On Leaving Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#401

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #334

ravenstine wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if you can manage to find things to do to occupy the time and appear busy, you'll be lucky if management considers the importance of your work and schedule it with the rest of your workload. One too many times have I had to find something to do and spend weeks or months on that thing only to have management tell me to immediately stop working on it even though that thing was actually important. This may not…

> [...] having real work be tossed in the garbage is [...] demoralizing [...] This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke…

> getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review

I don’t think I could have lived with that if that was done to me. I’d either resign on the spot or shortly after.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#402

Post by SamoyedFurFluff » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #345

pkdpic wrote: post #11

Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being a user. Just for personal interest. Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though? Any thoughts?

I do quite a lot of screening/hiring. I’m personally very critical of Meta the company but have no issues hiring people who’ve worked there. The malaise in Meta is obviously a product of its top leadership not the engineering people

I would probably hesitate if someone was in a position of leadership at Meta in the past few years, had been leadership for a long time, or did their formative engineering years at Meta. I’d want to question to ensure they’ll actually push back against unethical suggestions by product people if they suggest things without knowing that those features might rely on something unethical like scraping personal data.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#403

Post by Beltalowda » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:46 PM UTC

em500 wrote: post #317

vanusa wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from 7,000 -> 70 Do you have any hard data behind that ratio? Or are you just kind of ... making those numbers up? Because they, you know, "feel right"?

Google receives about 3 million applications per year, and hires less than 1% of them. Not all of them for dev positions, but still probably at least a million. Google is probably the most popular, but even the maligned Facebook gets a few hundred thousand applications per year. I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that ca…

Companies like Google (and similar) are kind of the exception; I'm starting a job next week, and I had an initial video call for almost all jobs I applied for when searching. Sometimes I wrote a cover letter, often I don't. My CV is decent enough, but not uniquely "oh wow!"-type of impressive. I don't think I was filtered out of thousands of applicants in ~90% of the cases.

While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass. Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates at the most, often less. Certainly not thousands of them.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#404

Post by hiq » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:47 PM UTC

klohto wrote: post #390

hiq wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a car loan Is it normal for a software engineer (or anybody who could afford it after saving for a few months) to get a loan to buy a car in the US? Is it worth it financially? Or is it to improve credit scores, maybe?

Money’s cheap. Why wouldn’t you take a low interest loan and invest the leftover money yourself? Car is the worst investment you can do anyway.

Ok, so the interests are so low that it does make sense financially? I often see ads for such loans that seem less advantageous than just saving and buying it cash, so I thought it was mostly for people who could not save fast enough.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#405

Post by zerr » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 12:54 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #176

voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.

Seems like this could cut either way. Yeah, older people are more likely to have other priorities, but they’re also more likely to be financially secure and thus able to trade money for time to study. Also, they’re more likely to have gained time management/prioritization skills and discipline that they could apply toward studying. Ultimately it seems like arguing that older people lack time or inclination depends on…

It's more about the lack of desperation.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#406

Post by yob22 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#407

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #161

unmole wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please name your company? I haven't worked at FAANG but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.

Not going to dox myself. > I haven't worked at FAANG I doubt that. > but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours. You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

What about Microsoft? Do their employees get a pass because the company wasn’t included in Jim Cramer’s acronym? It seems odd to single Cramer’s stock picks out specifically. What about Philip Morris ex-employees? Palantir? HSBC or any other evil investment bank? I think those three have done far more evil, but you’ll consider their alumni because they are not specifically “FAANG”? So odd to single out five specific companies that are only associated with each other because a TV personality made an acronym out of them.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#408

Post by hiptobecubic » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

albemuth wrote: post #3

It was comforting to hear about a fb veteran struggling with LC hards

I think if you don't specifically train for competitive programming, an average LC hard is going to take you many days, assuming you solve it at all. A lot of them depend on knowledge of algorithms that most people will literally never use for anything professionally, ever.

As much as we like to talk about algorithms, it's pretty rare that anything more interesting than DP comes up at work unless you are doing optimization research or work in a niche domain like bioinformatics.

Interviewing someone with an LC hard is a colossal waste of time unless the position you are filling is like "senior staff swe: performance and optimization"

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#409

Post by throwaway014921 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #278

cantrememberpw8 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was previously at the top of the salary band for Sr. Software Engineer at a decent big company, making 1.7-2x mediocre engineers I know elsewhere. Joining FB, my total comp (400kish) is an ample 5x mediocre in my area, and I hear thats normal across FAANGs. I know 2x is still ridiculously high, even 1x is a very reasonable amount to live on, but 2x doesn't compare to 5x.

Sounds like you’re making bank now. The problem is that, you sound like are expecting me to respect you. You sold out, sure you got some more cash for your trouble so congrats I guess. I just want you to be honest about what you did.

Maybe you live in a place where developers have the privilege of being able to pick the right employer among thousands.

It's not like that in most of the world.

In many places even senior software engineers have to choose between:

- nasty companies (advertisement, finance and trading, faangs, real estate speculation, cryptocurrencies, gambling and worse) that provide a living salary and provide a decent working environment

- few ok-ish companies that can offer a low salary, very unremarkable conditions and stability

- start your company or consultancy and make 0 money

- regret working in software and open a grocery store

- be unemployed

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#410

Post by mFixman » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others.

I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools.

I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy.

One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools.

It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.