Pros: Facebook is a good company to work for. They pay well and have great perks. At the beginning, life is good. Facebook rewards ambition.

Cons: The appeal quickly wears off. Your experience at Facebook highly depends on the team you join. Facebook does not have the best people managers. If you join a team with a good manager who knows the system, you will be more likely to have a productive, prosperous time at Facebook. If you join a team with a bad manager, your work-life balance will be horrible. You will feel extreme pressure with the performance cycle review every six months. Worse yet, you may even blame yourself for what's happening, not realizing the role your manager plays until it is too late. Facebook is a good company for new college graduates. Even with a bad experience, you can learn so much about practical, applied technology here. For those with several years of experience, or with family commitments, be careful. Come into Facebook with a clear sense of what you need from Facebook that you cannot get anywhere else. Be prepared to leave when that is delayed, or not a possibility, or comes at a cost to your family or external commitments. For most people, Facebook is not a company that you join and happily work at for the rest of your life. Facebook is a temporary stop that will squeeze as much productivity out of you as it can. When that stops, it forces you out or makes you want to leave.

Pros: Huge breadth and depth you can choose to work in. A mix of feature development and ops work, free to focus on either or both. The scale of systems is truly enormous.

Cons: Work-life balance varies widely between teams. Some teams PE works with can be filled with divas.

Pros: Working at a global scale, Meta has to solve some unique problems few other companies have the opportunity to see. Meta will often be at the forefront of new technology, or sometimes is creating that new technology, for solving problems. Smaller companies often have to settle for commercial off-the-shelf products that half-work or don't actually properly work, but Meta can do it properly. Your managers will most likely care about you and do their best to support you in whatever you need. Base pay is probably a bit lower than other similar companies, but overall benefits are incredibly hard to beat.

Cons: Upper management doesn't care about you at all. Your immediate managers do; their managers probably do. Beyond that, it's uncertain, and by the time you get to the VP level, they don't care about the individual person. Diversity support is a joke. You're supported as long as you fit one of these very specific, predefined Silicon Valley molds. Otherwise, you get support for what fits in that rather small space. Talking about what's wrong is strongly discouraged. There's even a policy that people have fallen afoul of just for criticizing that same policy's impact on discussions about how to improve life at the company. Career progression is less about what you actually do and more about how much a bunch of people think you do. I've done some huge things, well-received by people and still talked about today as a good example of a company-wide, high-impact project, but I got a bad rating. And I've very recently had a year where I did basically nothing all year but made a bunch of upper managers happy and got a great rating. The way multiple layoffs have been handled has left us not knowing whether it's even worth working hard for a great rating anymore, since we've seen high performers fired and low performers safe. At first, layoffs were held dishonestly, but then subsequent layoffs were handled in possibly one of the worst ways to respond to those criticisms.