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Toxic but pays well

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Meta for 4 years
July 8, 2021
Seattle, Washington
3.0
Doesn't RecommendPositive Outlook
Pros
  • Great benefits.
  • Compensation is hard to beat.
  • Really good free food in the office.
  • Cool offices with fun amenities.
  • The vast majority of people are very empathetic and smart.
  • Ability to change teams fairly easily.
Cons
  • Super toxic high achiever culture. There tends to be an attitude of "Facebook isn't for everyone" if you don't meet the absurdly high and intentionally ambiguous standards, even if it was for reasons outside your control.

  • So much saying one thing but literally everything pointing the opposite direction. For example, "we're a strengths based company! Just focus on your strengths!" but performance evaluations are designed to evaluate uniformly and will hyper-focus onto the smallest weakness while ignoring strengths that balance it out.

  • Facebook's idea of diversity is only skin deep (i.e., race and gender). They completely turn a blind eye to other forms of diversity like disabilities, neurodiversity, age, and culture, etc., when it means that any action needs to be done to address unfairness and implicit bias.

  • Expectation to promote within specific timelines until E5, but the timelines are fairly short and don't take into account different learning speeds.

  • The higher level software engineer you are, the less you get to code and the more you're expected to project manage. Honestly, I'm not sure why Facebook bothers to hire PMs if they just force engineers to project manage anyway.

  • Performance evaluation system was designed to be as "fair" as possible by evaluating against uniform standards, which ironically makes it extremely unfair if you don't conform to the average, even if your coworkers and manager chain think you're delivering impact and providing unique value that would be hard to replace.

  • Talks a big game about work/life balance, but there really isn't much because of how much it invades into your personal life.

  • Your success is almost entirely based on your manager because that's how it was designed. If you have a bad manager, you're SOL and your only options are switching teams or dealing with it. It's also common to have many manager changes, and it's not that unusual if they only stick around for a half, leave, and then you're "managed" by an overwhelmed skip who probably won't be able to represent you accurately at performance reviews or make much time for you.

  • So many damn re-orgs, and it scrambles everyone except directors. They don't care because that's their impact for the half.

Advice to Management

Listen to what people are complaining about PSC for. If you want to boast how diversity-friendly of a company you are, start by changing the processes and culture built into Facebook that literally push diversity out.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
1.0
Culture and Values
2.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
2.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
3.0

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