How does Meta's culture differ from that of other Big Tech companies?

I have a bad taste in my mouth due to a particularly bad experience at Meta, but will try to put that aside.

Meta seems obsessed with metrics and experiments, but it feels a little disingenuous. You will set up your experiment, set guardrails, put the flag in your code (but did you expose it right? Not everyone does), then get nonsense results. You’ll change the universe and rerun it. It is possible that you repeat this multiple times, and the data doesn’t prove our your hypothesis. There’s a lot of stress, and time spent iterating, on getting the numbers to show the impact, or prove no impact, or whatever. It is my opinion that at times the results were invalid and nearly random, but once there was a result that looked good, that one was considered good. It felt a little cover your ass.

Access to Mark is pretty unprecedented. I think he’s gone off the deep end, but regardless getting on a Live every few weeks and taking questions from employees is… interesting.

I know some people love and swear by the level opacity @alex included. It does change culture. It really broke my brain and me trying to understand it only made things worse. I think I felt… deflated. I finally had a fancy, senior role and wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. More so it is super hard to deliver career advice without level information. I can assert it’s different, better or worse is an exercise for the reader.

There’s a lot of other things, but like… the Workplace stuff is… not used anywhere else I’ve worked, and the rubric to decide when to use WorkChat or whatever, Workplace posts, email… I never got it right. Use chat unless it’s a senior executive then email, but no one checks email.

Anyway… those are some I know, but I was full remote and not deeply steeped in a lot of culture.