How to succeed at Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#101

Post by vsareto » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #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 produc…

I think it comes down to team/company preference.

I would really prefer a culture that allowed (at least) 2-8 hours for a larger code review of features. That way you can block time out for it and digest things. A company culture has to allow that. People get reluctant to review the large PRs because they know they have to other work to do.

A bunch of small model/service/repository PRs seems tedious to me. If I want the consider the whole picture, I also have to go back to each PR.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#102

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #29

This 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…

> To top it off, most of these companies are on some shitlist for abusing their work-force or slave labor in developing countries.

What is the dirt on Meta? I'm guessing abuse content moderators in the Philippines or something?

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#103

Post by hodornah » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

> Joined about 5 months ago as E5 and I think I’ve cracked the meta culture.

I would not put any faith in this. Companies typically operate at a year cycle and are different depending upon level. The author sounds overly arrogant and just gonna lead people down the wrong path.

> This is the only way to succeed here.

Complete bullshit. This is the red flag that says "ignore everything this guy is saying, you're wasting your time."

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#104

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

woooooo wrote: post #63

endtime wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

How would they go about associating engineering effort with customer impact when they have a bunch of sales people, product managers, project managers, UX designers, and so on, in between them? Heck, any large company where there is a division of labor will begin running into the problem of relating individual performance to overall customer impact, and if you begin measuring everyone by that singular metric, you will lose all of your good engineers very quickly (they will switch companies or move to non-engineering roles that have direct customer impact).

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#105

Post by srvmshr » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

If everybody follows this recipe, then it will fail at the author's currently desired idea of acceptable performance.

Goodhart's law states the target shouldn't be a metric ideally but this is sort of a meta-metric to succeed at Meta. (Pun was unintentional)

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#106

Post by Our_Benefactors » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #39

davewritescode wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nihilistic and short sighted way to see the world. Being highly visible inside and outside my company has opened up more opportunity long term in terms of being offered consulting roles and opportunities in early stage startups then being a worker bee at Amazon for 2 years until you burnout. I know many people who have taken that route and it's one of many paths. If you're a good engineer and can sell your wo…

My concern is also the social dynamics that "TC or bust" people engender around them. There is an obvious mentality that goes along with that approach, and more often than not this turns what should be a collective, holistic approach to social well-being into a quasi-zero-sum game where everyone is just trying to extract value from everyone else. It is deleterious to community per se . Islands of nuclear families doe…

> But I would bet a lot of money that it's mostly people who spend frivolously and selfishly so that their kids go to good schools and have good opportunities, but that others' kids don't get access to the same kinds of on-ramps to success.

Getting a higher TC does not take opportunities away from other people. What kind of communist thought is this? Line employees at these companies aren’t the ones appealed to in “The Gospel of Wealth”.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#107

Post by sfashset » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #98

sfashset wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but you’re completely wrong about both your 5 years comment and your income range. For a more realistic look at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/

Those are income numbers for specialists (cf. GP's comment "Unless they specialize") The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years. During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.

Again, you are just mistaken - I'm not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism, or what. General practitioners are in the above dataset, and make an amount comparable to an L5 Google SWE.

If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech comes out looking better).

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#108

Post by grocer-eyewear » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

strulovich wrote: post #89

grocer-eyewear wrote: post #5

The 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 (…

That is a very interesting take, I haven't thought about things from that perspective. Thank you very much, for such a POV.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#109

Post by jlarocco » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #93

uoaei wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put differently: if you were hired for a certain job, and your personal convictions don't align with that job such that you don't identify as someone who wants to "hit those metrics", find another job.

The managers could've been more upfront about that and what those metrics are during the hiring process!

On the other hand, as a potential employee it doesn't hurt to ask during the hiring process if it matters to you.

For a large enough company, it's a given that there will be metrics, and a lot of people don't care much what they are, so it's not always something to spend time on in the interview.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#110

Post by yodsanklai » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #100

yodsanklai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two big differences. Family doctor can work easily until 65. And they don't need to live in the most expensive cities in the world. For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG over 50 years old.

Extremely few? If the company only existed for less than 20 years and founded by a bunch of college dropouts, you wouldn't have many workers over 50. You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE "profession" with Ageism.

The company exists for less than 20 years and since then, they have hired 10000s of SWE. Their selection process is heavily biased toward younger people, and so is their performance evaluation process. Their demographic is totally not representative or the workforce, and it's not just a coincidence.