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On Leaving Facebook

frantic.im

521–530 of 645 posts

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#521
> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day.

A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations.

I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#522
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I had a similar attitude when I was younger - I thought I would work for ever since I enjoyed programming so much. I had a fairly successful career both financially and in terms of technical achievements but by the time I reached my mid 50s, I was feeling completely burnt out with software development. Thankfully by that time I was financially secure so I was able to retire (I don't know if you would call 50s early t…

It's definitely early in general.

Most millennials or younger won't be retiring until they're 70+ if ever on average the way the world is going. I certainly hope I'm as lucky as you and glad to hear you're enjoying it and keeping your mind engaged.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#523
Wow; it's all about you: what you have to gain or lose if you leave or stay. Not a single mention of conscience about contributing to an enterprise that has and continues to do so much damage to the human psyche. That's really sad.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know a bunch of people who work at FB. They explain that Zuck would love to be as evil as Google or Microsoft, but is just nowhere near their league.

Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China, but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin does rabble rousers in a year.

Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would like to be.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#525
post #93

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.

No, you cannot do all those things and more while working. You can't even get a taste, it's more akin to looking through a store window.

It's not possible to fully experience a foreign country/culture in a 1 week vacation.

No idea about surfing, but it's not possible to even get a sense of what skiing has to offer in a couple of weekends a year.

Maybe, for a few people, it's possible to find the motivation and energy to fully immerse yourself in working on your own software after already having put in a full day of work, but they are in a tiny minority.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#526
post #26

I just do not understand why somebody with 20 years of experience would invest that kind of time in leetcode. just say "no" and be done with the BS, and with the kind of financial success the author has enjoyed previously, wait for the right company to come along that doesn't require it. That's the only way the industry is going to fix itself; enough people start saying no.

I am casually doing some leetcode in prep for a job search a few months down the line. I've never had to do these problems before, nor do I have a formal CS education (am a senior dev). While many of the hard problems are quite esoteric, IMO being able to easily power through most of the easy/mediums is 100% a sign of developer competency. Even if you don't remember the exact algorithm, being able to build it from the ground up quickly and accurately through reasonining seems like a pretty solid signifier of a quality developer to me.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] having real work be tossed in the garbage is [...] demoralizing [...] This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke…

I find it helps to be cynical in these situations. > I felt bummed out nonetheless. Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care. Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they asked in exchange for pay. That's it. >_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.…

What you're saying makes sense, but sentiment like this makes me long for a post-capitalist conception of work where everything's not purely transactional and we can do meaningful work that we feel proud of. I think artisans or craftspeople had that historically and it's something we require to feel fulfilled.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#528
post #25

Was interesting that the writer says little about FB's mission and impact on the world - seems like it was not really important to them as a positive or negative. Perhaps part of this is due to writer's spending more time in tools rather than something like NewsFeed?

It's actually why the blog post bothered me, despite everyone heaping praise on it here. "Then there’s the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in media lately, but in everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line." That's the money quote, this person is only thinking about themself and really doesn'…

Yeah, I find this view to be pretty unfair to the author. He was not directly responsible for things like data policy or anything at Fb. As he said multiple times, he found fulfillment from working on projects with a small group, and from distancing himself from the higher corporate debacles.

I don't think he is morally at any fault.

Here's another way of looking at it: Fb is so damn big, there's no reason them looking bad to the public should condemn every software developer on their payroll.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#529
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people in the US difficult to fire?

Because attorneys know how deep the employer's pockets are, which gives them a great incentive to pull out all the stops, which gives corp HR the incentive to make sure there is a long and painful performance management process before anyone can be fired without it exposing the company to too much risk.

In other words, firing people in the US just costs money. Not very much, usually.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#530
Super successful people at Facebook need Facebook "prestige" to get... car loans?

Huh.

And you can get that prestige and success working a couple of hours a day.

Huh.

What a weird world.

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