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Comment by ForTheWin98 | Hacker News Reader

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

With Facebook products, you see outages in December and May. Why? Those are the last few weeks to complete your project before your performance review. Miss this window and you find yourself in career trouble. Facebook employees put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves during these months.

I would not be surprised if this outage was caused by a bad pull request related to a new project.

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Thanksgiving and Christmas are then some of the quietest times in terms of outages. Of course, the interval right after then is usually worse, since all of the backlogged changes from the holidays land at once.

“Diff”, not PR.

There is a period just before the freeze which can also get a bit hectic, but we should be well beyond that point for most relevant services by now. Don't know the exact dates since I left in September. But your point stands: holiday freezes exist and are taken seriously.

End of next week Lol

do people get fired or not promoted?

In FAANG for typical SWEs it is rare for to outright get fired for a mistake. How you handle the mistake matters a lot though. Usually if things are less than perfect during performance reviews, you just don't get promoted.

Depending on your current level, this can be the same thing (Facebook has an "engineering progression" - there's a time frame within which you're expected to be promoted to a certain level).

> there's a time frame within which you're expected to be promoted to a certain level

What happens if you don’t? You get fired or put on a PIP?

One or the other, I think they usually try to put you on a PIP before firing though. It can feel like an up or out kind of culture, but the timelines are fairly reasonable IMO - e.g. they give you 5 years to progress from an entry-level SWE to mid/senior-level SWE (L3 -> L5).

Is that 2 promos?

Yes

You go through PSC as if you are the needed level.

So you're calibrated as if you are a 5. But if you're still a 4 because you're not delivering as a 5... then you'll fail to meet expectations, naturally. The rest sort of takes care of itself.

Pro tip: ask them for the severance instead of the PIP, and GTFO.

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