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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

#281

Post by Ozzie_osman »

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…

I worked at a FAANG (not anymore), and my spouse and many of my friends still do.

There are two ways to do FAANG (very generally). You can care about promotion, or you can not. If you do care, then it's competitive and stressful because perf reviews (and often politics) will determine your fate. If you just want to cruise and have a cushy job, you can do that too, but just accept that you either won't get promoted (or will get promoted very slowly). You may have to transfer to a team where that's easier to do to get away with it, but it's very doable.

(There are some exceptions. If you go in at a very high level, the level expectations will be high and you still have to meet them. That might be what happened with the parent commentor, given the expectation to have broad impact)

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

#282

Post by propogandist »

thawSeh6s2p wrote: post #149
lordnacho wrote: post #32

I would guess people evaluate their job on money/work/stink axes. All of FAANG pays well, so what's left is whether the work is interesting/important/fulfilling and whether the company has integrity/evil issues. Eg you might think F1 has interesting problems despite glorifying fossil fuel cars, or you might think drones are technically challenging despite being used to kill people. Loads of people become nurses and t…

> Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much I know it's not the primary point of the post, but define "much". An RN makes around 80k on average, they're also hourly and can generally pick up overtime whenever they want. Nurse anesthetists make double that at minimum, practitioners are north of 120k. It may not be as much as a FAANG position but I…

there are nurses pulling in $200/hr locally (travel nurses usually). Due to shortages, some hospitals are allowing 6 days of work (typically 12 hr shifts) and nurses are making ridiculous amount of money, if they can manage it mentally and physically.

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

#283

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

throwaway_1114 wrote: post #238
pedrosorio wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Probably because your story sounds dubious. Name and shame or forever hold your peace. You're posting from a throwaway account anyway.

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

#284

Post by adjkant »

maxpert wrote: post #146
ferdowsi wrote: post #106

As the negative perception of Facebook engineering picks up it'll be interesting to see where this heads. There's been precious little conversation about the stewardship model of React.JS, in which Facebook has an outsized role. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to divest React from Facebook, given the potential reputational risk to the React project.

I think React is pretty soon gonna share same fate as jQuery. Svelte is slowly picking some steam, and with recent move of original author to Vercel I am more confident than ever that momentum is shifting. My friend directly got to work with Carmack, and him moving away directly from project should tell a lot about what the future of the hardware holds with FB. Microsoft had to rewire itself in order to recover from…

I think you're underestimating a few things here re React:

1. Before the React/Vue era, there was so much JS churn and many devs who went through that are not looking to change anytime soon.

2. Even if React goes into keep the lights on mode, what is going to compel someone to not choose React at this point? The uniformity of it in the JS world, the stability, and the flexibility make it a great fit for most use cases. What value proposition is it failing that would make it lose its place as the dominant front end framework?

It would take a massive, worthwhile new paradigm shift to occur in the JS world to unseat React IMO, and I don't see that happening anytime in the next few years simply because there is no need. React works TM which is big.

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

#285

Post by adjkant »

rightbyte wrote: post #221
foepys wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you switch to maintenance mode, you have already lost. You will always need to innovate and for this you need smart people with good ideas and talent to make it work.

Not really. You can also just buy contenders.

Facebook is going to struggle to get the FTC to clear any acquisition in this political climate

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

#286

Post by tqi »

This is a pretty weak article. The trend is sourced from an unspecified number of "tech recruiters and other industry source," but not quantified at all. Quitting is up across the board[1], but there is no attempt to baseline against industry overall. The whole thing is basically an "X stock is up because of Y reason" article.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/a-record-4point4-million-peo...

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

#287

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

lmilcin wrote: post #237
rajup wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produ…

> 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.

How did it come to this? You don't see this in other engineering industries. There's not a ton of incapable civil engineers bouncing from interview to interview. You don't hear about how bad aerospace hiring processes are.

Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry?

Saying "a lot of people are just bad" without investigation the situation seems rather unscientific.

> The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying.

The amount of effort invested into the Leetcode prep industry would suggest otherwise. A lot of people are playing the game even if they are under-qualified. Maybe that process will make them better coders. Or maybe, they will just appear to be better coders to you the interviewer.

> 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.

Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.

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

#288

Post by dang »

i_heart_dang wrote: post #268
dang wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily (in fact, exclusively, it seems) for ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Care to elaborate? What’s the ideology here?

I don't know exactly, but the account has been doing nothing but hammering Facebook for months, and the profile makes it clear that it's an agenda account. That's the sort of battle agenda the site guidelines are asking people not to conduct here. The guiding value of this site is supposed to be curiosity, not smiting enemies.

Lest anybody misunderstand, I'm not defending FB by that; just defending HN.

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

#290

Post by yeswecatan »

bottle_roket wrote: post #236
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

I feel like a lot of the anxiety around reviews is an unquenchable thirst for more. My understanding is that if you just meet expectations you get 100% of your bonus. If you're happy with your salary alone (which is probably higher than 99% of tech companies) then why get stressed?
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