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How to succeed at Meta

• mooreds 4y ago
  Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    There are ALWAYS either hidden or visible metrics and as soon as you figure them out, you can game them. Sometimes the metric is "how much does my manager like me", other times its stack-ranking and other times again its "business value that was assigned to stories you finished".
    • Move37 4y ago
      Really like the concept of hidden metrics here.
  • amelius 4y ago
    Sounds like China's social credit system.
• randshift 4y ago
  Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.
  • davewritescode 4y ago
    Blind self selects for people who want to brag about how much they're paid and people who think they're underpaid who want to validate those assumptions. It leads to a toxic community. There's so much more to work than compensation and this post proves it. Being on a good team is 100x more important than what you're paid. Good teams elevate engineers and give you a better career path in your future. I make SL level compensation and non-SL level companies because my value is high, not because my employer can overpay for mediocrity. There's too many engineers who think the secret to success is to get hired at the right company and then they just sail on to a dream career. I've worked with enough people from those big companies who left, some after long careers, to know that it's simply not true. A lot of people see the impactful work that happens at these big companies and assume that's the impact they'll make as well. What they don't get is those big companies literally poach PhDs or buy smaller companies to get that kind of talent.
    • ohgodplsno 4y ago
      For many devs, especially non SV people (or even non US people), a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It's "I never could have ever gotten this, and not only is my life set, the people around me are too". Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my life (or, well, things I actually enjoy doing, not for a megacorporation). Being an elevated engineer doesn't pay the bills.
      • morelandjs 4y ago
        Very true. Golden handcuffs is an option, but you can also just liberate yourself from financial stress and help the people around you who need it. Not everyone is chasing a BMW or bragging rights.
      • yodsanklai 4y ago
        > a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It doesn't get you that far. Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to get such a TC. Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough there, but considering ageism and burning out, you're not in the same leagues as let say doctors, or people who inherited 1 million after selling their parents house.
        • za3faran 4y ago
          How much do you think doctors make? Unless they specialize and spend another 5+ years pursuing it, they're in the 100K-250K range anyway depending on location.
          • sfashset 4y ago
            Sorry but you’re completely wrong about both your 5 years comment and your income range. For a more realistic look at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/ https://www.offerdx.com/
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    Well, it's not like people join Meta to "make the world a better place" lol.
  • aantix 4y ago
    If you're working for someone else's dream, what else is there? "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in the world. Yes, I want to take two big family vacations a year, live in a great neighborhood/ school district, and give my kids extra opportunities. Optimizing for "TC" makes sense.
    • karamanolev 4y ago
      Being an IC doesn't inherently conflict with enjoying your work. Yes, TC is important and as you pointed out, it gives you options to do other things. OTOH, thinking that "someone else's dream" must necessarily be an awful daily grind is a folly - many people enjoy software engineering and it doesn't bother them that it's "someone else's dream". Being technically challenged brings them joy. Going one step further, you can actually enjoy the mission and the impact of your work, so not only is the process nice, but the result as well.
    • davewritescode 4y ago
      This is nihilistic and short sighted way to see the world. Being highly visible inside and outside my company has opened up more opportunity long term in terms of being offered consulting roles and opportunities in early stage startups then being a worker bee at Amazon for 2 years until you burnout. I know many people who have taken that route and it's one of many paths. If you're a good engineer and can sell your work, contribute visibly to open source projects in your area of expertise and can present at conferences you'll have more opportunities than a worker bee at FAANG. Someone out there is building the next big thing and if you're focusing just on getting the biggest paycheck you'll be watching from the outside.
      • mataug 4y ago
        If optimizing for TC is a nihilistic way to see the world, your take is naïve. The reality is that even if someone is a good engineer, they may not always have the right opportunities, they may struggle to sell their work, or they may have other challenges that we cannot foresee. With such unpredictability in mind, all advice here on HN is anecdotal, and everyone has to optimize for their specific situation. Optimizing for TC isn't necessarily bad, it may be the only option at a better life for some people.
  • yodsanklai 4y ago
    It's the anti LinkedIn where everybody is kissing asses.
  • 22SAS 4y ago
    Blind is mostly Indian and some Chinese. Two cultures that care a shit load about money and prestige. I would know, I am from one of those cultures.
  • jjtheblunt 4y ago
    What is "TC" ?
    • LaffertyDev 4y ago
      Total Compensation. It lets people compare compensation across companies and normally includes Salary + Options + Bonuses. Different companies offer different mixes, so just relying on salary alone is not a good metric for comparison.
    • dvirsky 4y ago
      Total Compensation
  • dvirsky 4y ago
    I avoid it at all costs most of the time. Whenever I do break and go there I usually get so depressed.
  • wiseowise 4y ago
    You’re shocked that people who work for money care only about money?
  • carabiner 4y ago
    Search "thank you blind." It's incredible how much additional TC has improved people's lives. They can cover their kids' tuition and take care of ailing parents. Even wellness programs at the better companies have helped people lose weight and avoid chronic illness. The advice to get there is toxic for a toxic world. This is why the hyper politically correct LinkedIn is so useless in comparison.
• jabroni_salad 4y ago
  thats every big company. Eventually there will be someone who makes a spreadsheet, sorts by a column, and makes a decision based on what they see. Or, perhaps they will send it to a management consultant who has been in the workforce for all of 6 months to make a powerpoint about the columns. Make sure you have a good rank on as many columns as possible.
  • zffr 4y ago
    In my experience, Apple was not like this. I was on a user-facing team, and we hardly looked at metrics related to our product's usage. In some cases we didn't even have meaningful metrics to look at.
    • TimSchumann 4y ago
      Might I point out that this may be too far in the ‘opposite direction’?
  • laweijfmvo 4y ago
    similar to leetcode-style interviews, no one likes it, but when pressed no one can really come up with a better method (that doesn't open the company up for discrimination lawsuits, which is sadly important)
    • mejutoco 4y ago
      A take home test is such an alternative. I have seen several companies offering either a technical challenge live or a take home test.
      • MikeTheRocker 4y ago
        This has its own problems. For example, it's easy to cheat and it disadvantages people who don't have a lot of time to do homework assignments, which is common for parents.
  • binarycrusader 4y ago
• grocer-eyewear 4y ago
  The sad part is it may very well be true, at least I don't know. The issue is, if you put in effort to make valuable contributions, and your manager doesn't care at all about them, and harp on the fact that your metrics aren't met so you'll get 0 RSU, 1% Bonus, and 2% hike, well then things like this will happen. Which is not wrong, but is eternally sad. The smart people which solved problems and made Meta/Amazon/MS/Apple such giants, that kind of generation might never reach these companies due to these things. I maybe wrong, but who knows. Blind = TC or GTFO :D Kids these days.
  • belval 4y ago
    Can't speak about Meta, but my team at AWS does incentivize more complex longer-term projects. Improving metrics and getting short-term wins is pretty good if you want to get the L4 (entry) to L5 promotion, but you will most likely not make senior SDE without having some more complex projects that shows you know how to collaborate with other teams and juggle requirements. That person would make L5 at AWS easily, but L6 will be harder without a somewhat lenient manager/reviewer.
  • strulovich 4y ago
    You’re correct, but there’s a less cynical look at it. If you want to work on long term stuff, and have no metrics or data to show for it - then you need to get your manager (and team, and others) on board with it. If you can’t convince people around you this is important, then the company can’t figure out how to differentiate you from someone doing useless long term work. This is what a lot of people call politics (especially if they’re not succeeding in it), but for me it’s just part of the system barring any better alternatives that will allow organizing a big company.
    • grocer-eyewear 4y ago
      That is a very interesting take, I haven't thought about things from that perspective. Thank you very much, for such a POV.
• trenning 4y ago
  This is the SDE equivalent of an Amazon warehouse worker.
  • cm42 4y ago
    The Real Tragedy Nobody Wants To Talk About was the unfortunate decision to buy a flavored soda water machine to cut down on plastic water bottle waste.
• me_again 4y ago
  Ah, the unassailable confidence required to work in one lower-level position at a company for 5 months and believe you know "How To Succeed" there.
  • smrtinsert 4y ago
    Ops post is a sarcastic take not a true guide (at least to my read)
    • jmk123 4y ago
      Having worked there for a while, I'm not sure I agree with your take.
      • eclipxe 4y ago
        It’s clearly sarcastic. See the point where he says “this is actually good advice” indicating that the rest is not.
        • theIV 4y ago
          That was not my read from OP. I took it to mean that they realize that most of this advice is not universally good/not applicable everywhere, but that single point is.
    • me_again 4y ago
      That seems possible, but satirically posting self-aggrandizing BS on Blind is like satirically posting Pepe memes on 4Chan.
      • lovich 4y ago
        I haven’t used blind but that sounds contextually appropriate for 4chan
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• aaron_m04 4y ago
  I wonder how many people at Meta are like this person.
  • shaftway 4y ago
    This was basically how my manager laid it out for me on day 1.
• jlarocco 4y ago
  Hate to burst the ego bubble, but hitting metrics is what you were hired to do.
  • uoaei 4y ago
    Put differently: if you were hired for a certain job, and your personal convictions don't align with that job such that you don't identify as someone who wants to "hit those metrics", find another job.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      The managers could've been more upfront about that and what those metrics are during the hiring process!
      • jlarocco 4y ago
        On the other hand, as a potential employee it doesn't hurt to ask during the hiring process if it matters to you. For a large enough company, it's a given that there will be metrics, and a lot of people don't care much what they are, so it's not always something to spend time on in the interview.
  • SentientAtom 4y ago
    You are hired to fulfil a job role based on your experience. Metrics are just a tool that tries to highlight your effectiveness for corpos too large to have oversight in the actual productivity of the workforce.
• eh9 4y ago
  Leave
  • pcurve 4y ago
    Hey, he/she figured it out. No need to lead :-)
• y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as if the company itself is not solely concerned with profit. To top it off, most of these companies are on some shitlist for abusing their work-force or slave labor in developing countries. There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money and I'm surprised to see the current attitude in this thread around that. I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven these days. BTW the person is not literally saying to do these things. They are using humor as a means to illustrate how ridiculous it is working under those conditions.
  • GCA10 4y ago
    "This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase" So true. Family members have seen it in pharma. It's endemic in retail banking. Large parts of media/entertainment have gone this way, too. The core ideas of being your own PR department -- and hopping from one short-horizon metric to another are just how these places hand out recognition, promotions, etc. At the better ones, innovative work will be tolerated, too. But the easiest path is pretty much what OP describes.
  • yodsanklai 4y ago
    > I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven these days I think this is my biggest disappointment working for a big tech company. I don't feel I'm "part of the family" at all. Very high turnover, people come and go, some are fired, burn out, or move to another job. I'd love to feel I'm part of something, but it's not the case. Plus most products are very questionable. Very few people do work on something meaningful anyway. It's all about optimising some metrics. The same way you need to leetcode to get recruited, you're expected to check some boxes once you're in if you want to stay.
    • 4y ago
• 121789 4y ago
  this would work for like 3 months. the real advice is more nuanced and probably not Meta-specific 1. aggressively fend off low impact commitments or projects (there are always a million ideas and requests for help floating around) 2. make sure you have a good relationship with your manager, your team, and other teams that you need to work closely with 3. work in an area that either clearly makes the company money, or is critical to the business in some other way 4. make sure your work is publicly shared, but you don't have to go overboard. if your team does something valuable or interesting, write about it
  • mi_lk 4y ago
    real answer right here based on my experience
• DethNinja 4y ago
  I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this. I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
  • glomgril 4y ago
    let me know if you find out
  • feifan 4y ago
    You'd probably want to look for small companies making something that impresses you (which may or may not be public). Hopefully they stay small for a while and preserve that culture.
  • endtime 4y ago
    No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free. But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.
    • woooooo 4y ago
      Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're trying to solve.
      • potatolicious 4y ago
        Agreed, having been on the inside at Google - they are not good at producing customer impact. The orgs are so large, so diffuse, and upper management so disconnected from on-the-ground execution that it's really all about gaming metrics. Even people who still want to produce customer impact have to play the game of stuffing their feature into a metrics-shaped-box so their projects don't get shut down. Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company. re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed. I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.
• p0pcult 4y ago
• endtime 4y ago
  People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get promoted past L5 (or even maybe past L4) with a short term-focused approach like this. And, at least at the lower levels (up to L5), you only need to be self-promotional every 6-12 months for perf.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6 expectations.
    • klabb3 4y ago
      > literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The promo committee and even your manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail. In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen. Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate their abilities and over-engineer things that break because it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the first place.
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
        And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be almost a hard blocker here.
        • klabb3 4y ago
          I'm saying that each criteria is open to interpretation, so you can very well satisfy any of them if you play your cards right and craft a good narrative. I've seen directors and VPs take on new projects, get praised, hold talks, get promoted and then the project is abandoned a year later. Failing upwards is very much a thing in FAANG. Not always, but it happens.
• ConSeannery 4y ago
  The post is flippant but a decent strategy. Your goal (whether you're a total comp+promo seeker or just looking to float) is to arm your manager with as much ammunition as possible to argue on your behalf during calibrations. Project impact can be easily argued against, especially when your area of work is difficult or not well understood by other engineering teams, not to mention that coming up with undeniably impactful projects every 6-12 months is not possible on many teams. Lines of code and moving efficiency or cost metrics cannot be argued against. It's not the only way to "succeed" at Meta but it's certainly the easiest way
• dehrmann 4y ago
  > Write small diffs (pull requests) (this one is actually good advice) I work at Meta, my opinions are my own, and I'm speaking to this point in general, not specific to my time at Meta. Small, incremental changes are great because they're easier to review, easier to verify, and safer to roll out. What's important during the review is seeing the whole picture. It's possible for changes that are locally sane to produce something globally goofy. I've also seen changes for larger projects with multiple reviewers miss an important piece because each reviewer assumed it was a change the other person looked at.
  • vsareto 4y ago
    I think it comes down to team/company preference. I would really prefer a culture that allowed (at least) 2-8 hours for a larger code review of features. That way you can block time out for it and digest things. A company culture has to allow that. People get reluctant to review the large PRs because they know they have to other work to do. A bunch of small model/service/repository PRs seems tedious to me. If I want the consider the whole picture, I also have to go back to each PR.
  • dnissley 4y ago
    What I've really taken to heart is telling a story of my changes using a stack of diffs. A random one line change to some sketchy function is a whole diff so that you can call it out as something to be aware of, etc.
• google234123 4y ago
  There’s a chance this is just some intern trolling.
  • Move37 4y ago
    Highly doubt it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• hodornah 4y ago
  > Joined about 5 months ago as E5 and I think I’ve cracked the meta culture. I would not put any faith in this. Companies typically operate at a year cycle and are different depending upon level. The author sounds overly arrogant and just gonna lead people down the wrong path. > This is the only way to succeed here. Complete bullshit. This is the red flag that says "ignore everything this guy is saying, you're wasting your time."
• srvmshr 4y ago
  If everybody follows this recipe, then it will fail at the author's currently desired idea of acceptable performance. Goodhart's law states the target shouldn't be a metric ideally but this is sort of a meta-metric to succeed at Meta. (Pun was unintentional)
• mathgladiator 4y ago
  A lot of this depends on management, so this can be a good strategy especially for product engineers. For infrastructure engineers, this is a recipe for disaster which is fantastic because it always explodes in your face which attracts long term thinkers who work well with stake holders to build a long term strategy. I say this as I led two multi-year complete re-architectures and took from E6 to E8. My final architecture before trying out Oculus was published at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572 I'm retired now and building my own lifestyle company.
• Move37 4y ago
  I have worked at two big companies (8k+ and 500k+ Employees) in my life and it is sad, but I can confirm. If you want, you can get by amazingly with very little effort there. As long as you get attention for your work, you will stay. In investment banking (my roommate works there) people call it 'face time'. They stay in the office late to get in facetime. I hate the concept of it, but sadly it is true. 2 ways to succeed at huge companies - do work they can't ignore (at one of the companies I was, I was doing Business Dev work and I outperformed my peers by 200x - I was able to chill a lot visibly after a couple of big deals, but I still succeeded due to performance) - do average or below average work, but communicate it great and get in 'face time' without actually doing something.
• proc0 4y ago
  While this may be true, it's also the problem with large software companies. This is why often they create products that don't meet user expectations despite a large effort. This is prioritizing appearance over substance, something that is common for business minded people like sales or managers, and is no surprise large companies are taken over by this mentality. In my opinion roles have to reflect their area of expertise when it comes to career success. Engineers should be rewarded for the solutioning and technical knowledge (for the most part). That list should look very different for each role.
  • SentientAtom 4y ago
    But everyone looked so damned productive in the analytics captures we ran with KPIs, milestones, and reports! Too bad it is a forest for the trees situation where everything granular is lost and no one is making sure the "spirit" of the roles are being fulfilled. Just becomes a group effort to play the numbers instead of accomplishing the actual goals of the project.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  This is why I don't work for large companies. I don't want the stress or to play the bullshit games. My last company tried to pretend it was larger than it was and introduced KPIs. I pushed back hard but had little control over it. I argued that if we were going to be judged on KPIs then that's all we would spend our time on. Commits matter? Guess I'm committing every few lines. Bugs found matter? Guess I better backchannel with QA to prevent a real bug getting logged since I'll get dinged. Story points uncompleted matter? Guess I'll drop the points I take so I never worry about not finishing everything. It gamifies everything and not in a good way. Just like this post says, it doesn't matter what is best long-term or what is good for company/customer, all that matters is what you are graded on.
  • SilverBirch 4y ago
    I've worked for a number of large companies, and it doesn't have to be like this. It absolutely can be like this, but it depends what you want. You can plough your own furrow and be nicely rewarded for it and be in a very secure situation. What is described in this article is the sort of behaviour that'll get you through 1-2 years, but fairly quickly people will spot what kind of person you are. This post sort of implicitly views management as NPCs, they're not. They have their own things going on, but they do pick up on things eventually and it gets difficult to change their mind, it's pretty hard to shake that reputation so you'd better move on quick. You can do something similar - build more long term reputation, influence across teams etc. and that'll pay off in the longer term. Or you can say "I'm going to do it my way" and put your priorities first, work on what you think is valuable, and if you really succeed generally you will be recognised - these hacks are easy ways to advance, not the only way. All of these are different games you can play at Big Corp. But you don't have to play them, and you can choose your own strategy, but the basline is high pay, low risk, and you can always walk away with 0 guilt, and that's not a terrible place to be.
• danbrooks 4y ago
  Former Meta employee here - only slightly exaggerated.
• Balgair 4y ago
  Perhaps the Gervias Principle can show insights into the script here. Per Rao's analysis, the poster isn't the sociopath (Rao's term) that they make themselves out to be. I'd say they would fit better as one of the clueless (Rao's term, again); thinking that they are making an impact and gaming the system. They seem, per my reading of Rao, to just be mercilessly hitting metrics that their sociopath bosses have set out; being the nice little carbon control rods in the nuclear reactor of capitalism. To Zuck, this is great news (again, using Rao's lens) Personally, it reads as tongue in cheek. But trying to use the lenses of the Gervais Principle is always a dark and fun little exercise. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
• undoware 4y ago
  Also true at MSFT
• c7b 4y ago
  > Joined 5 months ago Let's see how long the author will last with this strategy.
• cavisne 4y ago
  Maybe I've been in big tech for too long but this actually seems like reasonable advice to me (delivered in a snarky way). Big tech companies move slow technically, but move fast in organization structure. A "long term" project often means nothing ever gets done, a management chain change happens, and it all goes to nothing. Metrics are never perfect, but it beats hand wavy claims of success, normally if a change is useful there is some metric that will show it. Honestly, the default "success" in big tech is the scope being reduced so many times that literally nothing happens and the PM's and management treat it like a win. Finally testing... It's already easy enough to get nothing done in a big tech company but test code can take this to another level. You can join a team, write a big design document about some testing framework, spend 6 months implementing it, then leave the team just in time for the next reinvention of the test framework. And the whole time you were never at risk of deploying anything to production.
• Ava4312 4y ago