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Ignore polarized reviews, your experience will be distinctively average

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Meta for 1 year
September 5, 2022
London, England
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros
  • Packed with very smart people, often underutilized.
  • Good pay and outstanding benefits.
  • For a big corporation, there is remarkable tolerance for internal dissent. People create open (everyone can read) groups where they poke fun at the idiosyncrasies of the company and don't get fired for it.
  • Internal tools are actually getting better, despite being a bit rough around the edges.
  • Diversity: people don't look all the same, which is great.
  • QA sessions with Zuckerberg are actually quite entertaining.
  • I was never insulted or attacked. While I am sure it happened to someone, it is not customary. You are required to conduct yourself in a dignified way, which is great.
Cons
  • There is relative freedom to choose teams (during bootcamp) and projects (during planning), but most projects/teams are pointless and/or dull. People always seem to be doing A as a stopgap while they wait to move into B.

  • Not many options in London except AR/VR, which is becoming difficult to get into. You don't want to work on Workplace, do you?

  • People are constantly looking for "impact," which means moving an arid and unimaginative metric someone else has defined. It's a crushingly sad show of very smart and insightful individuals running around begging for leftover projects that may move some metric by 0.05%, which will let them keep their job for another semester.

  • Nobody knows how things work. When you ask why something is done in a certain way, it's likely the person originally responsible for it has just joined (and doesn't know anything and is just doing things at random), or has left, or is about to leave (so he/she is not incentivized to help).

  • Largely an oral and office-based culture struggling to get into the habit of writing things down to communicate, after work got hybrid and teams became intercontinental.

Advice to Management
  • Hire fewer people so there is more "impact" to be captured per capita.
  • Speaking of "impact", stop being so obsessed with metrics. Not everything can be measured.
  • Don't create teams to fix botched work for other teams, and then create extra structures and positions to co-ordinate between these useless teams, etc. If you need an army of "fixers", then your "builders" aren't doing their best.
  • There is not much else you can do; this is how all large corporations turn out to be: most work in a large corporation is bound to be dull.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
3.0
Culture and Values
4.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
5.0
Career Opportunities
2.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
3.0

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