Meta

• Great compensation and perks.
• Chance to meet awesome professionals and learn from them.
• Great to list on a CV.
• Chance to see and work on services used by billions of people.
• Great chance of career growth if you are a junior or mid-senior engineer.

The performance review process (called PSC) is frustrating. It feels like it's very hard to improve ratings or get a promotion at a senior level. It's more about being liked by the manager and getting a great scope to work on.

Code quality is surprisingly abysmal. I would again blame the PSC structure. Most of the codebase is unowned or even abandoned, not documented, and to accomplish anything, there are a lot of painful processes to go through. Consequently, the coding experience is quite bad.

Surprisingly, this is no longer a company where SWE is the ideal role. Nowadays, it's much better to be an Engineering Manager, as they get rewarded mostly for team impact, but they don't need to prove correlation. So, they can just cuddle a few high performers and make the bad ones' lives miserable so they'll change teams fast.

The hardest part of being a manager, helping reports' careers, is really not a thing at Meta (for senior engineers).

• Recognize the poor state of the codebase as a consequence of poor choices with respect to PSC.
• Provide a true career progression path for senior engineers.
• Recognize managers have too much power over engineers and can make their life miserable, with no chance of appeal. The Meta emperor really has no clothes.