“This week marks the beginning of my 4th year at Facebook”

Wow, sounds rough. You seem bitter and hurt by the whole experience still. Let me just tell you: this experience is good for you in the long run. I can tell you as someone who sits on the ASD scale, I've had some painful periods in my early life where my brain locked on and obsessed over similar rejections. And the obsession and bitterness didn't do me an ounce of good. But later on I accepted it and realized the experience itself made me a wiser, better person.

As to your experience - sounds normal to me (unfortunately). You didn't fit the culture, or at least ended up working with some anti-you people. Maybe you weren't brogrammer enough. It happens to most everyone at some point in their career. I suggest you take from it what you can - when to recognize that things are not working out as early as possible, and to never expose yourself to risk as an at-will employee (always have a money backup!).

Nice reading

This is a good explanation (of what it is to tackle bigger problems):

"As an engineer, your job is to build things that solve problems. When you first join the company, you're assigned small tasks and you solve them. As you grow professionally, the domain of these tasks becomes larger. It is a mistake to constrain the increase in domain to larger or more frequent diffs. Code is a tool you have for solving problems. If you were gardening, you might plant flowers or pull weeds. Increasing your scope does not mean planting more flowers or pulling more weeds (though you should expect to be faster and more proficient at that as you become more experienced). What it really means is looking up from the ground at the garden in its entirety, considering how your section fits in, and eventually helping to decide the whole garden's plan."

It sounds, based on what you say, that they are replacingthe famous meritocracy of google with a technocracy?

Is this your impression?

I was also fired from an engineering role at Facebook. However, I look at the experience very differently.

They seek candidates with strong engineering skills, and only do a little culture fit at interview time (this was my experience at least). The real culture fit test happens during bootcamp, where they try for 6 weeks to break any misfit. Now that isn't going to work for everyone, but their strategy is to go all-out and try get a strong candidate to work well in their culture.

It didn't work out for me. I constantly reflect on what made me decide to accept their offer, what I could have discovered that would have made me realise it wasn't going to work out for me. I take interviewing far more as a two-way discussion, trying to find out what a company sees in me that they like and sometimes I tell them they misread me rather than risk ending up in the same predicament.

There are a number of things not directly in my control that lead to me leaving though. I had some bad luck with many of my bootcamp tasks, e.g. task owner on vacation for a couple weeks, task owners not being responsive if I didn't get back to them with working code really fast (I was working on other tasks at the same time), etc. I was drawn in very strongly by a manager who recognised that my skills strongly matched his team's requirements. I felt uncomfortable around that team from day one and never really tried hard on their tasks, and that reflected very poorly on me. At the same time, teams I took the initiative to approach would setup an initial meeting and then I'd never hear back from them. It wanted to dig into stuff I was excited about, while my bootcamp manager wanted me to complete the boring tasks I was assigned. Other things at hackathons drew me in, and I spent too much time on those projects only to be told a week before being fired that those were not being counted in my evaluation so I had to scramble to work again with the team I didn't get along with. Soon after that, that team didn't want to give me new tasks and I was left with nothing.

If I was to go through the process again, there are a few things I'd do differently. I would avoid letting the side hackathon projects take up too much time in the early days until I was firmly settled in. I would get more clarification on tasks as early on as possible. I would focus on one or two tasks at a time, rather than trying to churn through five or six in parallel. This way turn around time with task owners would be faster making them happier to help. I would forget about looking for a team until week four at the earliest - focus on tasks instead. I wouldn't take their advice to pick any team, even if you had no experience in the area, too strongly. It's good to get a strong start, and take the other roads once you've proven yourself.

I found a new job within a month. As an H1-B holder, I needed to be quick, so I settled for what I could get. Companies reacted differently to me being fired. While I'm sure all of them take it as a negative, some seemed to sympathise. I'm now interviewing again, and depending on whether Facebook comes up I have told some companies what happened and not told others. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference, since I've proven myself at my current company, but some keep prodding to try find that fatal flaw in me that lead to the firing (which I don't believe exists). I'm considering removing Facebook entirely from my CV after my next job.