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On Leaving Facebook

frantic.im

431–440 of 645 posts

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#431

> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others. I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools. I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated mess…

Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my experience.

Phabricator is miles ahead of anything.

Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day.

However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options? The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some s…

>> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying > This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna m…

Or you can not tie your identity to work as much as you do, and feel instant relief?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work like that. You have to be "on" even if you aren't working. That means you feel like you can't commit to anything substantial since you feel like you should be working. Fucking off on the internet is a coping mechanism to numb the pain of being in this limbo where you aren't working; but, feel like you should be working because you are getting paid a lot. In retrospect it's easy to see that there's thi…

And even if you can manage to find things to do to occupy the time and appear busy, you'll be lucky if management considers the importance of your work and schedule it with the rest of your workload. One too many times have I had to find something to do and spend weeks or months on that thing only to have management tell me to immediately stop working on it even though that thing was actually important. This may not…

I'm on the part of my career journey where I've realized you're _JUST_ exchanging time for money. They want you to work on something that gets thrown away? It paid for the mortgage, it made a car payment, it's thrown away JUST like 99.9% of the stuff I did for the first 10 years of my career.

It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.

Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options? The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some s…

>> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying > This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna m…

Right. "Just learn k8s, bruh." It's like ok, maybe, but if the problem isn't so much a lack of work then you're really juat apinning your wheels learning for the sake of it.

Another issue is evaluating whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It's easy to say "learn a new skill bruh", but what happens when you spend the time learning something, you get hired at a new job relevant to that skill only to run into your original problem all over again? The risk of that is significant, and in the world of tech it's extremely difficult to know what a position at a company is really like because so many of us are kissing ass, and we are avoidant of any real criticism or confrontation.

None of the argumenta here are necessarily wrong, but speaking as if there are clear solutions that those complaining aren't seeing and calling this a first world problem is pretty dismissive.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last two years of my life was this. Sitting at home with nothing meaningful to do but still having to park my butt in my kids bedroom.

So why didn't you use your time better and invest in other skills you want to have?

"Why don't you just not be sad?"

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#436
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.

Hard level are really rare in FAANG, based on my friend who recently went through Google interviews. More like easy/medium. It actually sounded fairly easy to me, he only prepped for a month without any prior leetcode experience. I think finance tend to ask the medium/hard questions more so.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't you use your time better and invest in other skills you want to have?

"Why don't you just not be sad?"

I didn't say or even imply that and it's unfair to interpret it that way.

Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way to win is to do something else with your time.

It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is not cool.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#438

"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…

These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.

Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.

I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.

Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.

And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)

They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.

(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#439
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards). It's weird because the preparation is often the thing we're not doing in our day to day. I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cra…

[deleted]

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#440
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?

Not a negative thing at all despite the perception du jour in the media.
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