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On Leaving Facebook

frantic.im

51–60 of 645 posts

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#51
post #29
post #11

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?

Yes absolutely go work at Meta. The person in the post had worked there for ten years; they’re likely a millionaire. It’s very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven’t done so yet, it will keep your motivation up.

It does seem like a challenge. And even though I only know a couple people there they have nothing but good things to say.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.

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.

You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interv…

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,…

> 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 :-)

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#54
post #11

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?

Unpopular opinion: Facebook is widely disliked by the loudest voices in the room (for good reason), but the vast majority of people still just treat it like a fancy forum. It's not going to stain your CV. Plus, Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-company especially now that's a formal distinction. I imagine it's still relatively cool to work on Instagram, for example.

Thats an interesting distinction. I've heard nothing about working at IG specifically. Wonder how different it is.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#55
post #31

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?

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."

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#56
post #22

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,…

On the other hand, one could easily work at Facebook for 10 years and have enough saved up to retire immediately depending on what their living expenses look like. So taking a 30% paycut to work on something that you find more interesting is less about being able to retire and more about working on something interesting until you decide that you'd rather retire.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#57
post #22

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,…

I find it kind of fascinating how into the idea of early retirement many people on this site are. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it as such, but… I don’t really get it. I don’t think I actually know anyone who has early-retired. What would you do with yourself? Is it not better to work for a longer time at a job you like than a shorter time at a higher paying one that you dislike?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#58
post #27
post #12

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 minut…

Are questions of the hard type really that common? Thought it was mainly medium.

Don't know about FB specifically, but in Bezosland they apparently are, according to this proud Amazonian, at least:

https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-always-ask-leetcode-hard-7S...

Smells like a troll - but perhaps only "partially" so.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(throwaway account for the obvious reason) I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?" The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience:…

Well of course we won’t say that to your face! But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.

So if an employee determines that they have a moral problem with Facebook, you will not let them escape?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#60
post #35
post #22

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,…

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.

Retirement at early age doesn't mean you stop doing things - it means you get to do things without having to regard financial consideration.
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