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On Leaving Facebook

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Re: On Leaving Facebook

#391

Post by geraldwhen »

sockgrant wrote: post #122
elb0w wrote: post #79

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 goo…

I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about someone being hired that couldn’t write simple code. It’s easy to study leet code, and it’s relevant because it shows the interviewer you can write code. I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes. It was fine. It tests code and knowledge as opposed to just algorithms and tricks. I dunno I’ve always felt that the people who can’t leet code are the…

I run feature code interviews. There are no tricks, just data modeling, simple logic, and automated tests.

I am exceptionally good at algorithms problems and I recognize it is not a useful skill I want to filter on when hiring. A dev team of 20 may only need a few to really understand algorithms to look over relevant pull requests. and even then such situations may be rare

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#392

Post by denysvitali »

shric wrote: post #387
denysvitali wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry. 90% of the interview processes are broken. Don't take it too personally :)

I'd like to hear more about the 10% that are not broken :)

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.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#393

Post by blocked_again »

jakear wrote: post #170
blocked_again wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends who retired at age 25. Retiring early should be the number one focus you have in your life. Everything else is bullshit, noise and propoganda.

Then what? Three options: never work; work for yourself; work for someone else. Each has its costs and benefits. To assume that one path is the ideal state for absolutely everyone is naïveté beyond belief.

Sure. But then you are making a decision based truely on what you want to do with your life. Not the same as people working for a company because they have to and that's their only way to survive.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#394

Post by dom96 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #305

> 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…

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.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#395

Post by dom96 »

> 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?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#397

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #308
voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a successful developer well past middle age, I find this to be nonsense. The most common complaint I hear around this is "yeah, that discriminates against people who don't have time to grind to do the preparation." Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed profes…

I think some of the weirdness is that orchestra musicians at the very least demonstrate skill reflective of the job, and doctors and lawyers only have to get the license once. Software is in this weird category of interviewing being it’s own technical domain that needs dedicated study, of which no amount of experience or prior success graduates you from.

Additionally, I find the logic behind this strange. It implies that just because some people can afford to sacrifice that this setup isn’t discriminatory. But the criticism is that some demographics are disproportionately unable to sacrifice. Discriminatory doesn’t mean no on in that demographic is able to afford to dedicate whatever resources towards the thing. In fact systems of discrimination often work better when there’s a model minority or “one of the good ones” that can be pointed to as an example as to why a discriminatory system isn’t really a problem.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#398

Post by bipendulum »

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…

Definitely for me too.

I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right decision.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#399

Post by notacoward »

romanhn wrote: post #165
CincinnatiMan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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