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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

#391

Post by smnscu »

coward123 wrote: post #362
smnscu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing Karat interviews for about three years and it's been incredible for my mental health. The work is extremely flexible and there is nothing to worry about when you're not working (I dread deadlines and I'm neurotic enough to never manage a good WLB at a regular SWE gig). The compensation is also pretty good. Apply on their website if interested ( https://karat.com/ ) or hit me up at my username at googl…

Karat represents everything wrong with how we interview in the tech industry. After being in tech for dozens of years and having interviewed and hired hundreds of people, an interview with Karat was one of the experiences that shook me to the core and told me It was time I retired. I’ve seldom felt so dehumanized.

I don't represent Karat but please reach out to me (same gmail as my username), I would love to hear what your thoughts are on a better process.

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

#392

Post by jameshush »

lmilcin wrote: post #380
exBarrelSpoiler wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates and worked for many projects over past 20 years. > Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? Yes. There is a lot of candidates who utterly incapable of doing their job. Let me share a story. I remember one day I wanted to pass driver's licence exam here in Warsaw, Poland. Poland…

"The more time I spend on the discussion the better starting point for negotiation I have."

Ding ding ding ding! You discovered the same thing I have.

Put me though six rounds of interviews. I have plenty of time. If I didn't think the job was a good opportunity I wouldn't have applied in the first place.

But I know after the sixth round if you still like me, there's a close to 0% chance you have any other candidates waiting around. You have a lot of leverage as a candidate if you go through a long interview process. It also buys you time to interview at multiple other places in parallel.

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

#393

Post by nextaccountic »

coward123 wrote: post #362
smnscu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing Karat interviews for about three years and it's been incredible for my mental health. The work is extremely flexible and there is nothing to worry about when you're not working (I dread deadlines and I'm neurotic enough to never manage a good WLB at a regular SWE gig). The compensation is also pretty good. Apply on their website if interested ( https://karat.com/ ) or hit me up at my username at googl…

Karat represents everything wrong with how we interview in the tech industry. After being in tech for dozens of years and having interviewed and hired hundreds of people, an interview with Karat was one of the experiences that shook me to the core and told me It was time I retired. I’ve seldom felt so dehumanized.

Could you share a bit more about your experience?

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

#394

Post by jameshush »

sbrother wrote: post #76
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #45

I have to wonder if job satisfaction at Facebook has a very binomial distribution. This is pretty much true at any large corp, where there can be a ton of variation between teams, but from the outside looking in it seems that Facebook basically has a dichotomy: On one hand you have teams working on interesting and industry-leading tech, like React, GraphQL, Oculus, etc. But on the other you have legions of people wor…

I think it depends on the person. I have worked on "fun" tech at startups but ended up coming back to my role as a cog in Google's money printing machine (ad plumbing AND content moderation in fact!) The retention in my group is actually pretty great; it's trivial to have tremendous impact so career progression is fairly easy, and work-life balance is very reasonable. Personally I'm more motivated by this sort of env…

I spent about 3ish years working on ad plumbing at another large adtech company.

You're right, everyone there was pretty happy. We had a great office by the beach in Venice. Free ubers to work. Great snacks.

I really only left because I wanted to spend some time in Asia and do my own thing for a bit. Different strokes for different folks!

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

#395

Post by jensensbutton »

ignoramous wrote: post #262
jensensbutton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I think if you're interested in VR/AR, wearables, computer vision, building products for the "creator" generation, or even crypto (Novi) then FB/Meta probably has the best work pitch of all the FAANGs.

Sorry to go a bit meta . I can't help but notice that a reply to comment that mentions F1, is from a user handle named Jensen Button. As long as it isn't GPT-3... (:

I definitely had F1 on my mind yesterday and the mention certainly wasn't missed :)

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

#396

Post by dismalpedigree »

crate_barre wrote: post #252
ethbr0 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That value proposition of stability is a high for those that have a life outside of work. Why does a typical engineer optimize for leetcode and FAANG salaries? Because they have shit else to establish self respect.

Essentially its ok to sell your soul for 40 hours (likely more) a week as long as it allows you to pursue your own interests outside of work.

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

#397

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

lmilcin wrote: post #380
exBarrelSpoiler wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates and worked for many projects over past 20 years. > Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? Yes. There is a lot of candidates who utterly incapable of doing their job. Let me share a story. I remember one day I wanted to pass driver's licence exam here in Warsaw, Poland. Poland…

> But I honestly believe most of these people simply can't program. What is even more interesting is that these people come mainly for senior development jobs (I don't interview junior developers)

But how do you explain people who don’t know how to program being able to advance to senior roles?

Maybe they are able to program but completely depend on IDEs or having reference code to look at in their daily work.

Maybe they are in roles that are mostly managerial but not technical.

Maybe, again, there’s massive resume lying going on.

If something rotten is going on in the heart of our industry, it merits study.

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

#398

Post by romanhn »

akomtu wrote: post #345
bottle_roket wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those extra axes seem easy to fake. Just "review" all code reviews you see - takes 5 sec per CR and your metrics skyrocket. Mission of the team? Write some bs docs with vision and ideas: nobody needs them, but you get to mark the checkbox. Team culture? Say you've organized a book reading club, even do a couple meetings - just bring a book there and mark the checkbox. Books don't actually need to be read. Want to sco…

That wouldn't fly at FB. Doing busywork without producing impact doesn't count for anything. And CR comments are reviewed by managers - a bunch of LGTMs doesn't add up to much. It might unblock the team, but the goal is to uplevel the team, so meaty comments that impart knowledge are searched out.

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

#399

Post by tubby12345 »

rajup wrote: post #203
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly this. It is fascinating to see this bubble on HN, when on the outside I know there are tons of friends and acquaintances who are happy to get a call from recruiters, happy to land a job and happy to work there.

The name of this bubble is salty delusion/denial - hn is exactly where you would find people that have tried to get hired at FB and have failed.

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

#400

Post by geekster777 »

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 work at FB right now, and one of the more stressful things are the timelines for promotion. I think you have a year and a half to go from New Grad to E4, then 2 and a half years to go from E4 to E5. If you fall behind on those timelines, your performance reviews just start getting measured against E#+1 until you either get promoted or more likely fail. A lot of pressure is placed in those early levels to get promoted quickly and efficiently, with not a lot of opportunity to coast. As someone who's very ok with the compensation and responsibilities at E4, I don't really want to get promoted and it's exhausting. It means that "meeting expectations" isn't enough. I need to be exceeding expectations so I can prove I'm working at the next level. This often involves seeking out ambiguity for ambiguity's sake and making projects unnecessarily formal.

The other main "issue" is how incentives are structured, although this one seems to be working as intended. By focusing so heavily on personal performance and impact, Facebook can pretty reliably delegate project planning to their engineers in a bottom up fashion. Engineers will then adjust to ruthlessly prioritize only the most impactful work on the team. Velocity also gets highly prioritized. You don't have to assign many tasks, since engineers are afraid of the mythical "poor performance review". This leads many teams to feel chronically understaffed, and bad for choosing impact over polish on many projects. The flip side is that if your team is overstaffed, it's a struggle to find enough meaningful work to get more than a meets expectations (which may be too low depending on what level you are).

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