Ah, the unassailable confidence required to work in one lower-level position at a company for 5 months and believe you know "How To Succeed" there.
Ops post is a sarcastic take not a true guide (at least to my read)
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How to succeed at Meta
51–60 of 211 posts
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#52People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get promoted past L5 (or even maybe past L4) with a short term-focused approach like this. And, at least at the lower levels (up to L5), you only need to be self-promotional every 6-12 months for perf.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#53I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this. I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free.
But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#54This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as i…
> I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven these days
I think this is my biggest disappointment working for a big tech company. I don't feel I'm "part of the family" at all. Very high turnover, people come and go, some are fired, burn out, or move to another job. I'd love to feel I'm part of something, but it's not the case. Plus most products are very questionable. Very few people do work on something meaningful anyway.
It's all about optimising some metrics. The same way you need to leetcode to get recruited, you're expected to check some boxes once you're in if you want to stay.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#55The post is flippant but a decent strategy. Your goal (whether you're a total comp+promo seeker or just looking to float) is to arm your manager with as much ammunition as possible to argue on your behalf during calibrations. Project impact can be easily argued against, especially when your area of work is difficult or not well understood by other engineering teams, not to mention that coming up with undeniably impactful projects every 6-12 months is not possible on many teams. Lines of code and moving efficiency or cost metrics cannot be argued against. It's not the only way to "succeed" at Meta but it's certainly the easiest way
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#56Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.
If you're working for someone else's dream, what else is there? "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in the world. Yes, I want to take two big family vacations a year, live in a great neighborhood/ school district, and give my kids extra opportunities. Optimizing for "TC" makes sense.
> "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in the world.
TC is tangential to all of that. If getting a higher TC decreases work life balance, then it actually doesn't give you and your family options to do other things in the world, it literally detracts from it. If a higher TC means a longer commute, you are losing out on time that you could be doing things with your family. Having more stress for more TC lowers your health (mental and physical) and can significantly strain family life.
TC is literally only one dimension that should be optimized for. There are many other factors that should be taken into consideration with a job, because burning yourself out before you are 50 just so you can maybe hope to retire early isn't always worth it, and isn't guaranteed to even actually work out.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#57I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this. I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
Netflix of eight years ago rewarded real engineering work (I left then so I don't know how it is now). Metrics didn't really play a part in anything other than providing information to guide business decisions (like direction and success, not comp). Or more specifically, they used a lot of metrics to determine comp but they weren't individual, they were market metrics of how much it cost to get new people on board.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#58> Write small diffs (pull requests) (this one is actually good advice)
I work at Meta, my opinions are my own, and I'm speaking to this point in general, not specific to my time at Meta.
Small, incremental changes are great because they're easier to review, easier to verify, and safer to roll out. What's important during the review is seeing the whole picture. It's possible for changes that are locally sane to produce something globally goofy. I've also seen changes for larger projects with multiple reviewers miss an important piece because each reviewer assumed it was a change the other person looked at.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#59This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as i…
> This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase
I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more layers of management between real customer-facing work and business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech companies, I agree. When a manager reports to a manager who's reporting to someone else degradation begins to occur. Another tip is to look at the org chart. If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.
However, there are exceptions to be found in specific sub-groups in some orgs. I've been witness to it more than once.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#60Ah, the unassailable confidence required to work in one lower-level position at a company for 5 months and believe you know "How To Succeed" there.
After 5 months, there was 5-6 weeks of bootcamp, 3-4 months in actual team, no formal evaluation yet.