There’s a chance this is just some intern trolling.
How to succeed at Meta
81–90 of 211 posts
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#82Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.
I avoid it at all costs most of the time. Whenever I do break and go there I usually get so depressed.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#83[deleted]
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#84This 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 just call that the "monopoly phase." There is no natural post-innovation phase, you either have to compete for business, or you don't.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#85Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.
What is "TC" ?
Total Compensation. It lets people compare compensation across companies and normally includes Salary + Options + Bonuses. Different companies offer different mixes, so just relying on salary alone is not a good metric for comparison.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now this person is missing out on a huge opportunity to get a ton of experience and prove themselves to be invaluable. I pay my mortage with opportunities, exposure and experience too.
I'm not saying work for nothing. I'm saying that immediately fleeing every time you are asked to stretch because it isn't in your current job role is going to limit your career growth rather than enable it.
Obviously don’t flee. Negotiate a rise. And if they don’t take you seriously get a better job, because they don’t appreciate you at your current place.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you have no problem knowingly wasting 30% of your life making useless shit in exchange for money then… well, enjoy, I’m not judging, but please realize many people don’t feel this way.
btw its not 30% its close to 50% if you count waking hours. I have never understood this single minded drive for Moar money. I mean I get upto a point but after that it sort of becomes a game in itself. OTOH you have basically extinguished your own 'signal' for resources that may have some dubious utility in future.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#88Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.
Blind self selects for people who want to brag about how much they're paid and people who think they're underpaid who want to validate those assumptions. It leads to a toxic community. There's so much more to work than compensation and this post proves it. Being on a good team is 100x more important than what you're paid. Good teams elevate engineers and give you a better career path in your future. I make SL level c…
>Blind self selects for people who want to brag about how much they're paid
Spot on! It's a race for them to keep moving up the TC ladder and then show off within their social circles. Their all now on to the new fad i.e working at HFT firms. I work at one and the questions I see on Blind, regarding HFT's, is a source of constant laughter for those of us in the industry.
Some great examples: "I have never written a line of production C++. If I do leetcode in C++ will that get me a job working on ultra low-latency systems?".
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#89The sad part is it may very well be true, at least I don't know. The issue is, if you put in effort to make valuable contributions, and your manager doesn't care at all about them, and harp on the fact that your metrics aren't met so you'll get 0 RSU, 1% Bonus, and 2% hike, well then things like this will happen. Which is not wrong, but is eternally sad. The smart people which solved problems and made Meta/Amazon/MS/…
You’re correct, but there’s a less cynical look at it.
If you want to work on long term stuff, and have no metrics or data to show for it - then you need to get your manager (and team, and others) on board with it.
If you can’t convince people around you this is important, then the company can’t figure out how to differentiate you from someone doing useless long term work.
This is what a lot of people call politics (especially if they’re not succeeding in it), but for me it’s just part of the system barring any better alternatives that will allow organizing a big company.
Re: How to succeed at Meta
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're trying to solve.
Agreed, having been on the inside at Google - they are not good at producing customer impact. The orgs are so large, so diffuse, and upper management so disconnected from on-the-ground execution that it's really all about gaming metrics. Even people who still want to produce customer impact have to play the game of stuffing their feature into a metrics-shaped-box so their projects don't get shut down.
Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company.
re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed.
I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.