Meta

I'm a software engineer who has been at Facebook for almost a year. It is, hands down, the best place I have ever worked.

To be frank, I didn't have high expectations going in that it would be very different from the misogynistic cultures I've had to navigate at previous companies.

Before working at Facebook, I'd kind of come to accept that being a female engineer would always be a somewhat isolating existence, and the best I could do would be to find a team with 90% great colleagues and just try to avoid the creepy and rude ones as much as possible. I'd seen that as long as they performed well (or held some other utilitarian value for the company), they would always have a place in a company, and their treatment of women would be an open secret and accepted.

Honestly, my first couple months at Facebook made me aware of how much effort I'd been spending navigating those types of situations.

It's incredible working with people who assume your competence rather than constantly having to battle to prove yourself.

It's amazing seeing constant efforts towards dissecting internalized biases, and senior male employees openly discussing their efforts to catch themselves unconsciously interrupting people. It's laughable to try to imagine this happening at my previous companies.

It's so precious being able to find a place where you can just focus on your work.

It's a long commute for San Franciscans who come down to Menlo Park because we don't have an SF office yet.

I wish we were less humble and more braggy about the culture here. I didn't realize until working at Facebook how different it was, and I think I would have come sooner if I'd known.