Meta

The pay and benefits are top of market.

Free food in the office.

Internal tools make development a lot easier.

Super smart people who are good to work with.

Good growth opportunities.

The first three years I spent at Meta were great, but the culture at Meta has gone downhill tremendously the past two years, and especially the past year. Stress is high, and work-life balance is not great for most engineers. The company has gotten more intense, and it uses twice-a-year performance reviews, with performance-based layoffs, to incentivize employees.

Coupled with this intensity, engineers are expected to create their own scope, even in work areas with too many engineers or not great impact. Managers and leaders will say, "There's plenty of scope here" without digging into the details, and engineers are held accountable if a project doesn't meet the bar for "impact" during performance reviews. As a result of this, engineers are competing with each other for the best projects. There is such a heavy focus on metrics that people will try to distort data to make things look better than they are. Engineers are pressured to create aggressive and risky goals. There is a huge emphasis on making Workplace posts to sell your work to others.

I've also noticed a pattern of overhiring recently. Some teams are growing even though there is not enough high-impact work. This happened in 2022 before they did the first round of layoffs, and I see it happening now. This allows managers and engineers to grow (more people means more mentoring), but it does not accomplish more impact, and it puts teams at risk for layoffs (which are normal now).

Reduce the work intensity because it is burning out employees. Stop focusing the culture around performance reviews. Stop overhiring so that everyone has sufficient scope. Rally employees around a common goal, like product launches, and set up teams to work together to achieve the vision rather than competing. Hold senior management accountable for setting team direction and priorities instead of making engineers invent work only to get it questioned in PSC.