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On Leaving Facebook

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Re: On Leaving Facebook

#441

Post by ipaddr »

underwater wrote: post #335
ipaddr wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was so great why is everyone an ex-employee?

During my time there it grew massively and went public. A company with 1,000 engineers is always going to be different from one with 10,000. The scope of work narrowed a lot. There was a shift to focus on review cycles instead did shipping cool stuff and avoiding being crushed by competitors like Google. Towards the end I fell into the trap of fixating on perf reviews and came close to burning myself out after switch…

What are the attributes of a successful facebook employee or what type of person fits the culture? Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#442

Post by mFixman »

vlovich123 wrote: post #431
mFixman wrote: post #410

> 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.

I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a lot on the last years.

Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#443

Post by whatever_dude »

zionic wrote: post #109
code_biologist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll match your anecdote with mine. I'm an engineering leader at a small company that has worked at FAANG. I have personal mixed feelings about working at FB, but it's a very strong positive signal about someone's engineering ability (and comp expectations lol). Send any good coders you toss out because they worked at FB my way!!

I’ll match your anecdote with mine. I’ve been everything from CTO to lead engineer. I’ve made sure we always pay well above average for every role because I’d rather have one exceptional engineer than 10 regular ones. FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.

You're doing your company a great disservice if you think no great engineer had ever joined Meta.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#444

Post by ricardobayes »

Out of all the sites I visit on a daily basis, facebook clearly has the worst user experience out of them all, and that's counting the ad-infested local news that have jumping elements before click. Not sure if I'm the victim of some test group, but the page loads so slowly, and stories become pretty much unresponsive. If I click exit on the first story, it just keeps playing at least 4-5 more stories before it eventually closes the page. I wonder if this is actually intended to make people look at more stories. Marketplace is another abomination which feels like it was thrown together by an intern. Useless filters, categorization of items super-bad, and again slow, slow, slow.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#446

Post by [deleted] »

zionic wrote: post #247
dnissley wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth reflecting on the fact that you took time out of your happy life to leave your original comment, which declared that you will use whatever small amount of professional power you have to enforce your personal grudge against a small set of companies you hate by refusing to hire their former workers. Edit: Just realized you've left like 20 comments on this thread that are all grinding the same axe.

Sure. It was very low cost. Much in the same way discriminating against FAANG employees is a low cost high efficiency strategy.

[deleted]

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#447

Post by alexpetralia »

zionic wrote: post #171
Godel_unicode wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know this as well. Anyone willing to write off literally millions of engineers because they happened to work at some huge companies is someone worth avoiding.

> literally millions of engineers It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated. > because they happened to work at some huge companies Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so. Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash…

This comes off as rather petty, impetuous and dictatorial.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#448

Post by vlovich123 »

zionic wrote: post #244
sockgrant wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I’ve worked for two of FAANG, it’s super duper easy to work outside of SV. The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate candidates based on whatever perception you have about who they are instead of trying to understand who they are. I’m sure you don’t care, sounds like it’s working for you, so in any event congrats on finding what makes you happy!

> The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate candidates based on whatever perception you have No, I’m making very real concrete moral judgements about you based on who you chose to associate with.

Shall we also start making moral judgements about the city or country you live/lived in? The products you choose to purchase? The schools you chose to attend? The political party you choose to support? The religion you are or aren’t a part of? The sports teams you support?

Shall we look down on NASA engineers because it’s part of the US government and pulls heavily from the US military/has overlap with the intelligence services/some of its top secret projects maybe do things I’m morally opposed about?

This kind of guilt by association is pretty bad and that’s the pushback you’re seeing in this thread. Humans are social animals. No social group will be without it’s flaw and larger groups have more and larger problems. This same line of reasoning is what fuels religious and political persecution. It’s barely acceptable in sports but that’s because it’s mostly harmless and in good fun until you hit riot levels of idiocy. Heck, the big tech companies are massive. They have so many individual teams that do totally unrelated stuff to the things you might have issues with.

As for the bitterness someone else noted, it’s not that you stated your values. You went further and made the claim that these engineers would have trouble finding jobs outside of SV because of the association. That part is blatantly false on its face. They may have trouble because of niche skills that aren’t relevant elsewhere because the scale doesn’t exist elsewhere. Are there some employers who won’t hire us because of our association with some company? Sure. So? I’ll not choose companies for myriad of arbitrary reasons too. That doesn’t mean I’ll struggle to find a job overall.

As an aside, I find it a bit telling that you lump Netflix into it and then your primary complaint about the company was that they canceled a show you are attached to. That’s not even about morals and is fairly arbitrary. This is why there’s feedback that it looks like you’re salty about something unrelated and note you’ve attached a larger reason behind it based on morals.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#449

Post by yalogin »

I dread interviews. I am an engineering manager, a product guy and have a long track record of finding creative solutions to problems, convincing leadership at all levels and executing on it. However, I suck at coding and coming up with solutions on the fly. I need that extra time to think through because I don't have every possible tech solution in my TLB buffers, I need to page them from main memory or even disk sometimes. So I end up failing interviews by default, so much that I stopped trying to move. It helps that I am doing quite well in my current role and am happy, but missing out on growth up the ladder.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#450

Post by higeorge13 »

ipnon wrote: post #180
gzer0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the sheer number of fradulent and stuffed credentials people have begun using, and applying, en masse to job positions. To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because they can't remember linked lists in the mome…

I think the distinction to be made is between the process of finding the best out of 7,000 and finding someone sufficient out 7,000. The first is surely extremely expensive for companies. The second can be done in a week or two. I think the anecdotal evidence shows though that no company can accurately do the first, and the gamification of this process is a deeply researched topic, so it's likely that a company that…

I worked in ATS company and 7k seems like an exaggeration. Most companies would only get tens of candidates, some of them hundreds and only a tiny minority would get thousands. I would also confidently say that the vast majority have sourcing issues, and that’s why they ask recruiters, agencies, etc to fill more applicants to their open positions.

And yet, all these companies would have complicated hiring pipelines to hire. I have seen examples which made me laugh; like receiving tens of cvs and asking almost all of them for take home exams (felt sorry for the reviewers and the candidates who lost their time), multi stage technical reviews for companies with less than 10-20 employees, final executive level interviews with more than 5 candidates in parallel, time to hire times of 3-6 months, etc.

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