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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 fro

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.
  - romanhn 5y ago
    Thank you for the extra detail. I will add that PSC exerts plenty of pressure at terminal levels as well, since two halves of Meets Most rating are likely to end your career there. Lots of weasel words from leadership about how it's not an official policy, but it's near impossible to recover from given that at that point your manager's PSC depends on getting the low performer off the team. Really curious how it works now with the cycle moving to annual cadence. I really doubt though that two years of Meets Most is going to be acceptable.

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.
- romanhn 5y ago
  Thank you for the extra detail. I will add that PSC exerts plenty of pressure at terminal levels as well, since two halves of Meets Most rating are likely to end your career there. Lots of weasel words from leadership about how it's not an official policy, but it's near impossible to recover from given that at that point your manager's PSC depends on getting the low performer off the team. Really curious how it works now with the cycle moving to annual cadence. I really doubt though that two years of Meets Most is going to be acceptable.