sure if I'm the victim of some test group, but the page loads so slowly, and stories become pretty much unresponsive. If I click exit on the first story, it just keeps playing at least 4-5 more stories before it eventually closes the page. I wonder if this is actually intended to make people look at more stories. Marketplace is another abomination which feels like it was thrown together by an intern. Useless filters, categorization of items super-bad, and again slow, slow, slow.

mrobot 5y ago

Don't work for these people.

yalogin 5y ago

I dread interviews. I am an engineering manager, a product guy and have a long track record of finding creative solutions to problems, convincing leadership at all levels and executing on it. However, I suck at coding and coming up with solutions on the fly. I need that extra time to think through because I don't have every possible tech solution in my TLB buffers, I need to page them from main memory or even disk sometimes. So I end up failing interviews by default, so much that I stopped trying to move. It helps that I am doing quite well in my current role and am happy, but missing out on growth up the ladder.

onos 5y ago
Same here, in that I’m relatively good at slow thinking - pondering something over many days or weeks etc till I find a good solution. I see prep for interviews as table stakes, and accept it as such. but I still regret that my slow thinking strength can shine in these contexts.

sharker8 5y ago

This post is missing the key detail: is this person taking risks with 'the house's money' (high net worth, can generate passive income) or not? The answer is probably yes having spent that many years at fb, but I found the tone of 'I'll cut to the chase, I took a pay cut' disingenuous. The real questions is 'is this person already high net worth or not'.

golondon 5y ago
I guess with 8 something years at Meta, if the RSUs were not spent stupidly, considering the stock appreciation and the refreshers, it would be safe to say this person's net worth is at least $2M.

vogt 5y ago

I found a lot of value in this. I rarely find the desire to comment on threads with input that amounts just to “great job!”, but to the author: I took a lot of tips and inspiration from this. Thank you for sharing.

logifail 5y ago

> [on health insurance] It’s very comfortable to know that you are likely not going to receive a huge bill for doing an ultra sound for a routine checkup. Just as a comparative data point from the other side of the pond (we're mainland 'yurp): our eldest is currently fighting off some kind of infection with swollen glands and abdominal pain and within the last 10 days I have visited: - our regular doctor twice - [the first time] was referred for ultrasound at another doctor, where he was seen immediately [then] - referral to a paediatrician, where he was seen the next day [and] - he eventually ended up having a complete check-up in the paediatrics department of our nearest hospital, including blood tests. None of that was much fun at all, as any parent will know, thankfully so far none of it uncovered anything bad (thank $deity), but happily all of it was funded from general taxation and deductions that everyone here contributes to. Which is a relief. Next time I'm tempted to whinge about how high the tax rates are here, I need to remember not to.

ncmncm 5y ago

NB, Replit is the outfit that did this: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

AlexCoventry 5y ago
Replit's position there seems reasonable to me. Companies would be a lot less enthusiastic about hiring developers if it came with the risk that someone could take internal designs and open source them with no repercussions.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  If your company's value proposition can be replicated by an intern in a weekend, you have a much bigger problem than interns. Companies' enthusiasm for hiring developers worries me not even a little. Of much greater moment, IStM, is the character, or lack of, demonstrated by company officers. That CEO's final e-mail lays him all out. I will certainly not be applying to work at Replit.
dragosmocrii 5y ago
hmm, those emails are cringey

throwaway_merig 5y ago

Here's what I've experienced over the past few years. I went to work as a SWE at a large tech company and was paid handsomely, think SWE L5 level at Google. For almost 2 years, I had almost nothing to do, no software to write, no green fields to explore, no products to develop. I'm in a large unit and there's unit level funding with silly goals that the whole unit (hundreds of people) has to achieve. I have consulted here and there for specific projects, but for the most part I am left alone. Which means I have a lot of free time in my days and my vacations, official and unofficial, have been of the "gap year" or late 19th century bon viveur type: visits to major Asian capitals, beach life in Turkey, adventures all over the world. My ratings have been more than good, but I often wonder if I should stop this grand experiment in paid time off and take a new step in my career. But where? There are few companies that pay as much and it's pretty (or very!) stressful living. Then, I'd have to go on the interview circuit, studying for a couple of months to prepare (wtf!) being judged by half-asleep people who couldn't care less if I get into the company or not. And why? I enjoy my free time and have lots of activities, hobbies and interests that I love. Certainly the current state of affairs could end, but the same could be said of any "experience". Contrary to what many others in the tech industry apparently think, if I didn't get paid, I would never work one second for someone else. It's all a transaction and I'm not particularly passionate about my job. I don't hate it, but if it were to disappear as a profession tomorrow, I wouldn't cry.

deep_lol 5y ago

The author leaves so clearly work at FB sucks, yet he spends most of the article praising the company. There are leadership changes, reorgs and direction churn yet it is somehow very easy to follow the career ladder by "just executing the plan". People leave being burnt out and yet he somehow managed to only work "few hours" per day.

29athrowaway 5y ago
A person that dedicates time to learning how to be efficient at their job can in some roles achieve more in less time.
- deep_lol 5y ago
  I find it hard to believe. Learning also takes time and in software development you need to learn constantly. You can optimize some type of work, maybe you can code faster, but others are fast too! Remember, everyone around you passed the LeetCode test. How would you optimize meetings, communication with the team, reading/reviewing other peoples code?
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    > How would you optimize meetings, communication with the team, reading/reviewing other peoples code? 1. Having purposeful, moderated meetings with minutes and deliverables that can be evaluated. When you force people to deliver something, and when that something will be subject to open evaluation, meetings stop being "free" and people that see "meetings as a job" will quickly give their 2 weeks notice and go away to the next company that will sponsor their lazy lifestyle. Managers are employees too, and their performance is more important than the performance of the people they manage. 2. Communication with the team is solved by verifying communication. At the end of a meeting, ask a random person in the room if they understood the presentation. At the end of a standup meeting, ask a random team member what someone else was doing. You will be surprised with the results. And people will grow around this process by becoming better communicators, and by owning their responsibility as attendees. 3. For code reviews, you should start by automating as much as you can with static analysis, creating a coding standard and documenting good practices, then adding a human at the end to verify that humans are not cheating by suppresing rules. Also, make sure that the feedback is about the code, is fair and never gets personal. The main takeaway is: verify everything. Take nothing for granted.

bigyellow 5y ago

Guy works at Facecrook for a decade and all he can muster is a selfish article about compensation and his precious "work life balance". Couldn't even say a few words about the ethical ramifications of this "contributions" to society by working there. No soul, no mindfulness, just pure ego.

Hakashiro 5y ago
I get this all the time. I can only ever dream of joining Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, ethics aside, but because I’m an immigrant from a no-name university, nobody gives a fuck about us of course. Americans be like: “man, this 400k USD job is so boring, I need better work-life balance” Meanwhile Europeans have to make do with 60k EUR jobs with zero work-life balance but hey, at least we have free healthcare, right? Free healthcare that costs us half our salary. Cool.

romanhn 5y ago

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations. I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.

beering 5y ago
On the flip side the huge number of new hires will drag down the performance bar. They can’t give bad ratings to too many people at once. The other thing is that for many people, getting a normal Meets All rating is totally fine. You don’t need to push yourself to Exceeds level.