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How to succeed at Meta

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Re: How to succeed at Meta

#111

Post by mathgladiator »

A lot of this depends on management, so this can be a good strategy especially for product engineers.

For infrastructure engineers, this is a recipe for disaster which is fantastic because it always explodes in your face which attracts long term thinkers who work well with stake holders to build a long term strategy.

I say this as I led two multi-year complete re-architectures and took from E6 to E8. My final architecture before trying out Oculus was published at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572

I'm retired now and building my own lifestyle company.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#112

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

lbotos wrote: post #64
mrandish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign. A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?

Span of control. As you get above that number of reports, the manager is splitting their attention to the point that hot/cold spots are inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#113

Post by Move37 »

I have worked at two big companies (8k+ and 500k+ Employees) in my life and it is sad, but I can confirm. If you want, you can get by amazingly with very little effort there. As long as you get attention for your work, you will stay. In investment banking (my roommate works there) people call it 'face time'. They stay in the office late to get in facetime. I hate the concept of it, but sadly it is true.

2 ways to succeed at huge companies - do work they can't ignore (at one of the companies I was, I was doing Business Dev work and I outperformed my peers by 200x - I was able to chill a lot visibly after a couple of big deals, but I still succeeded due to performance) - do average or below average work, but communicate it great and get in 'face time' without actually doing something.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#115

Post by Move37 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #33
mooreds wrote: post #2

Sounds pretty dystopian to me.

There are ALWAYS either hidden or visible metrics and as soon as you figure them out, you can game them. Sometimes the metric is "how much does my manager like me", other times its stack-ranking and other times again its "business value that was assigned to stories you finished".

Really like the concept of hidden metrics here.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#116

Post by dnissley »

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…

What I've really taken to heart is telling a story of my changes using a stack of diffs. A random one line change to some sketchy function is a whole diff so that you can call it out as something to be aware of, etc.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#117

Post by scottyah »

karamanolev wrote: post #72
lbotos wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best example of why large organizations are like this was Engels writing on "the state": “The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an ins…

I've seen many a "startup within a corporation", but the benefits of that are almost never, what what I've seen, realized. I wonder what gives. Why can't anyone figure out how to make that work?

In my experience, they just get absorbed quickly and the label of “startup within a corporation” gets dropped, becoming so-and-so’s org/team

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#118

Post by UncleMeat »

klabb3 wrote: post #99
UncleMeat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6 expectations.

> literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The…

And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be almost a hard blocker here.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#119

Post by wobbly_bush »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #10
davewritescode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For many devs, especially non SV people (or even non US people), a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It's "I never could have ever gotten this, and not only is my life set, the people around me are too". Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my life (or, well, things I actually en…

That TC might be life changing if they earned that much in their current cities/towns. That TC would involve moving to SV and the associated costs of living in SV - specially housing.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#120

Post by Spivak »

akira2501 wrote: post #84
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…

> 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.

I mean more charitably it's the "maintenance" phase except that our fucked up economic system punishes companies that are happy at their current size and so must do ever more ridiculous or desperate things to make the numbers keep going up.

A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.

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