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Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

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Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#231

Post by samplatt »

rhexs wrote: post #209
lovich wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought teachers spent much of the summer break maintaining certifications and incorporating new school regulations into their lesson plans for the next year. I don’t think it’s a 3 month break for them

Most teachers absolutely do get a 3 month break. They’ll have a few workshops at most.

People in here seem to be using "most" to mean "people I know personally".

To add another data point, every teacher I know uses at least a third of their "break" for lesson planning. Usually more.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#232

Post by PragmaticPulp »

bottle_roket wrote: post #229

I’m a FB employee and I’m giving my notice tomorrow. I interviewed with them in 2019 just so I could get a competing offer and had no intention of working there, but at the end of my interviewing run they were the only offer I had. It was 2x my current salary and it was too hard to turn it down when the money was right there in front of me. I had sincere moral issues with the company but I convinced myself their wors…

Thanks for the inside perspective

> Couple this with a culture that has masterminded a set of carrots and sticks that gets people to push themselves very hard all of the time, I’m completely burnt out.

Can you say more about the work/life balance?

I've heard Facebook's work life balance described as everything from a cushy "engineer retirement home" to a grueling crushing workload that few can handle.

Obviously FB is a big company and it can vary from one manager to another, but I'm interested in hearing more of your perspective.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#233

Post by ethbr0 »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #228
raydev wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody wants to be a founder or deal with the bad WLB of a startup. It's nice to be paid a reliable 400k/year and work on something you think is cool.

Facebook…erhm Meta.. makes cool and useful services. My uneducated guess is about 20% of their efforts go to delivering something compelling to the user. The remainder goes to figure out how they can manipulate, coerce, farm, and monetize said users. The problem is the level of perversion they have done and justified due to the need to monetize.

I had a guy pitch me on Comcast's tech office once.

He said you get to work on cool stuff, but it never actually gets deployed. And that everyone hates your employer, but you'll never get fired.

I definitely see how "work on cool stuff" + "don't worry about getting fired" could be pretty cool, if you don't have any investment in really creating things that are used.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#234

Post by cm2012 »

electrondood wrote: post #124

I think it really says something that Facebook has to pay 20k/year extra in base salary for the same level compared to other FAANG companies to attract developers. I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but when someone lists that they work at FB on their dating profile, I assume they either aren't paying attention or have dubious morals.

Netflix pays an extra 100k, is that because of a reputation for dubious morals?

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#235

Post by goldenManatee »

bottle_roket wrote: post #229

I’m a FB employee and I’m giving my notice tomorrow. I interviewed with them in 2019 just so I could get a competing offer and had no intention of working there, but at the end of my interviewing run they were the only offer I had. It was 2x my current salary and it was too hard to turn it down when the money was right there in front of me. I had sincere moral issues with the company but I convinced myself their wors…

Cash in, cash out. Resume is a trail though.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#236

Post by bottle_roket »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #232
bottle_roket wrote: post #229

I’m a FB employee and I’m giving my notice tomorrow. I interviewed with them in 2019 just so I could get a competing offer and had no intention of working there, but at the end of my interviewing run they were the only offer I had. It was 2x my current salary and it was too hard to turn it down when the money was right there in front of me. I had sincere moral issues with the company but I convinced myself their wors…

Thanks for the inside perspective > Couple this with a culture that has masterminded a set of carrots and sticks that gets people to push themselves very hard all of the time, I’m completely burnt out. Can you say more about the work/life balance? I've heard Facebook's work life balance described as everything from a cushy "engineer retirement home" to a grueling crushing workload that few can handle. Obviously FB is…

Obviously it’s a huge company with thousands of teams, but I’ve been an engineer on 3 different product teams and certain things have been the same everywhere.

I would say purely from a coding perspective the workload is typical ~40ish hours a week. The stress comes from the biannual performance reviews that grade you explicitly across 4 axis.

If you got your projects delivered on time with high quality code that’s just 1 axis. What did you do to improve the codebase? What did you do to help drive the mission of the team? How many code reviews did you do(they count)? What did you do to improve the team culture?

I think these things are all important, but everywhere else I have worked a lot of these are more implicit. At FB you need to have bullet points and evidence of these contributions every 6 months to get a satisfactory rating. Couple this typical giant corporation red tape (legal, marketing sign off, metrics reviews) to getting anything released.

Some people seem to not have trouble keeping up with it, but I find it exhausting. I’ve gotten good reviews during my employment here but it’s been grueling.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#237

Post by lmilcin »

rajup wrote: post #208
lmilcin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble for FB is that best developers have free choice of where they are going to work. Yes, when you need to pay your bills and FB is going to pay a shit ton of money, most people will rationalize, bend and accept FB's offer. But when people have basically free choice of where they can work this is when most of them actually start paying attention to non-financial aspects of their decision. FB's model requires…

You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free. They do not and you can find tons of posts on here complaining about how the interview process sucks, does not measure true capability etc, etc. Many people may just not have the time to grind Leetcode juggling a job to pay bills, kids and family. Sorry, but this "free choice" argument is bunk IMHO.

> You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free.

Not for free, you still have to honestly work there. You get salary for value you provide.

In general companies set up hiring processes with intention to hire people. (I know this sounds like a heresy to some ears here on HN). They interviews are set up with intention to hire people while but also filter out people who will not be productive. That these processes are frequently badly designed is another matter.

If you are genuinely good -- they want to hire you. Trust me on that.

The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool. Then they come back to HN and complain how badly these processes are designed, completely missing the point.

Somebody will finally hire them, but why does it have to be me? Could I do something to prevent these people from even applying? Could I do something that, if these people apply, they have no hopes of getting the job?

Sure, some good people who would be able to do the job will be collateral damage but guess what, it usually costs much more to hire a bad apple than accidentally not hire a perfectly acceptable candidate.

The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying. If you only apply to one or two places, couple of hours of interviews is nothing compared to years of work you will spend there, but if your plan is to shotgun the interviews you can't attend ones that require some preparation, multiple rounds of interviews, maybe a trip onsite, etc.

Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions.

If you are good at what you are doing, longer interview just gives you more occasions to prove that. And also learn more about the company.

In my experience even with badly designed processes, good developers will still be better at navigating them than bad ones.

Think about it: you attend an entrance exam where you know only 2% candidates will be accepted. Does it matter how difficult the exam is? No it does not, it only matters if you are better than 98% of applicants.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#238

Post by throwaway_1114 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #165
skinkestek wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been contacted by a FAANG (or is it MANGA?) company too recently, one of the traditionally better ones. Earlier I'd fallen ober myself for that but I ended up not following through. I love my current. I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man. I'm not sure I want to contribute to the surveillance economy etc. Maybe another day I'll answer yes, but...

> I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man This is not a thing.

I worked at a place that is discriminatory and has hostile attitudes against men -

1) a team I was previously on had two open headcount. I knew a friend of mine that would have been a perfect fit for the role. I suggested my friend and was told that they weren't considering men or non-diverse candidates. I'm a mixed Latino and was told this from a white man

2) a government grant was given to businesses impacted by covid, and our business assisted with this. Preference was given to women and minorities. White men were held in a queue. Eventually a lawsuit was filed by white men claiming discrimination and the court stopped the program. Dozens of people in my company Slack were furious that the white men held up money disbursement because of their "racism". This was the narrative for weeks

3) there have been official mandates to interview minorities (non-white, non-Asian men) before anyone else (is this even legal?)

4) in an effort to combat wage discrimination against men, women are paid more on average than men in respective wage bands. This is announced quarterly and celebrated

5) women get special groups, off sites, and classes paid for by the company. woman and minorities get special coverage, special interest stories, community highlights, and praise. white and Asian males do not unless they are LGBT

6) a female colleague of mine (who I like as a friend) is an extremely low performer. We've all had to pick up the slack from her, and at times I've had to explain things repeatedly that I'd fail candidates in interviews for. she's never been given a negative performance eval, yet a collage who went through a bad quarter got fired

---

edit: flagged, which is disappointing. I'm not anti-women or anti-minority. I am a minority on the race and sexuality dimensions. why isn't my experience valid?

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#239

Post by kayodelycaon »

raydev wrote: post #227
mkl95 wrote: post #22

This is an entirely subjective take, but in the last few years FB seem to have evolved from one the coolest places for an engineer to being at the bottom of FAANG. I wonder if a significant amount of those people are looking for positions at Google/Amazon or they are taking their expertise somewhere else.

While I agree that FB has fallen down the list, Amazon will have to improve a lot to get bumped from the bottom of the list. Hiring bar at Amazon is lower, WLB widely recognized as terrible, constant stack ranking horror stories, etc.

When I lived in Seattle a decade ago, I went to some kind of Amazon-sponsored event and multiple programmers who were working for Amazon at the time quietly told me the place was hell and not to apply.

Re: Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

#240

Post by ramimac »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #173
Gentil wrote: post #93

I don't have much data points to share. But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now. It has been a common trend that when someone I know posts a job position in FB, nobody replies to it. At least not publicly (publicly means replying to tweet, replying to slack message in a well knit/known group of people). Even if they are replying personally and privately, that in it…

> But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now. This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything. Facebook isn’t having a hard time hiring, despite whatever the headlines are trying to imply. There will always be a steady stream of applicants for high paying FAANG jobs. Being able to choose exactly which ultra-high-paying tech job you take or being able to wal…

Curious if you'd contradict recent coverage corroborating reports that FB isn't hitting hiring targets? https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...
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