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Trade-offs: Perks Vs. Burnout

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Meta for 4 years
February 11, 2020
Menlo Park, California
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Free food.

Pay is good.

Friendly people (faked sometimes, but not backstabbing in my experience).

Free gadgets from vending machines.

No real owners on code, so in theory, you can make changes to any team's codebase (it can backfire, though).

Cons

Up or out culture: if you don't get promoted to a certain level in a set time, you're fired.

Poor work-life balance due to the up or out culture.

If more seniors on your team are workaholics, you are compared against them harshly.

Oncall infra can be nightmare-inducing.

Again, you must really love what you do and your team if you want to be happy here.

It's difficult to move to another team if you get a 'Meets Most' rating in a half. HR won't help you since it's a hard rule (I think it was updated to 2 halves recently).

Advice to Management

Aggressive goals can cost the health (physical and mental) of employees. People who just enjoy their work but don't love it will have a hard time with the constant threat of getting fired or stuck on a team.

Calibrations is only a 3-minute exposition per person. It's difficult to show the whole 6 months of a person's activities in that time. Also, the calibration bar seems to be pushed up by workaholics, so other people are reviewed more harshly.

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