Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by romanhn » Mon, Nov 15, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

akomtu wrote: post #408

romanhn wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the incentive for those managers to take you down like that? Even then, you can write prose in comments - semi-related thoughts that are very difficult to distinguish from actually valuable comments.

The incentive is the calibrations where the org leaders get together to compare notes and align on scoring. A manager who's not aligned would not only see their reports' scores forcefully shifted, but their own performance as a manager would be seen in a more negative light.

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

#412

Post by m0zg » Mon, Nov 15, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #409

m0zg wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct way to do it, if you can, is, quite obviously, #2. The comp differential that comes from "career" isn't life changing, but the stress that comes with that comp differential is very real and damaging to your relationships IRL, your family, and yourself. And even if you coast, you'll still be paid better on income/effort basis as well as in absolute, compared to the vast majority of non-FANG companies. As r…

How might the age solve the problem? (Retirement maybe?)

You learn not to give a shit and realize work isn't all there is to life. IOW you develop a more balanced, informed world view. You also learn to not do stupid shit, which saves a lot of effort.

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

#413

Post by codewiz » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #278

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…

> How many code reviews did you do(they count)? A friend who works at Facebook was telling me recently that since he gets judged explicitly on the code review count, he feels like he needs to immediately drop everything when a code review comes in so he can get to it before someone else approves and it gets merged. As you might expect, he finds that very disruptive.

Well, what would happen if everyone prioritized writing code over reviewing their coworkers' code?

Since junior engineers and new hires are not yet able to review code effectively, senior engineers end up reviewing a lot more code than they write.

I think recognizing and rewarding this behavior in performance reviews is entirely reasonable for any tech company that wants a sustainable codebase.

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

#414

Post by zelos » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 8:28 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #406

zelos wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodhart's law in effect. I once had a job where a portion of our bonus was related to an automated code quality score. Needless to say, we reverse engineered the algorithm and scripted the (pointless, probably slightly harmful) changes to the source to maximise the score.

What did and didn't the score algorithm like? (Did you reverse eng it during work time :-))

There were several components, but the parts that were I can remember were gamed were code duplication - someone figured out the minimum number of matching lines required for it to be detected and made minor changes in the middle of blocks - and number of imports. The penalty for .* imports was quite low, so we just ended up with wildcard imports everywhere.

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

#415

Post by Jansen312 » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 12:55 PM UTC

Should we be saying meta employees instead? Or it is just the FB part that employees leaving?

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

#416

Post by tdeck » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

codewiz wrote: post #413

tdeck wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many code reviews did you do(they count)? A friend who works at Facebook was telling me recently that since he gets judged explicitly on the code review count, he feels like he needs to immediately drop everything when a code review comes in so he can get to it before someone else approves and it gets merged. As you might expect, he finds that very disruptive.

Well, what would happen if everyone prioritized writing code over reviewing their coworkers' code? Since junior engineers and new hires are not yet able to review code effectively, senior engineers end up reviewing a lot more code than they write. I think recognizing and rewarding this behavior in performance reviews is entirely reasonable for any tech company that wants a sustainable codebase.

The problem isn't that code reviews get recognized and rewarded, it's that once a change is merged you can't review it, so people "race" to review changes before their colleagues get to it. That's not a healthy system. It's better to let people manage their time to promote flow, letting them batch up code reviews at a certain time of day if that's more effective.

I'll just add that nowhere I've worked has counted code reviews in this way and they still get done, so it's not a disaster when you don't officially penalize people for their review count.

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

#417

Post by cutemonster » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #412

cutemonster wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might the age solve the problem? (Retirement maybe?)

You learn not to give a shit and realize work isn't all there is to life. IOW you develop a more balanced, informed world view. You also learn to not do stupid shit, which saves a lot of effort.

Aha, age, as in life experience :-) I think I understand & agree, also about the stupid shit

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

#418

Post by cutemonster » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

zelos wrote: post #414

cutemonster wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did and didn't the score algorithm like? (Did you reverse eng it during work time :-))

There were several components, but the parts that were I can remember were gamed were code duplication - someone figured out the minimum number of matching lines required for it to be detected and made minor changes in the middle of blocks - and number of imports. The penalty for .* imports was quite low, so we just ended up with wildcard imports everywhere.

Ok :-) I'm surprised they were looking for duplicated code, interesting

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

#419

Post by m0zg » Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #417

m0zg wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learn not to give a shit and realize work isn't all there is to life. IOW you develop a more balanced, informed world view. You also learn to not do stupid shit, which saves a lot of effort.

Aha, age, as in life experience :-) I think I understand & agree, also about the stupid shit

Age happens to be the only way to obtain life experience, unfortunately, although the reverse is not true - a lot of people never actually learn of the deeper issues in their lives in that meta-cognitive way. Some just keep doing things more or less the same way they had done them when they were 20. That is a recipe for much regret on one's deathbed. One thing that helps profoundly to understand one's life in a deeper context is raising kids. You see exactly what you were at any given age, and you see the shortcomings (and sometimes advantages) of behaving that way. So you learn much more effectively. It's not the same if it's someone else that you can't observe 100% of the time, without a "facade".

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

#420

Post by piva00 » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

tubby12345 wrote: post #399

rajup wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN is exactly where you would find both types of people: the ones who got hired as the one who failed.

Not sure why you tried to take a jab with the community here that way, sounds pretty salty for an unknown reason.