Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Leaving Facebook

frantic.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 645 posts

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#141

Post by yumraj »

zionic wrote: post #105
throwaway3137 wrote: post #23

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:…

> 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?" Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.

Exactly. I cannot trust folks who have spent more than 1-2 years at FB to make ethical decisions and I will not hire them.

Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB.

If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company.

But, that’s me.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#142

Post by zebraflask »

fallmonkey wrote: post #94

"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 t…

I think these kinds of complaints are interesting compared to other HN posts about - take your pick - startups trying to keep the lights on, startups closing their doors, bootcamp attendees looking for their first job, etc.

Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#143

Post by rcheu »

jackblemming wrote: post #8

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

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.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#144

Post by mizzao »

zionic wrote: post #127
comp_throw7 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outli…

> I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck. Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned…

Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making.

I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time.

It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#145

Post by shopkins »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #108
zionic wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. My thoughts? Screw ‘em. They aren’t worth your skill set. I’m not joking, fuck these people. The paycheck they give you won’t make you happy, what will however is not working for these scumbags.

I know a bunch of highly skilled people who would never have trouble finding work at other companies who say they love working at Facebook. I also know a lot of people who use it and think it's a great tool for keeping in touch and communicating with friends and family and the social, hobby, interest and volunteer groups they're in. I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the things it does very much,…

"Most corporations" don't do global surveillance on the scale Facebook does. It's that simple.

It's not about 100% purity. Just not doing this one little, tiny, fundamental-to-their-entire-business thing.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#146

Post by smallerfish »

jakear wrote: post #93
smallerfish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Travel, surf, garden, build and fly drones, make music, enjoy time at the beach, sculpt metal, write interesting programs that occur to me, write a novel, play poker... I could go on. You'd rather be working? You only have 40 or 50 years left on the planet and then that's...it.

I think the critique is that you should be perfectly able to do all those thing and more, while working, if you have a job that properly respects work/life balance. On the other hand, if you spend a decade or two constantly grinding on work at the expense of all else, so that when you’re 40 you can do those things, you might find that your body isn’t up for the task.

Perhaps, but it's about tradeoffs. If you retire in your late 50s or 60s, your body is into decline at that point, however fit your lifestyle has been. The goal of early retirement is about being free of the need to put in time for somebody else's business while you're still in a condition to lead an active lifestyle doing things that you enjoy doing.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#147

Post by Godel_unicode »

mercutio2 wrote: post #34
throwaway3137 wrote: post #23

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.

Taking you at your word that you do this, I'm very glad I don't work with you. I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management, and then punishes them for wanting to leave that same management. Seems pretty biblical, in the original sin sense.

The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#148

Post by Wiseacre »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #103
pkdpic wrote: 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?

No, it looks good on your resume. The type of clown who would get upset at you working for Facebook is not someone you want to work for anyway so consider that another plus. Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will never face up to the fact that the companies they work f…

If they do face up to the fact, then that means they are not necessarily clowns. Some orgs do have ethical standards.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#149

Post by zionic »

kbrackbill wrote: post #77
pkdpic wrote: 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?

If you can stomach it, you should absolutely do it. Having one of the tech giants on your resume has definitely been a strong positive in my experience and you can't beat the comp.

Counterpoint: if you can avoid it keep FAANG off your resume.

I’ve always made sure to hit top-tier pay and a FAANG entry on your CV is an instant disqualification.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#150

Post by gryn »

rsynnott wrote: post #57
dahdum wrote: 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?

'early retirement' doesn't mean sit down and do nothing.

for me personally it mean getting the opportunity to not be shackled by money.

you can spend the rest of your life working on whatever project/idea you want without it ever needing to be perverted by money in order to sustain yourself.

a lot of problems/services solved by many business would be more effective for both sides if the business didn't have as a goal first generating profit and then solve stated problem second (or further down the list of priorities)

Post reply on HN