Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say | Hacker News Reader

Facebook employees are now more willing to leave, tech recruiters say

businessinsider.com

340 pointsevo_9387 comments

https://archive.md/2021.11.14-152530/https://www.businessins...

I’m a FB employee and I’m giving my notice tomorrow.

I interviewed with them in 2019 just so I could get a competing offer and had no intention of working there, but at the end of my interviewing run they were the only offer I had. It was 2x my current salary and it was too hard to turn it down when the money was right there in front of me.

I had sincere moral issues with the company but I convinced myself their worst days were likely behind them, that they were committed to doing the work to to fix their reputation. The last 2 years have only gotten worse and it’s very clear the leadership has no interest in making meaningful changes to address social harm caused by the platform. I legit don’t like telling people what I do for a living when I meet someone new at a bar for fear they ask where I work.

Couple this with a culture that has masterminded a set of carrots and sticks that gets people to push themselves very hard all of the time, I’m completely burnt out. My GF pretty much told me she can’t handle living with someone so stressed out all the time.

I don’t have another job lined up but I’m not too worried. I’m excited for a reset. I’m taking through the end of the year to cool off and prep for interviews. I think it’s imperative at my next job that I at least somewhat believe in the product. I’ve learned that money isn’t enough to keep me going in the face of giving 0 fucks about the company mission.

It's a great way to look at peril (physical or moral) posts:

"Will I make enough money over my current salary to (1) move substantially closer towards my financial life goals (funding kids' education, house, caring for parents, retirement, etc) & (2) fund my R&R, unemployed, for long enough to put my head and soul back together?"

Often the answer is yes, but it's definitely a different way of looking at a job. Still trying to do a great job, but knowing there's a 1/2/4/8 year expiration date on your working there.

And yes, at the hazard of putting it out there, I'd say believing in the mission vs not is worth ~25% salary to me.

Thanks for the inside perspective

> Couple this with a culture that has masterminded a set of carrots and sticks that gets people to push themselves very hard all of the time, I’m completely burnt out.

Can you say more about the work/life balance?

I've heard Facebook's work life balance described as everything from a cushy "engineer retirement home" to a grueling crushing workload that few can handle.

Obviously FB is a big company and it can vary from one manager to another, but I'm interested in hearing more of your perspective.

Obviously it’s a huge company with thousands of teams, but I’ve been an engineer on 3 different product teams and certain things have been the same everywhere.

I would say purely from a coding perspective the workload is typical ~40ish hours a week. The stress comes from the biannual performance reviews that grade you explicitly across 4 axis.

If you got your projects delivered on time with high quality code that’s just 1 axis. What did you do to improve the codebase? What did you do to help drive the mission of the team? How many code reviews did you do(they count)? What did you do to improve the team culture?

I think these things are all important, but everywhere else I have worked a lot of these are more implicit. At FB you need to have bullet points and evidence of these contributions every 6 months to get a satisfactory rating. Couple this typical giant corporation red tape (legal, marketing sign off, metrics reviews) to getting anything released.

Some people seem to not have trouble keeping up with it, but I find it exhausting. I’ve gotten good reviews during my employment here but it’s been grueling.

> How many code reviews did you do(they count)?

A friend who works at Facebook was telling me recently that since he gets judged explicitly on the code review count, he feels like he needs to immediately drop everything when a code review comes in so he can get to it before someone else approves and it gets merged. As you might expect, he finds that very disruptive.

Well, what would happen if everyone prioritized writing code over reviewing their coworkers' code?

Since junior engineers and new hires are not yet able to review code effectively, senior engineers end up reviewing a lot more code than they write.

I think recognizing and rewarding this behavior in performance reviews is entirely reasonable for any tech company that wants a sustainable codebase.

The problem isn't that code reviews get recognized and rewarded, it's that once a change is merged you can't review it, so people "race" to review changes before their colleagues get to it. That's not a healthy system. It's better to let people manage their time to promote flow, letting them batch up code reviews at a certain time of day if that's more effective.

I'll just add that nowhere I've worked has counted code reviews in this way and they still get done, so it's not a disaster when you don't officially penalize people for their review count.

I feel like a lot of the anxiety around reviews is an unquenchable thirst for more. My understanding is that if you just meet expectations you get 100% of your bonus. If you're happy with your salary alone (which is probably higher than 99% of tech companies) then why get stressed?

Meeting expectations is a pretty high bar to start with. The next lower rating (Meets Most Expectations) is a cause of stress because two of those in a row frequently results in a PIP at Facebook.

Those extra axes seem easy to fake. Just "review" all code reviews you see - takes 5 sec per CR and your metrics skyrocket. Mission of the team? Write some bs docs with vision and ideas: nobody needs them, but you get to mark the checkbox. Team culture? Say you've organized a book reading club, even do a couple meetings - just bring a book there and mark the checkbox. Books don't actually need to be read. Want to score some diversity points? Say your book reading club studied "white fragility" - nobody is going to verify you havent and nobody really cares, but you get to mark the checkbox.

This sounds like some different version of hell to me.

But hey, if you can make it work - and it sounds like you do - then all the power to you! :) I must admit I do like seeing the middle digit you're raising in their direction there.

(Edit: Even though CRs ought to be taken seriously, for the sake of your fellow engineers).

Goodhart's law in effect.

I once had a job where a portion of our bonus was related to an automated code quality score. Needless to say, we reverse engineered the algorithm and scripted the (pointless, probably slightly harmful) changes to the source to maximise the score.

What did and didn't the score algorithm like?

(Did you reverse eng it during work time :-))

There were several components, but the parts that were I can remember were gamed were code duplication - someone figured out the minimum number of matching lines required for it to be detected and made minor changes in the middle of blocks - and number of imports. The penalty for .* imports was quite low, so we just ended up with wildcard imports everywhere.

Ok :-) I'm surprised they were looking for duplicated code, interesting

That wouldn't fly at FB. Doing busywork without producing impact doesn't count for anything. And CR comments are reviewed by managers - a bunch of LGTMs doesn't add up to much. It might unblock the team, but the goal is to uplevel the team, so meaty comments that impart knowledge are searched out.

I would have thought that people would start doing smaller and smaller change requests, collaboratively enabling each other to do more and smaller & quicker code reviews

True teamwork

What's the incentive for those managers to take you down like that? Even then, you can write prose in comments - semi-related thoughts that are very difficult to distinguish from actually valuable comments.

The incentive is the calibrations where the org leaders get together to compare notes and align on scoring. A manager who's not aligned would not only see their reports' scores forcefully shifted, but their own performance as a manager would be seen in a more negative light.

I worked at a FAANG (not anymore), and my spouse and many of my friends still do.

There are two ways to do FAANG (very generally). You can care about promotion, or you can not. If you do care, then it's competitive and stressful because perf reviews (and often politics) will determine your fate. If you just want to cruise and have a cushy job, you can do that too, but just accept that you either won't get promoted (or will get promoted very slowly). You may have to transfer to a team where that's easier to do to get away with it, but it's very doable.

(There are some exceptions. If you go in at a very high level, the level expectations will be high and you still have to meet them. That might be what happened with the parent commentor, given the expectation to have broad impact)

The correct way to do it, if you can, is, quite obviously, #2. The comp differential that comes from "career" isn't life changing, but the stress that comes with that comp differential is very real and damaging to your relationships IRL, your family, and yourself. And even if you coast, you'll still be paid better on income/effort basis as well as in absolute, compared to the vast majority of non-FANG companies.

As rational and verifiably correct as that strategy is, I can't do this myself though. I either care about the things I do, or I don't do them at all. I feel as though my age might solve this issue.

How might the age solve the problem? (Retirement maybe?)

You learn not to give a shit and realize work isn't all there is to life. IOW you develop a more balanced, informed world view. You also learn to not do stupid shit, which saves a lot of effort.

Aha, age, as in life experience :-) I think I understand & agree, also about the stupid shit

Age happens to be the only way to obtain life experience, unfortunately, although the reverse is not true - a lot of people never actually learn of the deeper issues in their lives in that meta-cognitive way. Some just keep doing things more or less the same way they had done them when they were 20. That is a recipe for much regret on one's deathbed. One thing that helps profoundly to understand one's life in a deeper context is raising kids. You see exactly what you were at any given age, and you see the shortcomings (and sometimes advantages) of behaving that way. So you learn much more effectively. It's not the same if it's someone else that you can't observe 100% of the time, without a "facade".

I have never heard of Facebook described as anything like "engineer retirement home". Google, yes, but not FB. When I was there, poor work life balance was everywhere - from individual contributors to managers, from engineers to product managers to all other cross-functional partners, from juniors to senior staff levels.

How many hours per week did the poor balance people tend to work?

I work at FB right now, and one of the more stressful things are the timelines for promotion. I think you have a year and a half to go from New Grad to E4, then 2 and a half years to go from E4 to E5. If you fall behind on those timelines, your performance reviews just start getting measured against E#+1 until you either get promoted or more likely fail. A lot of pressure is placed in those early levels to get promoted quickly and efficiently, with not a lot of opportunity to coast. As someone who's very ok with the compensation and responsibilities at E4, I don't really want to get promoted and it's exhausting. It means that "meeting expectations" isn't enough. I need to be exceeding expectations so I can prove I'm working at the next level. This often involves seeking out ambiguity for ambiguity's sake and making projects unnecessarily formal.

The other main "issue" is how incentives are structured, although this one seems to be working as intended. By focusing so heavily on personal performance and impact, Facebook can pretty reliably delegate project planning to their engineers in a bottom up fashion. Engineers will then adjust to ruthlessly prioritize only the most impactful work on the team. Velocity also gets highly prioritized. You don't have to assign many tasks, since engineers are afraid of the mythical "poor performance review". This leads many teams to feel chronically understaffed, and bad for choosing impact over polish on many projects. The flip side is that if your team is overstaffed, it's a struggle to find enough meaningful work to get more than a meets expectations (which may be too low depending on what level you are).

Cash in, cash out. Resume is a trail though.

This experience has definitely given me more compassion to people who have made mistakes.

I just hope my future interviewers ask themself: “if my morally questionable actions were written down would anyone want to work with me either?”

saying “ex-Facebook” is still serious clout with few questions from people that appeal to authority unobjectively, you could be an ex Facebook janitor and garner audiences for an investable venture with no questions asked about the specific role and experience and its relation to that venture

> Resume is a trail though.

Companies value being able to work on amoral projects so I don't see why having Facebook on your resume would be an issue. Every big corporation is more or less evil so they want people who are fine with working for someone evil.

Has there ever been any instance of someone being turned down for a job because they had FB on their resume? I see this sentiment pop up a lot on HN but when it comes down to it you could always explain it away with “it was my only offer at the time and I had crushing student debt and/or medical expenses to take of”.

If someone has moral qualms about working at FB that’s a different issue but the whole “don’t want to be shunned at dinner parties or future jobs” thing seems to be all self-inflected and unnecessary.

I would not turn away anyone because of where’d they’d worked in the past. You gotta hustle to bring home the $$$ and the I’m not gonna judge you for doing what you had to do.

I really don't think anyone in our industry is holding regular Facebook employees responsible for any issues with Facebook. People who worked there are still regarded as very competent.

I've been doing Karat interviews for about three years and it's been incredible for my mental health. The work is extremely flexible and there is nothing to worry about when you're not working (I dread deadlines and I'm neurotic enough to never manage a good WLB at a regular SWE gig). The compensation is also pretty good. Apply on their website if interested (https://karat.com/) or hit me up at my username at google's mail service if you want a referral (though you shouldn't need one to get in the door, we're hiring pretty aggressively). Hope this helps.

I've had a karat interview before on behalf of Palantir and by the end of the interview I was less interested in Palantir (although thankfully I did move forward) than I was in Karat. I didn't end up looking too much into it. Do you think engineers with ~1 experience could get hired there for interviews? I am about to get promoted to SWE2 if that helps. I actually enjoy leetcode type problems and have solved over 800, so I think this would align with my interest.

for me, I was excited to interview with Indeed.com

However, their interview process requires a karat interview. Since I was unable to pass the karat interview (due to disability discrimination), I was unable to even speak with the team at Indeed!!!!!

Therefore, Indeed misses out, I miss out, and Karat gets paid.

The compensation is also pretty good.

What is the compensation?

I googled it and it said $60-$100 per hour, which is not that great compared to Facebook pay or other contracting gigs.

Karat represents everything wrong with how we interview in the tech industry. After being in tech for dozens of years and having interviewed and hired hundreds of people, an interview with Karat was one of the experiences that shook me to the core and told me It was time I retired. I’ve seldom felt so dehumanized.

I don't represent Karat but please reach out to me (same gmail as my username), I would love to hear what your thoughts are on a better process.

Could you share a bit more about your experience?

I totally agree with them.

Karat is actually systematically building an algorithm that EXCLUDES diversity of thought. I spoke directly with their CEO who was not interested at all in diversity , but just wanted to make the process "scalable".

Here is the problem:

The more companies use Karat as a service, the more companies will NEVER get to hire engineers who are unable to pass the karat interview process! I have personally programmed highly complex distributed systems, algorithms, and more, yet I have a disability which makes it difficult if not impossible to pass a karat interview.

The karat interview is the gatekeeper to the other companies. Therefor, Karat is LITERALLY blocking software engineers from getting in the door at other companies. Any software engineer that cannot pass the karat format of interview will never be able to get a job at any company that requires a karat interview to begin!!!!!

"Build global technical talent acquisition operations"

Why they think this dehumanising language is okay? It reeks of modern slavery.

Human resources beg to differ ;)

"We see workers as assets!"

- Proud slave trader

Highly paid tech workers complain about their "slavery".

I doth think you should see what a slave's life actually was.

Relatively to how much the corporations they work for make, it is. I guess for many people being exploited, as long as you have a roof over your head and can afford food is totally okay.

> I’ve learned that money isn’t enough to keep me going in the face of giving 0 fucks about the company mission.

(Anymore)

I don't have much data points to share. But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.

It has been a common trend that when someone I know posts a job position in FB, nobody replies to it. At least not publicly (publicly means replying to tweet, replying to slack message in a well knit/known group of people). Even if they are replying personally and privately, that in itself shows a problem.

When I see someone working in FB, I can't deny that I am judging them. At this point, there is no reason to give a benefit of the doubt to how bad FB is to people, democracy and humanity in general. Sure, you can argue with technical meritocracy of some tech they produce. But how long can you sell yourself that excuse really when on the other side, adverse effects are mounting up?

As nerdy and smart as tech workers are, we are still in need of validation from others right? There definitely should be some effect on people being perceived as a bad person for working for a bad company even if it is paying a ton. FAANG engineers should be more than equipped to look elsewhere because of it.

Facebook's biggest problem in the next few years is going to be that it will struggle to attract new talent. Simply put if you're a senior SWE, even the possibility of FB putting a stain on your resume is going to drive you away, because there are so many other options out there. It's not worth the risk of always having to explain your time there because everyone has an opinion on the company these days. It's not that Facebook isn't a great place to work, it probably is. It's the fact that if you're at the level where you can get hired by Facebook, there are many many other options to reach for and the vast majority of people at that level are just going to reach for those other companies that are just as prestigious but carry none of the stigma.

On the other hand, I would personally find some sanctimonious interviewer asking me to defend my previous employment history from a perceived position of moral superiority a great screening tool for companies I would never want to work for.

Is it really a screening tool for the company? It more likely just says something about that particular interviewer. It's not like a company has a policy of telling interviewers to scrutinize past job appointments. That can be done by the recruiter if desired.

So I'm an engineer at my org. I'd never want to work for Facebook. If I'm interviewing you then yes I will ask you why you chose to work there when by definition you had other options.

Do you expect to have to justify your employment history for the rest of your life? Can you imagine some reasons why someone would work for FB that have no value judgment besides being different from your view of the world?

There seem to be a few assumptions you're making in the post above about someone you've never met and only know based on their current/former employer.

If you are asking that question, you already expect a certain answer to fit your beliefs and values. Therefore you are already biased and belong nowhere near a fair interviewing process.

As someone who worked for Blizzard 20 years ago, and is already cooking up "excuses" to offer interviewers like you...

I hope your candidate in this example is able to part the conference room blinds, and point out his better-than-yours car, house, or helicopter that he took to your job site. And then just drop a microphone on the way to the next interview.

If it's a moral issue with a company you've worked for, you won't get the chance to defend yourself in front of a sanctimonious interviewer; you'll get screened before that point.

Good. Less of my time wasted.

This is a huge possibility. They are already struggling. The reality is I don't see Zuck backtracking on anything. Meta and the new tech coming around it is a good example of it. They are actually looking into doubling down on surveillance and being invasive.So them struggling should be a good point. Or a good thinng IMHO.

They could use AI to tackle this in the future now that we have Copilot of the sorts. It would be interesting to see how the cope up with it.

Facebook may be a dying company, slowly slowly slowly on the IBM timescale.

Facebook is definitely on the downslide. They staved off facebook's slide by successfully picking the next social network in instagram, but now that is probably going to lose its shine. If Tiktok is the next #1... That can't be easily acquired due to Chinese ownership...

They'll try the "metaverse" but man that is a big leap, and they are already poisoning their metaverse with stupid things like "must have a facebook account" which signals they are doomed to failure.

Facebook knows this. It's why they changed their name. Maybe the recruiting struggles signaled the death of the "Facebook" brand.

I'm sorry to break your fantasy, but FB is nowhere close to dying like IBM by pretty much any metric you can choose (apart from perception by random folks on the internet which frankly does not count for much).

$FB is up like 30% YTD? So by any reasonable standard on any reasonable timeframe, the smart money says it isn’t “dying.”

Twitter is just as dangerous as Facebook as far as I can tell. So much outrage that’s spilled into riots and bloodshed has been fomented on there in broad daylight with little repercussion. Do you judge people who work at Twitter too?

Yup. I also judge people who use Twitter but I doubt that will go over well here.

Not everyone who uses Twitter uses it to connect to extreme political personalities. Plenty use it to keep connected to smart people in tech and elsewhere.

Twitter is not The Internet for a massive population of the globe; facebook is. If you doubt this, keep it in mind that "internet.org" redirects to FB.

Anecdotally, just last week I've seen someone I know on senior (IC) level actually amplify their transition to Facebook on LinkedIn ("so happy to have worked in X, so happy to join Y, blah blah"), and another former coworker messaged me about their team in FB that they joined in the past year. Also I get much more Amazon/Google/random startup recruiting than FB, so they don't seem desperate.

I had a couple friends who joined FB 5-7 years ago and reported horrible WLB, so I was avoiding it, but if the trend you are describing is correct (and that person from last week claimed WLB was fine), maybe I should consider it some day.

I think there's nothing really wrong with the company, and I would view a somewhat lower level of "caring about social issues"/"wokeness" per-employee to be a small positive :)

> amplify their transition to Facebook on LinkedIn

That’s just humble bragging on LinkedIn. It’s so common on that platform to humble brag everything that I wouldn’t read too much into that one.

> But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.

This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.

Facebook isn’t having a hard time hiring, despite whatever the headlines are trying to imply. There will always be a steady stream of applicants for high paying FAANG jobs.

Being able to choose exactly which ultra-high-paying tech job you take or being able to walk away from one of those highly paid jobs is a massive privilege that not everybody shares.

Exactly this. It is fascinating to see this bubble on HN, when on the outside I know there are tons of friends and acquaintances who are happy to get a call from recruiters, happy to land a job and happy to work there.

The name of this bubble is salty delusion/denial - hn is exactly where you would find people that have tried to get hired at FB and have failed.

HN is exactly where you would find both types of people: the ones who got hired as the one who failed.

Not sure why you tried to take a jab with the community here that way, sounds pretty salty for an unknown reason.

Curious if you'd contradict recent coverage corroborating reports that FB isn't hitting hiring targets? https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...

Hiring engineering talent is hard across the board. I can guarantee you that FB isn't the only one who isn't hitting hiring targets.

This strikes me as true. I have never worked for a fast-growing company that was able to hit their hiring target, Facebook included.

From the article:

> Facebook's hiring problems are far from unique. Tech industry surveys indicate that talent shortages and hiring difficulties for engineers and developers are among the biggest concerns for companies right now, and the labor market has grown exceedingly tight across almost every sector in the United States over the last year.

It's possible that Facebook is doing worse than other tech companies, but the article doesn't go into that.

> This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.

Sure. But this bubble that I was in since for a long time had been OK with JOB positions and talking about a career in FB before. So if there is anything else, that itself shows that "my bubble" stopped preferring FB. Shouldn't that itself mean there is a reduction in people choosing FB? :)

And I am coming across this online and elsewhere too. So my bubble is not the only one with this feelings for sure.

FB might have some negatives to society as a whole but there are also some positives (besides being able to talk to your family).

The ad product has enabled a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. I really can't understate how pivotal facebook has been -> because they know so much about you the targeting can be REALLY REALLY effective. For many products the traditional competitors like google can't even come close.

Being an e-commercialist+advertiser may make me biased but I've grown to love Zuck much more than I would've previously been comfortable with.

I would guess people evaluate their job on money/work/stink axes.

All of FAANG pays well, so what's left is whether the work is interesting/important/fulfilling and whether the company has integrity/evil issues. Eg you might think F1 has interesting problems despite glorifying fossil fuel cars, or you might think drones are technically challenging despite being used to kill people. Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much.

What you're less likely to do is work in an area where your work isn't interesting, contributes nothing significant, and rots people's minds.

I found it interesting that only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me. I suppose it's possible that people with one FAANG offer have more than one? If that's the case, all the rest of FAANG would likely have less stink than FB at the moment, and also wins on the work axis.

> only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me

It would be interesting to get some stats on this. But the common advice when applying for jobs is to "get competing offers" so you can negotiate. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are getting offers at FB, can get a few very high quality offers at other places as well.

Yeah. Are these the real numbers or the gamed ones?

All of FANG seems to play this game where they will not send you a formal offer until you informally accept their informal offer. All to juice the “percent accepted” numbers and to make it marginally harder to play competing offers off each other.

I assume they genuinely struggle with recruiting. Getting cold recruiting mails from FB lately despite being on the wrong continent. They must be scraping the bottom.

The biggest thing turning me off when they email is that to work for Facebook you MUST have a Facebook account. I deleted mine years ago.

Dogfooding the product you're working on isn't that unusual even if it is FB. It dramatically improves quality when you're 'forced' to use the same product you're developing.

LOL if you can't get your own employees to want to you use your product you might have a problem .

In general, yes absolutely.

It becomes more questionable when that product is on the backend of hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours dedicated to optimizing engagement. Bit like saying "sorry bud, we don't want your chemical engineering talent in our meth shop unless you are a meth addict, surely you understand self-hosting enables us to make a superior product"

Maybe you just shouldn't work in meth shops at all.

Why? Nothing is stopping you from having a name_job account. Never add any friends other than coworkers, only use a specific browser, etc.

Being willing to use your employer's product is a really low bar in compatibility.

There's no reason for it if I'm doing back end DevOps. I don't want to work on "the product".

Facebook uses Facebook for internal comms as an alternative to GMail/Office. Would you use that if you worked there?

Yes I know. That's part of the problem. I don't want to be in that eco system. Even just to apply for a job at Facebook they expect you to already have a Facebook account. The arrogance of the whole thing is just problematic.

While there are lots of reasons to not want to use Facebook, it's also pretty reasonable that refusing to use a potential employer's product would be pretty much a non-starter when it comes to employment.

Do you think that Ford only hires people that have only bought Ford all their lives? They check your car on the way to the interview and if it's not Ford you're automatically DQ'd?

How would that work being a new hire at Tesla considering that they probably pay a lot of folks less than is required to own one?

Cars, appliances, housing, fuel & energy, food, etc. Huge, huge swaths of the economy don't require brand loyalty because it's not reasonable to expect.

A better analogy would be if you refused to even go to fords website, or if during a company event, you refused to even step foot in a ford car that drove you somewhere.

I don't have a problem using it at work if they give me a work account that isn't publicly visible. It's more akin to being forced to give up your private vehicle and use the company car but for everything. So even when you need a van... Nope you're stuck with a moped.

There was certainly a period when having Japanese-made cars in an American car manufacturer's parking lot was an invitation to (however much I disapprove) have your car smashed up.

But in more modern times, there's certainly a general expectation to use your employer's products when it's reasonable to do so even if they're not your preferred options. There are exceptions of course and tech companies are usually more flexible these days.

> Facebook uses Facebook for internal comms as an alternative to GMail/Office

No it doesn't. Are you familiar with a product called Workplace [0] released in 2016 [1]?

[0] https://www.workplace.com/

[1] https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/facebook/139126-facebo...

I've been forced to use it. It's Facebook, for work (it used to be literally branded with that name). Easily the worst productivity tool I've ever used.

They haven't adjusted any of the engagement levers for the workplace tool, so you get so many notifications that they become useless (and the email versions are just teasers to get you to open workplace), you get an out of order "news feed", the groups UI is hard to understand and difficult to search, messenger is enabled in the UI and you can't turn it off, etc.

But yeah, it's Facebook, and it's what they use for everything internally.

You're supposed to use a personal/social account for workplace communication?

I wonder if Ferrari needs more programmers.

They finally called me. So yep, bottom of the barrel.

Same here. The universe tipped back into balance when they didn't bother to reply after me asking about the role. :)

I've been contacted by a FAANG (or is it MANGA?) company too recently, one of the traditionally better ones.

Earlier I'd fallen ober myself for that but I ended up not following through. I love my current. I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man. I'm not sure I want to contribute to the surveillance economy etc.

Maybe another day I'll answer yes, but...

> I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man

This is not a thing.

ok, good to know. But it still doesn't feel safe.

There are varying degrees of discrimination across the tech industry, based on your skin color, gender, and political views.

Some are relatively mild, others will literally put resumes from the wrong group of people in the recycle bin. And the wrong groups are not the historically under represented ones.

Do you have a specific outcome you are afraid of? It's not clear what you think "getting thrown under the bus" would entail.

Are you worried your ability to be employed working on tech would be put at risk as a man working in FAANG? What would that look like?

Fear is a real thing. There is so much talk where people openly say they want to discriminate against men, or that men should watch themselves or that men are bad. Of course in reality most of that is just talk, those people doesn't hold that kind of power at most companies, but just letting them talk like that instils fear in a lot of men and those men will avoid such companies.

Actually it is. I’ve seen it.

I worked at a place that is discriminatory and has hostile attitudes against men -

1) a team I was previously on had two open headcount. I knew a friend of mine that would have been a perfect fit for the role. I suggested my friend and was told that they weren't considering men or non-diverse candidates. I'm a mixed Latino and was told this from a white man

2) a government grant was given to businesses impacted by covid, and our business assisted with this. Preference was given to women and minorities. White men were held in a queue. Eventually a lawsuit was filed by white men claiming discrimination and the court stopped the program. Dozens of people in my company Slack were furious that the white men held up money disbursement because of their "racism". This was the narrative for weeks

3) there have been official mandates to interview minorities (non-white, non-Asian men) before anyone else (is this even legal?)

4) in an effort to combat wage discrimination against men, women are paid more on average than men in respective wage bands. This is announced quarterly and celebrated

5) women get special groups, off sites, and classes paid for by the company. woman and minorities get special coverage, special interest stories, community highlights, and praise. white and Asian males do not unless they are LGBT

6) a female colleague of mine (who I like as a friend) is an extremely low performer. We've all had to pick up the slack from her, and at times I've had to explain things repeatedly that I'd fail candidates in interviews for. she's never been given a negative performance eval, yet a collage who went through a bad quarter got fired

---

edit: flagged, which is disappointing. I'm not anti-women or anti-minority. I am a minority on the race and sexuality dimensions. why isn't my experience valid?

Probably because your story sounds dubious. Name and shame or forever hold your peace. You're posting from a throwaway account anyway.

I work at a FAANG and I've seen every single one of those except #4.

I've participated in hiring at 3 billion-dollar tech companies. Nearly all of them I've seen happen, always under the cloak of wink wink nudge nudge.

I'm putting aside whether this telling is accurate, or whether this happened or not (given it is a throwaway).

Just answering the questions about legality:

1: 100% illegal. Any FAANG manager has likely had to go through hiring training that stresses this point.

3: 100% illegal.

4: Might be illegal under Federal law if this is a blanket policy, definitely illegal under California law (most "equality"-type laws and programs are deliberately worded to be gender and race neutral).

A recruiter working for Google sued Google over point 1. Maybe that lawsuit was all lies, couldn't find anything about what happened with it later, but at least it isn't just a bunch of anecdotes.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

I realize it's not helpful that I'm also posting as a throwaway (I unfortunately believe there's a chance being on the record opposing these programs could bite me in the future or really even now), but I hope it's a datapoint, to sister comment exbarrelspoiler as well.

My FAANG currently has 3 on the books in writing (it is called diversity slating), and has for periods of time ordered 1 verbally by vice presidents in certain organizations, that hiring is frozen but if a diversity candidate is found exceptions should be made.

You are correct with what the training stresses, my impression is that has little impact on the bigger picture that companies are shamed for not getting these numbers up so they turn every screw they can.

> Preference was given to women and minorities.

I directly know of an international financial institution (that probably most of the HN-ers have heard of) telling my SO's company, "off the record", that they would prefer to have a woman engineer assigned to their IT contracting position (my SO works for a IT services consulting company). One of my friends works for a FAANG company and he told me that a woman was directly chosen over a man for a promotion only because she was a woman, the man had higher credentials and had done more for the company than said woman but in the end that wasn't enough. I'm from Europe, where things have not gotten so out of control as in the States, so I suppose over there these cases happen even more often.

> I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man

I'm genuinely confused here. Is this comment a thinly veiled political axe to grind? A misconception about how real life works day-to-day at these companies? What exactly does "thrown under the bus for being a man" mean? How would that work and what kind of conversation do you imagine happening?

FYI: You can get thrown under the bus because your manager doesn't like the way your face looks. You can get thrown under the bus by jealous coworkers, or just someone looking to deflect blame. You can get thrown under the bus for anything if you coworkers are sociopaths, jerks, or just don't like you. Don't work for teams or organizations like that. If you accidentally find yourself there: move somewhere else.

> despite being on the wrong continent.

Unless that continent is Antarctica I don't see the problem here.

Everyone is. Amazon was hitting me up constantly in SEA and I’d imagine every other Engineer here too

Even though a lot of FAANG (or MANGA) companies are in need of tech talent, good luck getting in unless you have some serious time to allocate to studying Leetcode problems. While this time investment will help you get in the door to such places, it's unlikely to make you a better programmer or help you at all in your current role.

Depends on the place. FB's problems are medium at most really.

I'm aware, but that's not really what keeps me from working at FB.

It's funny, coming to Facebook from startups I thought I'd no longer deal with recruiting pipeline challenges. It surprised the hell out of me to see how much FB struggled with hiring senior engineers. The stupid hard interviews did a fantastic job of keeping experienced folks away, so the offices felt like college grounds (I don't mean to say this was done intentionally, they really did want tons of senior talent, but the interview process didn't help).

Personally, as a senior engineer with a decade and a half of experience I dropped out of the Facebook process once I learned how it worked. I have much better things to do than stress about optimally solving two LC mediums in 40 minutes without being able to compile the code.

>I don't mean to say this was done intentionally

I'm not so sure about that. Zuckerberg is on record saying old people just aren't as smart.

> on the wrong continent.

Afiak they're about to open (extend?) a new office in London, not sure if that's related or not. When one of my friends told me that (he works for a FAANG company) I had a similar reaction to yours: "Where are they going to get the people for that in this market?"

Oh, yes?… Why is that? Is it that hard to find good candidates in the UK?…

I'm not an operations guy, and from what I know development is concentrated in the States.

I accepted a diff offer because of rumors about not so great WLB.

I imagine some people who don't want to work at a FAANG still apply to leverage that offer somewhere else. It helps a lot in salary negotiations to be able to say "Facebook offered me $X, but I like you guys more, so how about we try to find a way to make that work"

> Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much

I know it's not the primary point of the post, but define "much". An RN makes around 80k on average, they're also hourly and can generally pick up overtime whenever they want. Nurse anesthetists make double that at minimum, practitioners are north of 120k. It may not be as much as a FAANG position but I'd consider that decent pay, especially for such a stable position with decent WLB(omitting pandemic). Up until the past few years RN only required a 2 year degree.

Teachers don't make as much, but average pay in my lower cost of living area, just crossed 60k. That's not terrible, especially considering they only work 9/12 months and can get more for summer school or many of them find side jobs.

FAANG senior engineers get in around 350-400k and with recent stock appreciation some are hitting 400-600 depending on tenure and company performance.

Source: levels.fyi

Which is an exceptional level relative to just about everyone except execs at larger public companies. It's by no means remotely normal.

Oh totally, but GP never said the words "normal", only "much"

> they don't get paid much

which is how I suppose we're on the topic of arguing the semantics of "much". I think GP should have said "as much" to clarify, since this is a comparison between two specific jobs.

It’s certainly very good. But many physician specialties are in the same ballpark. Unlike executives at public companies they are a non-trivial size population. There’s also white shoe lawyers, investment bankers, and management consultants but not as many as the doctors AFAIK.

The US healthcare system is a bit special. I tend to think about Europe, since I'm from there. Nurses don't make nearly as much from what I gather.

I thought teachers spent much of the summer break maintaining certifications and incorporating new school regulations into their lesson plans for the next year. I don’t think it’s a 3 month break for them

Most teachers absolutely do get a 3 month break. They’ll have a few workshops at most.

People in here seem to be using "most" to mean "people I know personally".

To add another data point, every teacher I know uses at least a third of their "break" for lesson planning. Usually more.

And some tech workers work 12 hours/day. That's on them for making poor decisions.

To add another data point, _every_ teacher I know (I know three) use less than a month of their three month break on lesson planning/continuing education/staff obligations.

my sister was a teacher for 20-odd years, then she went through a Ph.D. program in education theory, and now teaches teachers. So below is not based on "knowing one or two teachers", but on knowing how teachers are trained/certified and what professional standards are.

Most teachers work hard over the summer, it isn't a break. Pay isn't great.

And a certain mainstream political group puts significant effort into demonizing the profession and destroying the pay/benefits packages... which matters, because in public schools, the politicians hold the purse strings.

My teacher friend usually gets a full-time summer job at a college prep program, totally unrelated to his school-year employer. (Anecdote.)

> considering they only work 9/12 months

I think many teachers (almost all that I know, and all of the good ones) would disagree with you on that. Lesson planning, training/continuing education, scheduling, etc.

> many of them find side jobs

..why?

That is to say, I'm sure most people on here could get a side job if they wanted to. Is there a reason why teachers get side jobs and, say, programmers don't? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question.)

Programmers get side jobs all the time. That's usually how you start your own business in my experience. People who work with people do it because that's what drives them and they find fulfillment in that job.

Probably not the side jobs most here have in mind but after almost 2 years of remote I’ve been seriously contemplating getting a night job at a bar or restaurant just to meet folks and the little bit of money (relative to my salary and equity) would just be a bonus.

Schoolteacher pensions in CA are worth millions, and they’re not taxed on the imputed value of this wealth. Also in CA they qualify for BMR housing, another untaxed benefit. And in CA they don’t pay SS tax.

> they don't pay SS tax

This isn't really a benefit. Public employees with access to a state pension generally don't pay into SS because their state pension is is lieu of social security. They pay into the pension instead and have to hope it exists in the future, which for many states is significantly riskier than relying on federal social security.

> many of them find side jobs

This might just be a Midwest thing but those sidejobs typically involve something drinking related

there are nurses pulling in $200/hr locally (travel nurses usually). Due to shortages, some hospitals are allowing 6 days of work (typically 12 hr shifts) and nurses are making ridiculous amount of money, if they can manage it mentally and physically.

These aren't independent axes. For example, more money can make it easier to feel like you are genuinely contributing, or rationalize the idea that negative public sentiment isn't real and fake media reports.

> What you're less likely to do is work in an area where your work isn't interesting, contributes nothing significant, and rots people's minds.

Have you head of finance? What I think is that most current tech folks started their careers out of genuine interest, and so think along the lines you describe. But now that the money has really arrived, the balance will shift to the type-A aspirational folks who only care about the highest paying, most highly regarded career, and are looking for some FAANG->YC Startup->Management path. These people absolutely are happy to do whatever as long as they get external validation, and would have no compunction about working at FB as long as it keeps them on the track they planned.

We’ve crossed the Rubican on the injection of type-a’s in this field. The entire Agile layer is one hell of a ruse where they managed to employ an entire group of unnecessary people into what used to be a very natural workflow. I really don’t need a scrum master asking me every morning what the fuck I did yesterday, or size stories every other day. Believe me, I really don’t.

I almost want finance to be glamorized again so it can siphon these people away.

"I found it interesting that only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me."

It is not surprising if the goal is not to fill vacancies or expanding needs, but to prevent competing companies from having these people at their disposal. There will be enough offers to cover every possible person who could do this computer-focused work that might go to work for a competitor.

Another explanation is that there is a high attrition rate (e.g., like Amazon) and the company must overcompensate. Thus there will always be high numbers of advertisied positions that are never filled.

A third explanation is the company just has too much money and no clear ideas on how to spend it. (Case in point: Metaverse) Companies tend to sustain higher and higher levels of, for lack of a better term, "stupidity/foolishness" as the cash flow increases further and further beyond the company's immediate needs. Having heaps of cash on hand does not necessarily focus the mind; it can have the opposite effect.

You are interpreting this to mean "positions", but "offers" normally means a specific person was told "congratulations: we've agreed to hire you! here is what we will pay... are you in?" and so it does seem very strange that half of such offers are being rejected (and then implies the thought process explained of maybe people interviewing for multiple jobs and half the time choosing someone other than Facebook). (I honestly don't know which is "correct" for what is actually happening, but I noticed the disconnect between your two comments.)

It is also possible some of the people rejecting offers do not have another offer pending at the time.

I don't know, I think if you're interested in VR/AR, wearables, computer vision, building products for the "creator" generation, or even crypto (Novi) then FB/Meta probably has the best work pitch of all the FAANGs.

If you wanted to work on those things I'd think the last thing you'd want is for your work to be owned by them when you're done, though.

Not everybody wants to be a founder or deal with the bad WLB of a startup.

It's nice to be paid a reliable 400k/year and work on something you think is cool.

Facebook…erhm Meta.. makes cool and useful services. My uneducated guess is about 20% of their efforts go to delivering something compelling to the user. The remainder goes to figure out how they can manipulate, coerce, farm, and monetize said users. The problem is the level of perversion they have done and justified due to the need to monetize.

I had a guy pitch me on Comcast's tech office once.

He said you get to work on cool stuff, but it never actually gets deployed. And that everyone hates your employer, but you'll never get fired.

I definitely see how "work on cool stuff" + "don't worry about getting fired" could be pretty cool, if you don't have any investment in really creating things that are used.

That value proposition of stability is a high for those that have a life outside of work. Why does a typical engineer optimize for leetcode and FAANG salaries? Because they have shit else to establish self respect.

That seems unnecessarily harsh.

I've known a lot of people who have a thriving life outside of work, but are also very driven and value their work highly.

Essentially its ok to sell your soul for 40 hours (likely more) a week as long as it allows you to pursue your own interests outside of work.

Not the last thing, or at least not the worst company to choose if that's important -

Oculus research has a better track record of publishing AR/VR research and opening up old hardware (unlocked Oculus Go) than anyone else doing serious AR/VR work.

Apple, on the other hand...

> better track record ... opening up old hardware (unlocked Oculus Go)

This one thing that happened 3 weeks ago is a "track record"?

Sorry to go a bit meta. I can't help but notice that a reply to comment that mentions F1, is from a user handle named Jensen Button.

As long as it isn't GPT-3... (:

You may be running outside your traction circle here, son. :)

I definitely had F1 on my mind yesterday and the mention certainly wasn't missed :)

There are enough companies that offer competitive salaries to FAANG and interesting work in those spaces. That FB is the best of a list of companies wall street grouped should be the notable factor.

Google has by far the best team in computer vision.

Bay area RNs aren't as poorly paid as you imagine.

The bubble we (hn) live in, is turning against fb/google/evil corp for various reasons, but the truth is, like any corp they will have ups and downs, if this meta shit pays out (fortnite skins for 2 billion people is basically infinite money) they will just buy their way out. Or they will buy the devs in another way, like apple is buying them indirectly for 30% commission on their apps.

Worse case, you get survivor bias of people without moral compass, as anyone who cares leaves. Let's see how the social dilemma will play out, if the devs are actually malicious.

(edit: grammar)

The trouble for FB is that best developers have free choice of where they are going to work.

Yes, when you need to pay your bills and FB is going to pay a shit ton of money, most people will rationalize, bend and accept FB's offer.

But when people have basically free choice of where they can work this is when most of them actually start paying attention to non-financial aspects of their decision.

FB's model requires them to be able to hire a lot of really good developers. It may take some time, but if they have trouble hiring really good developers they may start a vicious circle with end result that they will be open to being caught by competition.

> The trouble for FB is that best developers have free choice of where they are going to work.

Thats in most companies no? The builders build from their heart. Until they get convinced to move somewhere very important as victims of their success and burnout. But you get 2-3 years of people giving their hearts out. Its what I call 'paying with love'. You know how they say 'do what you love and never work a day in your life', but what they dont say, is that you consuming that love, little by little, some day you will make a compromise, like an artist forced to paint something they dont agree with, and then again, and again.. until you start hating your brush.

> FB's model requires them to be able to hire a lot of really good developers. It may take some time, but if they have trouble hiring really good developers they will be starting to slide a slippery slope to mediocrity when they can easily be caught by competition.

I am not sure I agree with that, I dont think anybody's model requires constant input of really good developers, most things will work with ok devs, some sharded mysql, lots of ram and a bunch of materialization jobs.

You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free. They do not and you can find tons of posts on here complaining about how the interview process sucks, does not measure true capability etc, etc. Many people may just not have the time to grind Leetcode juggling a job to pay bills, kids and family. Sorry, but this "free choice" argument is bunk IMHO.

> You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free.

Not for free, you still have to honestly work there. You get salary for value you provide.

In general companies set up hiring processes with intention to hire people. (I know this sounds like a heresy to some ears here on HN). They interviews are set up with intention to hire people while but also filter out people who will not be productive. That these processes are frequently badly designed is another matter.

If you are genuinely good -- they want to hire you. Trust me on that.

The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool. Then they come back to HN and complain how badly these processes are designed, completely missing the point.

Somebody will finally hire them, but why does it have to be me? Could I do something to prevent these people from even applying? Could I do something that, if these people apply, they have no hopes of getting the job?

Sure, some good people who would be able to do the job will be collateral damage but guess what, it usually costs much more to hire a bad apple than accidentally not hire a perfectly acceptable candidate.

The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying. If you only apply to one or two places, couple of hours of interviews is nothing compared to years of work you will spend there, but if your plan is to shotgun the interviews you can't attend ones that require some preparation, multiple rounds of interviews, maybe a trip onsite, etc.

Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions.

If you are good at what you are doing, longer interview just gives you more occasions to prove that. And also learn more about the company.

In my experience even with badly designed processes, good developers will still be better at navigating them than bad ones.

Think about it: you attend an entrance exam where you know only 2% candidates will be accepted. Does it matter how difficult the exam is? No it does not, it only matters if you are better than 98% of applicants.

> The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool.

How did it come to this? You don't see this in other engineering industries. There's not a ton of incapable civil engineers bouncing from interview to interview. You don't hear about how bad aerospace hiring processes are.

Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry?

Saying "a lot of people are just bad" without investigation the situation seems rather unscientific.

> The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying.

The amount of effort invested into the Leetcode prep industry would suggest otherwise. A lot of people are playing the game even if they are under-qualified. Maybe that process will make them better coders. Or maybe, they will just appear to be better coders to you the interviewer.

> Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions.

Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.

> Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Pretty confident that the lack of in-house training has been mostly facilitated by that highly skilled computer people tend to take care of that on their own accord (since that’s how most got there in the first place).

I wanted to say that this echoes my experience perfectly.

After interviewing several hundreds of people, two surprising things stood out:

- a large percentage of technical applicants cannot program even in languages where they claim multiple years of work experience

- this holds true for non-technical applicants too

I think this is a combination of poor applicants being overrepresented in the applicant pool (good ones get hired), the fact that modern job complexity has grown compared to previous generations, and the desire for people to "hit the ground running".

I don't know what's the solution. Fields that require certification don't seem to be suffering as much, but that has significant side effects too. What I know is the times where people would work for the same company for 30+ year, where they'd get taught what they needed on the job, are not coming back.

But then how do these applicants manage to amass experience they claim to have?

Massive lying and resume inflation? Performance anxiety leading to bombing interviews? Maybe the roles they were in didn’t actually require as much programming, or deep understanding of programming as people would expect?

It could just be that a massive amount of work in the software industry is really code monkey work. “Gluing together APIs.” Refactoring existing code. All things that can be accomplished by referring to Stack Overflow copypasta or the existing codebase itself without requiring the coder to have any deep independent understanding of the code or the language they claim to know.

And, if that gets the job done- how high should engineering standards even be if so much of the work is menial? Either able to be outsourced, or one day Autopiloted away?

In almost every industry the bottom is subject to shifts while the top with most ability and experience tends to be secure in their jobs.

If the industry shifts needing less developers (for whatever reason), companies will just set higher expectations when hiring meaning a lot of people will not be able to find a job.

But I don't think this happens. Copilot is not going to solve development problems same way stack exchange and google did not. We got google and se and number of developers only grew.

I am interviewing candidates a lot (I would say on average 1-2 per week for the past 20 years).

At least in case of software development jobs I think there is couple additional factors:

- people who are absolutely unable to do it but have strong desire to get well paying job regardless. I have actually seen this work. Ie. a person that can't program at all be called a principal developer and for years successfully hide the fact she can't program anything more complex than a simple loop.

- young people who tend to completely mistake what the job is about. They think software development is about coding when it actually is about building stuff and coding is just one tool to do it.

- people overpromoted very quickly (most likely to keep them and or avoid salary raise), having very unrealistic expectations. A lot of candidates I am getting are calling themselves senior developers even though they have 1-3 years of experience and are still learning to program. And have no real world experience beside 1-2 projects they worked for. They could potentially become better developers in future. But they are impatient with their careers and are skipping the part where they should be getting experience.

- people who cod do it but don't care. They don't care about development but are intelligent enough and want good salary. The issue is, people do not learn things well if they don't care about them. Halfhearted effort at learning results in mediocre results. In my lifetime I think I saw only a single good developer who did not care about development but he was such a professional trooper that he forced himself to do it well by sheer power of his will.

As to working for the same company for 30+ years, I got to know some people who worked 20+. They usually don't stay in development job and are getting promoted thus removing themselves from the developer candidate pool.

I also don't think it is healthy for your experience nowadays to stay in one place for so long. I think having varied development experience, seeing different kinds of projects with different kinds of abnormalities, is important to be able to understand what is going on in your project on a larger scale. And this is important if you want to advance to something like tech lead or an architect.

Your observations match mine, too. Especially the first bullet point. There are a lot of developer candidates who simply can't develop--even the most basic FizzBuzz level program. But, boy can they talk... and talk... and talk... and self-promote... and charm... and flash a big, beautiful consultant smile... and make the non-technical higher-ups feel great about hiring them. I think a lot of us work at companies where the technical screen is a deal-breaker, but there are many, MANY tech companies out there where, if a candidate impresses the VP with their smooth talking Ivy-league sounding charm, the VP will override the tech-nerd's evaluations and hire them. And then, the impostor can use their charm and political savvy to mask their lack of work output... sometimes for years.

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates and worked for many projects over past 20 years.

> Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved?

Yes. There is a lot of candidates who utterly incapable of doing their job.

Let me share a story.

I remember one day I wanted to pass driver's licence exam here in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is known for having one of the most difficult exams in the world.

There was a group of people standing there that seemed to be already knowing each other. One new person came, greeted them and said they just blew the exam. So they ask him "Where did the guy fail you?". It is difficult to translate, but the assumption in the question was that it was the examiner's decision rather than examinee's fault. Then I learned that he made some stupid mistake and that this is 25th attempt at the exam. Then they started discussion about how unfair entire process is and how impossible it is to pass it.

I went and passed on the first try because I have honestly prepared.

It is the same with software development. A lot of people just keep complaining and complaining about unfairness of it while they are doing absolutely nothing to get better and effectively have the same level of competence as the people in the story. And all the while they also earn a comparatively very good salary (at least here in Poland if you are software developer for a foreign company you are already getting more than average salary that most non-developers need many years to achieve).

My every other interview is a person that cannot answer any of the questions I give and then, can't write a simple piece of code I ask them to.

It is possible that a small percentage of these people are truly stressed and I try to employ stress relief tactics to help this on an interview.

But I honestly believe most of these people simply can't program.

What is even more interesting is that these people come mainly for senior development jobs (I don't interview junior developers) and that they come through agencies that supposedly screen them and some even hire them and bring them forward as contractors.

> Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.

I summed up the actual length of zoom meetings I had and it added to more than 24 hours. Yes, I am an outlier. But it still does not change the fact that I was looking to change jobs and was willing to go through a lengthy process (actually it was fun talking to intelligent people and I wouldn't mind even if I did not get the job).

For me, personally, I am happy to have more time to convince the interviewers that I am the right guy for the job and my good first impression is not just a fluke. The more time I spend on the discussion the better starting point for negotiation I have.

I assume that if they spent a lot of time talking to me and are very happy with my answers they would be willing to pay more than if I was just random person off the street that just lucked out giving couple good answers on a very short interview.

"The more time I spend on the discussion the better starting point for negotiation I have."

Ding ding ding ding! You discovered the same thing I have.

Put me though six rounds of interviews. I have plenty of time. If I didn't think the job was a good opportunity I wouldn't have applied in the first place.

But I know after the sixth round if you still like me, there's a close to 0% chance you have any other candidates waiting around. You have a lot of leverage as a candidate if you go through a long interview process. It also buys you time to interview at multiple other places in parallel.

> But I honestly believe most of these people simply can't program. What is even more interesting is that these people come mainly for senior development jobs (I don't interview junior developers)

But how do you explain people who don’t know how to program being able to advance to senior roles?

Maybe they are able to program but completely depend on IDEs or having reference code to look at in their daily work.

Maybe they are in roles that are mostly managerial but not technical.

Maybe, again, there’s massive resume lying going on.

If something rotten is going on in the heart of our industry, it merits study.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and I have some theories.

First, we underestimate how difficult it is for managers to learn which employees are good ones and provide value. There is a lot of reasons for this.

Maybe they aren't very good engineers themselves in the first place? Maybe they have some skewed measure of what value is (for example they just count closed tickets or lines of code written or some other measure that has little to do with real value?)

Second, some people create a lot of shit that will come around as technical debt later. But understanding technical debt is incredibly complex task for the manager. I have never seen a manager that has good understanding of where their technical debt comes from, forget about pinpointing exact people that are causing it, except for very special situations (like me pointing out a PR and explaining line by line why this is poor development).

They can and do close tickets a lot. They do that because they feel insecure and need justification for them being there. But they will do quantity over quality and will tend to pick simple problems that will not expose their lack of capability.

You can solve a lot of problems by simple trial and error. Which tends to produce poor code.

Yes, they tend to close a lot of tickets. But they also tend to create more problems than they solve.

Most corporate projects I worked for do not require any complex coding. You can get by ctrl-c/ctrl-v-ing existing code. A difference between a good and bad employee will not be in whether they can produce a code that works now. The difference might be whether they can:

- produce code that will work correctly regardless of the changing circumstances,

- produce code that is as simple as possible but not simpler than necessary,

- notice problems with the codebase and take initiative to fix this on the spot (sometimes without anybody else even being aware of),

- notice opportunities for improvement that somebody else will be working on,

- drive communication to ensure the feature that is being built is really what the client needs (rather than what the client wishes), then to confirm satisfaction,

etc.

Additionally, these people tend to create an image of being overworked which looks plausible from manager's point of view. It does not help that other developers might be aware of this but will not say a word to the manager (as it might be considered "snitching" or they might feel they shouldn't do that which somebody else might do for them).

These things are not easy to understand when you are a manager and you are also surrounded by your team that guards every word they send your way.

Thank you for sharing your detailed experience and insight into the problem. It sounds like this field has a long way to go to produce better engineers. Perhaps the way software engineering education and training needs to be completely rethought. It’s ironic that despite the name, so much of the creation of software lacks the craftsmanship attributes that other engineering disciplines possess.

> You get salary for value you provide.

Salaries are not tied to value, otherwise developers would be making 7-8 digits not 5-6. Salaries are determined by "market rate" which is a synonym for market fixing. It does not matter what value you provide, only matters how low you will agree to get paid.

> FB's model requires them to be able to hire a lot of really good developers.

It really doesn't. They need to hire a lot of developers, but they don't all (or even most) need to be really good.

They've got lots of stuff to reduce the blast radius of poor developers. Extensive testing and automated regression. Extensive code reviews (although I don't know how effective that is). Lots and lots of layers that make it harder to do things wrong (but also harder to do things period). Gobs and gobs of meetings so nobody has time to get much done anyway.

Some parts of that need really good developers, but you don't need a lot.

> Worse case, you get survivor bias of people without moral compass, as anyone who cares leaves

Conversely, perhaps that's precisely what needs to happen for the legal banhammer to come down?

I have to wonder if job satisfaction at Facebook has a very binomial distribution. This is pretty much true at any large corp, where there can be a ton of variation between teams, but from the outside looking in it seems that Facebook basically has a dichotomy:

On one hand you have teams working on interesting and industry-leading tech, like React, GraphQL, Oculus, etc. But on the other you have legions of people working to make the money machine printing, and I've got to think most of that work sucks: the nitty-gritty of keeping the site up, content moderation teams, all the ad plumbing. A lot of that stuff would be good for a new grad to learn how stuff works at such large scale, but that's the cohort who I think would be most turned off by Facebook's social/brand problems.

I think you mean bimodal. Binomial is something else completely

Indeed, binomial distributions are quite unimodal!

Lol, thanks, Sunday morning brain fart.

This is the case with most tech firms. Unless you’re hired specifically to work on OSS stuff, your likely job role is “boring” stuff. If you’re really good and deliver consistently, you get to work on projects with increasing scope and impact, and if you build a custom solution for a unique problem you face, you may open source it and it might end up solving other peoples problems…

I think it depends on the person. I have worked on "fun" tech at startups but ended up coming back to my role as a cog in Google's money printing machine (ad plumbing AND content moderation in fact!) The retention in my group is actually pretty great; it's trivial to have tremendous impact so career progression is fairly easy, and work-life balance is very reasonable. Personally I'm more motivated by this sort of environment and the ability to (slowly) make improvements that affect millions of companies and billions of people, than I am by hacking on greenfield tech that may or may not see users. But I know plenty of people who feel the opposite (as you allude to), and this sort of role wouldn't be a great fit for them.

I spent about 3ish years working on ad plumbing at another large adtech company.

You're right, everyone there was pretty happy. We had a great office by the beach in Venice. Free ubers to work. Great snacks.

I really only left because I wanted to spend some time in Asia and do my own thing for a bit. Different strokes for different folks!

> But on the other you have legions of people working to make the money machine printing, and I've got to think most of that work sucks: the nitty-gritty of keeping the site up, content moderation teams, all the ad plumbing.

From technical point of view, things like keeping such a huge site up, or building ads backend can be very rewarding for infrastructure minded folks.

Very true, lots of fun distributed systems problems can be found working in infrastructure for FAANG companies.

I think it totally depends on the team.

I am a senior IC. I went from Google to FB for L+1. The salary increase alone was enough to convince me. Personally I don't think GOOG is much better than FB (if they are better at all) in all the areas in which people on HN complain.

I heard some horror stories about FB Work/Life balance before I came here. Turns out I work 10-15 hours a week less than when I was at Google, in a much better org, on problems I care about. Beyond my immediate manager (who at GOOG was great too), FB leadership chain is far better throughout my org except for one other person at GOOG. In my GOOG org people were constantly promoted and rewarded for the wrong things.

FB let me go through weeks of trying out teams before I selected one. Google put me on a team, told me nothing about it, and I had no idea what team it even was until the end of the first day when my manager picked me up.

Not really worried about the performance reviews a comment mentioned above since GOOG has the same (actually in my experience worse there).

While this is a trend across the board since the pandemic, for Facebook it is particularly troublesome because it's deeper rooted than at other companies. On an almost daily basis it is becoming more and more public knowledge that Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem). Young people are not stupid, no one wants to work at a company with no future, even if it still pays well. The root of all these problems is, of course, the toxicity of Zuck.

> Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem).

Is it? I've always liked the perspective that Facebook's product, to governments, beyond mass surveillance, is societal stability (or lack there of).

If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook. That sort of power doesn't have to be stated explicitly and the mainstream Liberal media spent 4 years stating it quite openly. Nancy Pelosi is a well known Facebook investor.

Any major issue from the government can just result in a "bug" that accidentally amplifies the opposition and just like that, the cause of the issue is voted out.

> If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook

Why not Twitter?

Facebook is (was?) used by the masses. Twitter is mostly the same group of influential people talking to each other.

Source: https://mashable.com/article/twitter-pew-study-echo-chambers

Twitter doesn't seem to have the market penetration. It's public by default permission also creates a different dynamic

I imagine many FB employees also envisioned themselves working their way to levels of seniority where they could nudge policy and practices towards the better (however they might define that). After all, one might have said, there’s no other place where an individual’s career in tech can have greater impact on so many people’s lives.

Now, seeing how even senior people on dedicated integrity teams had little ability to steer the ship, and being constantly reminded of this by friends outside FB even if it had previously been whispered internally, must be sobering for many of these folks.

What sort of ship steering do you think these employees wanted? More moderation and censorship? Or less? Or just different? Or is it more around reducing engagement based goals that drive addiction to social media? Or is it around targeting children?

I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus.

The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.

They’ve certainly faced an onslaught from the press, which has decided they are Philip Morris 2.0. It’s very unclear if that is going to translate into actual legal trouble.

If I was at FB I’d be more concerned with how young people are rejecting it.

Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation. The Press is doing their job: finding out what goes on inside Facebook and reporting on it. As someone not really involved either way, the responses of Facebook to legitimate questions has been entirely unsatisfactory and justifies the negative coverage they’ve received.

Facebook runs American tv and print media?

> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.

They (FB and the news media) do indeed.

I heard that Murdoch particularly hates FB & Google since he's lost so much ad money to them. As a result his papers have gone to great lengths to give Google/YT/FB, etc bad press to try to convince advertisers to advertise in traditional print newspapers like the good old days (for which they margins are far higher).

Facebook's legal troubles are certainly not imaginary. They are actual, they are ongoing, they are overwhelming and there's more and more coming out all the time. Zuck and Thiel themselves are named as defendents on multiple very serious lawsuits which money alone could not spare them from (and not for lack of trying - untold billions have been spent in the past 5 years to ensure Zuck's name didn't show up on lawsuits. Until it did.)

I haven't been following FB, and wasn't aware that Zuckerberg could be liable for more than financial penalties. Is it regarding Cambridge Analytics? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/tech...

he's talking about how they may have misrepresented the business of the company to investors. the SEC has ongoing stuff about this.

This is where Matt Levine would opine "everything is securities fraud".

maybe. if nothing matters then it doesn't matter if zuck gets charged with something then.

Young people(of which I am one if 24 is considered young in this context) might reject FB but instagram(owned by FB well now meta) is probably the most engaged social media by people of younger 18-29. And whatsapp is the most used messaging platform in most regions of the world. If I was at FB, I would be most concerned with my company not being considered "cool", the potential kneejerk reaction of governments worldwide to show action(I am really skeptical that the underlying issues that led to the current issues with these megacorps would be addressed) even if there is no current legal trouble.

I’m afraid 24 is not young in this context. Teens are what these companies seem to care about (judging by the ad budget in the hundreds of millions), and in that demographic Instagram is behind both Snapchat and TikTok. It would seem that social media apps are like music: teens want an exciting new thing of their own (which, well, I have bad news about the coolness of music you like…)

Perhaps WhatsApp’s position is stickier, I’m unsure of it’s importance I’m driving revenue however.

I don't think the root problem is any one person, given that Twitter is even more destructive to society. It's the users, it's the incentives of the platforms, it's bad actors. There's low trust, a breakdown of institutions, a raging culture war. It's complicated.

How so?

Twitter has perhabs less than 10% of users as Facebook.

Twitter has out-sized influence.

Right, it's where the mob is and where the journalists and politicians are. They use and watch Twitter very closely and it informs what actions they take. Companies too.

When a company (like Facebook) or a nation state (like Russia) is deeply dysfunctional and it has for a very long time been ruled by only one person, it is in fact fairly reasonable to conclude that the root problem is, at present, that one specific person.

Interviewed there a few years back. This was right after one of the many Facebook crises became public (sorry, forget which). I wasn’t super interested in the role or working there but was interested in seeing what an offer might look like.

One of the interviewers was clearly going through a crises of conscience and told me he was thinking of leaving. All of the interviewers made it clear they didn’t personally use the product. Definitely the strangest interview of my life.

That’s just the reality of money. What self respecting talented engineer seriously uses any of this stuff? Now imagine everyone across enterprise, it’s even more of a shit show (literal evil industries).

The duality creates a conundrum amongst a generation that often don’t settle down with a family until very later (if at all). If work is just for money, and you have nothing else in life, well shit, your ass is gonna be depressed.

Maybe Zuckerberg gets it, maybe we do need the metaverse to fill this insane void.

As for me, I literally look forward to chaos in the news at this point. Imagine that, how’d it come to this.

> What self respecting talented engineer seriously uses any of this stuff

Not Facebook itself, but Oculus is way ahead of any commercially viable competition right now and I don't see this changing anytime soon.

When you have a large company that recruits in large part on comp, perks, security, and prestige, over time that will destroy the company culture no matter how good it was at the start. Because you're gonna attract bland, boring, competent but mediocre people by recruiting on those things, and their mid-tier mindsets will gradually pollute and dilute everything that might have been remarkable about the place in the early days. At some point it gets bad enough that even the mid-tier people want to leave because the culture and work have gotten too boring even for them, or the prestige/security side has eroded because,...well, because too many people like them have been there for too long. This problem isn't unique to Facebook...all the FAANG type companies share it to various degrees. It is ridiculous and shameful to blame Zuck. Zuck has fed and clothed half this industry for most of two decades

For most companies, getting people to care about the mission is impossible due to labor alienation ("we're working on creating fake test data for companies that provide cloud services for payroll automation for cloud service companies that vend fake test data"), and comp, perks, security and prestige are all you can offer.

Let's say you work for one of these companies - how do you tell whether you are one of the good ones or one of the "bland, boring, competent but mediocre" ones? And are there any companies out there right now that are still chock full of good people?

The test is really simple. Let's imagine that tomorrow you doubled your positive impact on the success of the company as a whole. Will your boss be twice as happy with you? If not, progression is basically political, or maybe in some cases based on the skillful execution of tasks unrelated to anything valuable, and people who are very friendly or are very unconcerned with the company they're working for (and consequently will not be bothered by wasting enormous amounts of brainpower on achieving pointless goals), respectively, will fill out the ranks in very little time.

It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.

This simply isn’t true. What attracts bad people is things like lack of promotion

Some people are excited about Oculus and the metaverse, but I can't stomach the idea of FB-owned VR. Social media already feels like a parasite and a drug thanks to FB, and putting an Oculus on feels like wrapping the vampire squid right across my face.

This is an entirely subjective take, but in the last few years FB seem to have evolved from one the coolest places for an engineer to being at the bottom of FAANG. I wonder if a significant amount of those people are looking for positions at Google/Amazon or they are taking their expertise somewhere else.

all of fang has lost brand power, all sufficiently large megacorps are clusterfucks

That's just not true (well the clusterfuck part is). Big tech dominates the top of the list for most well regarded brands.

https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/

https://morningconsult.com/most-loved-brands-2020/

Startups stepping into the unicorn status territory are a much better bet. Their stock grants have value since the companies are getting closer to exit, and there's a real chance that the stock will 10-100X.

Your four year vest of $250k could be worth $2.5M - $25M in the future.

These are the best jobs. They can be extremely lucrative, and the work is exciting and palpable. Scaling a company to the point of IPO is fun.

Look at the market the company is entering. How big? Is the company growing like crazy? What's the competition? How's the leadership and culture? And do you like the work?

If you can find one... I might be one of the lucky few who has (ask me in 1.5 years), but I've seen many promising startups fail.

I'm seriously considering moving to FANG for perceived stability and income. Stock which might 10x vs stock which at least has a market value.

These kinds of studies have all sorts of issues. The main one is it's cheap to answer a study. Nobody has any skin in the game. What do you think of Apple? Oh great phones, very nice UX.

Where it matters is when you're asked to spend money, for one. And the other one is what we're discussing here, where do you want to work? The natural experiment of choice is more telling than what a bunch of people can recall about some name that they barely know anything about.

Yeah why do we even have this acronym any more lol. I don't think I want to work at any of them anymore. I used to think it was cool, but now,ehh. Work life balance is to precious I think even if another 50k is enticing.

I've never understood obsession with FAANG. Seems like it is only meaningful to younger folks in the industry looking to establish themselves. You want FAANG on your resume so you can get the job you really want.

they pay 2-3x.

The obsession is simply around getting a high pay and great benefits at a very stable company. FAANG seems like a high confidence path to more money than employees probably ever wanted or expected. The reasons behind that are worth considering. We live in an economy that is increasingly consolidated, where massive capital sits with a few giants, where new innovators are easily copied by those giants, where network effects and shady practices discourage new competition.

If we had a more competitive economy, with functioning anti trust law, and protections for small innovators rather than giant conglomerates, I think talent might be distributed differently. But otherwise it is rational to look at the situation, realize nothing will be done, and to just work at FAANG and let the dollars roll in.

Same obsession as with the Ivy's/top schools. Its a status marker/credential.

Exactly this, plus high pay. However, I've known lots of people who have worked at FAANG companies and while they tend to hire extremely bright people that doesn't correlate with everyone doing interesting work.

As a friend put it, "yeah, I got to work at Google but I spent 3 years fixing obscure bugs in the Dart engine for Chrome."

Also, keep in mind that the FAANG companies sort of have to pay a ton because most engineers would likely rather work at a startup where they get to be big fish in a small pond and build something new.

> while they tend to hire extremely bright people that doesn't correlate with everyone doing interesting work.

If you are the dumbest person in the room then you will become the last pick for interesting projects, and someone has to do all the boring work.

Oh delusional amazonians thinking they can successfully prevent those in the know for lobbying for their removal from "FAANG".

Amazon is by far the lowest of the FAANG. Horrific WLB, worse pay than all others listed (esp the vesting schedule), toxic culture, terrible benefits (lol bananas). Don't delude yourself, Facebook is a great place to work and actually deserves to stay in the acronym

Fully agreed with your comment, but I wanted to correct one small thing regarding vesting schedule.

Recently, it seems like Amazon started to offset their poor vesting schedule in the first 2 years by giving the matching amount of cash bonus for those years of reduced vest. So technically, you still get only 5%/15% vested during your first two years, but with enough cash bonus for those two years to essentially make your "vest amount" equal to the real vest during years 3 and 4.

Note: I haven't done this myself as I am not interviewing with Amazon for all the other reasons you listed, but I had a few friends who interviewed with them in the past year. At first, I thought it was just a unique situation my friends managed to negotiate for themselves. But after checking the usual sources (r/cscareerquestions and a few other places online), it seems like my friends were far from being unique in that aspect, as I saw quite a few people reporting the same cash-bonus-offset method over the past year. From what I saw, it seems like a new thing they started doing at some point during COVID.

Amazon has had a large cash comp for years 1 and 2 for a very long time. It's not new because of covid at all.

My bad, it could have been not new, but I've literally never heard of it until last year. Could have definitely been just me living under a rock, so I appreciate the clarification.

While I agree that FB has fallen down the list, Amazon will have to improve a lot to get bumped from the bottom of the list.

Hiring bar at Amazon is lower, WLB widely recognized as terrible, constant stack ranking horror stories, etc.

When I lived in Seattle a decade ago, I went to some kind of Amazon-sponsored event and multiple programmers who were working for Amazon at the time quietly told me the place was hell and not to apply.

Amazon is the FAANG of last resort where engineers go to do their penance and show that they can put up with a year of working for a terrible employer. Their company culture is garbage among engineers and are notorious for abysmal practices such as hiring people for the sole purpose of having someone to fire so some middle manager can hit their unregretted attrition metrics. Amazon does cool work, but after talking about it with friends and coworkers who have worked there and one that is trying to leave I would never work at such a terrible company.

On the one hand, is this surprising? Once you get as big as FB, it is inevitable that it is no longer the same kind of work environment as it was when it was a hot startup or a new titan. FB is not new. It is no doubt changing on account of that, because the way the world reacts to it is changing. They wanted to start their own currency, which many startups do, but because they were FB, the governments of the world made it clear they would not be allowed to succeed in that. When you are big, you cannot "move fast and break things" without triggering a much larger backlash from the world around you, and this inevitably means you don't move as fast.

On the other hand, I don't doubt that they are going to have to worry more about work-life balance and things like that, because they cannot just use their status as the new titan to recruit with (because they're no longer new). So, like many no-longer-new tech titans before them, they will have to change how they recruit and retain. FB is now more like Microsoft, IBM, or Intel than it is like the FB of old.

This is a pretty weak article. The trend is sourced from an unspecified number of "tech recruiters and other industry source," but not quantified at all. Quitting is up across the board[1], but there is no attempt to baseline against industry overall. The whole thing is basically an "X stock is up because of Y reason" article.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/a-record-4point4-million-peo...

employees of all companies are more willing to leave lately. for this to be meaningful it needs to control for that.

Normally I’d agree with you but I think this article topic is fair. FB is a high profile company that has been an aspirational employer for many people (esp outside the valley) over several years. For that to change is interesting.

It's worse than that. We're assuming "X says [..]" is equivalent to a factual statement. Its the typical weasel wording by modern media which is simply looking to report click-bait/gossip (he says, she says), rather than expending any effort to verifying and reporting facts.

I think it really says something that Facebook has to pay 20k/year extra in base salary for the same level compared to other FAANG companies to attract developers.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but when someone lists that they work at FB on their dating profile, I assume they either aren't paying attention or have dubious morals.

Netflix pays an extra 100k, is that because of a reputation for dubious morals?

Does Netflix pay 100k extra total comp or salary?

Netflix doesn’t pay RSU, all salary.

Your conclusion is not the point that the parent is making.

Parent is assuming fb pays 20k more due to poor moral reputation. I am asserting that we don't know that at all.

No, it's because they're paying for the therapy you'll need after burning out in three years.

This bodes very poorly for Facebook. The money may still come in but forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference between a trendy company like Facebook and a corporate monolith like Oracle.

FB is already a legacy company in my opinion. It makes no products I am interested in using and gives no indication of ever doing so. I will never call them Meta and it's going to be funny when no one else does either. They haven't earned it.

Google, whatever its problems, gives some indication of keeping up with the times. Aside from undisputed leadership in AI, there are the little things: they recently overhauled their chat tooling (again) and (finally) added Slack-style emoji reactions. If they still had some of their mid-2000s mojo, it would be neat to see them try again with a social network product.

That's an interesting take. Most everyone I know find Google's chat changes utter shit, and have found alternatives. Personally, I dumped it and joined a Slack community of the one person I talked with most on it.

Besides being a complete disaster, UI-wise, it freezes up and ceases working constantly in the web UI. The remaining people I know who stay on Google's chat... I simply cannot talk to anymore. I send them email or use an alternative chat service they're on.

You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.

> You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.

Nah, it's okay that I feel differently about a feature than you and say so publicly.

The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you? Google is in “accumulate capital to deploy the next technological shift” mode, Facebook is trying to make that shift a reality (Waymo excepted).

Google keeps a large suite of in-house built, enormously useful products alive and still manages to move them forward incrementally. FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future? If I'm to believe they will deliver, shouldn't they have a track record by now?

And Google has led in AI for the past decade so I'm not sure how you got the impression that FB is doing and Google is just sitting on cash. Looks exactly opposite to me.

> FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future?

Have you used a few VR devices over the last decade, including the last Quest?

No. I can't imagine putting on anything that would exacerbate my neck strain. Screen, stay where you are and I'll decide what angle to look at you from.

Maybe when they scale it down to the size and heft of swimming goggles.

facebook groups and marketplace are huge. Marketplace will be the craigslist killer if they can fix their scammer problems.

Groups compete well with reddit.

As they build a 'metaverse' groups, marketplace, and walls can form the foundation

you wall is your own personal space. Your groups and the marketplace become places that you go to.

I respect that hypothesis. They've got their bite of the market with those products.

How will the "metaverse" UX improve any of those experiences?

Kinda reminds me when as a kid I was excited about windows 3d UI since it sounded cool, but quickly realized it's way less convenient.

> Google keeps a large suite of in-house built, enormously useful products alive and still manages to move them forward incrementally. FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004.

I despised Facebook before everyone else but seriously:

Google is extremely well known for killing useful stuff that people love, not for moving them forward incrementally.

I can't remember Facebook killing off anything since parsley or whatever it was called.

Google has also been going backwards since I don't know, 2009 or something? (Back in the day it used to be that search results somewhat reliably contained the the you searched for. Today Google is in my opinion a copy of the competitors they outcompeted: customer hostile ads, poor results.)

Facebook is the ugly thing it has been since I don't know when.

Google has killed about 5x more things people love than FB has created. But they still keep a lot of core products alive.

Ok, I admit you have a good point. I counted the ones I can remember:

- search (although this one barely qualifies in my opinion)

- GMail/GSuite (once provided ever increasing storage, also killed free GSuite etc etc but I'll count it, it exists and has even expanded a bit)

- YouTube

- Ads

- Android

- Chrome

Quite a portfolio actually. Says something about how much I dislike them when I had to think long and hard to admit it.

Maps and docs as well. While Facebook is the king of time wasting apps, Google is the king of useful apps. They might abuse their role a bit, but at least the products are things that helps people.

And now that I think of it GCP is still alive, for now at least.

> The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you?

I'm not sure the metaverse play really is anything other than continuing the same thinking that led to Facebook login required for Oculus. The idea is probably to roll out VR no differently than rolling out emoji reactions. It's what you do when you get big. 1B users * 10% using new feature = BIG NEW USER BASE and you get to report growth for years as 10% turns into 20%.

Their social networking product is YouTube. It's quite successful and it beat Facebook in video.

Not sure about that. I think management and culture would be the deciding factor. In fact our age demands diversity in the workplace and age is one of those dimentions.

"Demands diversity", really? You think people won't use FB's products as much if they don't hire enough older people?

Right now, “diversity” refers to skin color and occasionally gender

Oracle is doing just fine. And if I had to trade places with Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison, well, I’d say it’s not even close, but that implies there’s a metric at all.

Which would you choose?

If I had to trade places with one of those two, I’d pick Ellison. I didn’t even bother to look up their (theoretical) net worths, because at that scale it no longer makes a difference; what does make a difference to me is Ellison’s face isn’t regularly in the news attached both to stories about how they engage in censorship by removing people who break the site rules, and to other stories about how they take sides by failing to remove politicians who violate the site rules.

Well, I guess you would do a humanity a favour replacing Zuckerberg. In Ellisons shoes you can like, make Java hip again?

> forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference

Are engineers really the ones driving at the company? I think that has not been true in "the industry" for a decade now. Marketing, upper-management are the ones steering the ships now — engineers just row.

Maybe that's why Google has made a few dozen amazing things while FB has made basically one thing and acquired the rest. A culture that respects engineering leadership.

It's hard to think of something amazing from Google that they didn't acquire other than the search engine. Maps, YouTube, Android were all acquisitions. Most Google internal projects are future entries in the "Google graveyard". The better stuff I can think of is mostly deep technical stuff like Map Reduce built to support search. Facebook has also done fairly well with things that are pillars to support the (formerly) namesake product.

GMail, various chat things, GSuite, Google Brain, Google Translate. Maps, Android, and YouTube were all massively developed and scaled after the initial acquisition.

Chrome, Gmail, drive, Chromecast, duo, call screening. There are plenty of entirely home grown products that have succeeded. Discounting products which have had the vast majority of their growth and featureset built out while under Google is also a but dismissive of it's role in making them successful.

duo has been successful?

Most of their post-2000 successful products stem from acquisitions: Docs, Maps, Waymo...

Docs was an acquisition? From where?

Started out as a product called Writely in the mid-2000s. Got bought by Google not long afterwards.

Not sure if it’s still the case but until fairly recently you could still see writely in the different domains Docs cycles through when logging in.

Writely. Company was called Upstartle.

Version 1 was from a company named Writely. Google massively refactored and rewrote it afterwards though.

i dont think a tech company will move away from a engineer centric focus, everyone which dared disappeared. Oracle as patent company is a different story

>forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference between a trendy company like Facebook and a corporate monolith like Oracle.

Oracle is still one of the most profitable companies on earth. I highly doubt they care about being trendy.

Is this actually true? I'm not sure what younger means but pretty much every anecdote of innovation i know is mostly late 20s early 30s engineers with a few YOE and a couple exceptions of whizzkids straight out of college (e.g Facebook). Genuinely quite interested if there is evidence round age and innovation in Tech.

At a certain size, big tech develops efficient systems to transmute forward-thinking younger talent into slightly jaded mid career pros excited for 1% improvements and 30s off the build. The world needs both types of people and companies need them both in different measures at different points in their trajectories.

If my inbox is any indication, hiring has picked back up in the last month. Tons of interest from big companies (Google, FB, door dash, and lots of smaller companies). It seems a bit odd to me as I thought the end of the year was usually a slow time for staffing.

I had the same observation.

Correlation with perf wrapping up? :)

Eoy has not been slow ime - recruiters want to hit their annual kpis

People may be more willing to hop, but they'll be able find new hires. Check out the number of applicants to any "Meta" job opening on LinkedIn.

Everybody compensating like FAANG does will find new hires. The question is: are they the best?

Competing question: Do you need the best?

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are built. They have their management systems and structures in place. It would be wrong to think that everyone at Facebook needs to be a genius for the company to succeed, and putting a genius into many of the roles that are needed to keep the company operating won't work out well for either the genius or the company.

Once you switch to maintenance mode, you have already lost. You will always need to innovate and for this you need smart people with good ideas and talent to make it work.

Not really. You can also just buy contenders.

Facebook is going to struggle to get the FTC to clear any acquisition in this political climate

Any automatic apply feature is going to get flooded with job applications. Those LinkedIn job posts all have an “Easy Apply” button.

I recently went through the interview processes for FB and another (non-FAANG) company mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and it was stunning how different the processes were.

The recruiter for FB was incapable of conveying the simplest information in a period of time less than 30 minutes and constantly seemed to misremember what information they had already given me; they were constantly setting (and missing) deadlines to follow up with me with more information.

Finally, after the on-site interview, they said FB would be making an offer, and then began this very strange dance (across the span of two full weeks) of trying to negotiate me down on % remote time and salary _without ever making me an actual offer_ or giving me any information about what the position I was interviewing for entailed.

Meanwhile, the other company went from on-site interviews to an offer with firm numbers in two days. In the end, FB's recruiting process was so odious that I couldn't bring myself to wait long enough to even hear their offer to negotiate with (which, frankly, was the only reason I signed up to interview with FB). So much for "move fast".

The negotiating without an offer thing is a normal (and very annoying) tactic used by recruiters to give you an offer that you immediately accept, while being able to avoid giving you an actual offer that you may reject. Recruiters have metrics they need to hit that include acceptance/rejection on offers, and this is a way they juice their metrics.

I gave FB the exact breakdown of my other offer with plenty of time to react to it, and got only silence in response. They had all the tools to put together a superior compensation package and just didn't.

(It's possible that based on my interview performance, FB didn't want to match the level I was offered at the other company. But if that were the case, you'd think they would cut bait and move onto a more promising candidate rather than half-assing an attempt to get me to join regardless.)

How does the author know this is due to specific issues at Facebook and isn't just due to the job market being as competitive as it has recently become? Perhaps it was difficult get people at facebooks to leave, but now, with the market as tight as is it and with compensation everywhere soaring, perhaps it's reached a level where even Facebook is seeing attrition.

I refuse to ever work for facebook or have a facebook account. I regret having a whatsapp account, created before it was acquired. Still migrating friends+family onto signal. I get it, Facebook has scale and some cool hard problems to solve, and comp packages that are hard to ignore. I'm sure slavery looked pretty attractive too (don't get me wrong, I'm not equating the severity of these things). I just can't imagine having to explain to people in 20 years time how or why I put profit and personal gain ahead of legitimate social issues. How is it defensible? I probably clocked the issues a bit earlier than some, which is why I never created an account. Please just leave facebook and delete your accounts.

I recently turned down a FB recruiter on the spot without even finding out more about the job in question, telling them I just don’t like FB as a company.

I’m lucky to have been around long enough, to be able to pick companies for my own reasons. Society isn’t set up to give most people that kind of choice; FB will therefore never really have any trouble finding people, I’m afraid.

I would love to think that they take notes when receiving negative feedback from recruitment, using it as a clue to work on fixing a broken image problem. In reality, I think they just move on to the next person who will happily put up with them.

meh, facebook / meta will just raise the salary, enticing some would be employees to come or come back and they are already spending billions on this 'metaverse' thing.

they will always come back in the end.

In a sane world that would put them at a competitive disadvantage, and force them to clean up their act.

I wonder how much is from being fatigued from friends. If I see news I don’t like about any company I call whoever I’m friends with there to see what the tea is, but I might be a weirdo

To me, the question would be if it's general job dissatisfaction or something people don't like in Facebook itself? It's true every company has problem points. But when you have someone like Zuck who lies constantly, buys up Instagram and Whatsapp and then covers it all with this Metaverse idea, I can see people finally deciding enough is enough. It's clear what management wants isn't what's good for the world

As the negative perception of Facebook engineering picks up it'll be interesting to see where this heads. There's been precious little conversation about the stewardship model of React.JS, in which Facebook has an outsized role.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to divest React from Facebook, given the potential reputational risk to the React project.

I think React is pretty soon gonna share same fate as jQuery. Svelte is slowly picking some steam, and with recent move of original author to Vercel I am more confident than ever that momentum is shifting. My friend directly got to work with Carmack, and him moving away directly from project should tell a lot about what the future of the hardware holds with FB.

Microsoft had to rewire itself in order to recover from Windows. Facebook (or Meta) needs same. Microsoft had to bring in a new leader, I think Zuck should step down, and bring somebody different before it's too late. I can imagine a fight for throne happening inside already.

On what timeline though? Vue was looking to be a very strong contender to passing up React, but that has dwindled and it's a solid second alternative but won't end up usurping React. Next.js is one of the biggest hotnesses around web development in general right now, bigger than Svelte, and based on React. While Svelte is nice and shows promise, it's still in the "early Vue" stage and has a long long way to go to make React into a jQuery. Not to mention how ubiquitous jQuery still is.

I think you're underestimating a few things here re React:

1. Before the React/Vue era, there was so much JS churn and many devs who went through that are not looking to change anytime soon.

2. Even if React goes into keep the lights on mode, what is going to compel someone to not choose React at this point? The uniformity of it in the JS world, the stability, and the flexibility make it a great fit for most use cases. What value proposition is it failing that would make it lose its place as the dominant front end framework?

It would take a massive, worthwhile new paradigm shift to occur in the JS world to unseat React IMO, and I don't see that happening anytime in the next few years simply because there is no need. React works TM which is big.

Is the problems with Facebook only a big problem at their Menlo Park, or American offices?

What's the situation in their other offices, like UK, Europe, and Canada?

Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but could it be true that their morally questionable decisions happen at their headquarters, rather than at their Dublin office for instance?

I don't get the distinction.

It's like saying is it ok to work at HR of Phillip Morris, because I'm not involved directly in selling cigarettes.

Oh, okay.

Never been anywhere near these places, so, yeah. Pardon me.

I see stories about so many people quitting FB recently.

Is that happening only at their headquarters, or is it happening globally across all their offices?

The culture is a bit different in different offices. Most of the stress from working at FB is from your twice yearly perf reviews, where managers have to go and argue with other managers over what rating their direct reports' performance deserves. If your manager is not assertive or does not have much clout, doesn't really like you, doesn't get to give their shpeal before all the "exceeds+" are given out, or simply gets paired with one or more a-holes, then all that shit is going to roll downhill (your meets expectations will turn into a meets-most, and you will have a PIP in front of you soon for example).

Cultural differences in conflict, negotiation, and corporate drive can make this more or less stressful for the managers and as a result for the employees. As such, you can predict more stress in the US and less in Europe+Canada. The Irish office for example is a bit more laid back but also can be more passive aggressive.

Per decision making around immoral things, all those decisions happened in the US when I worked there.

As long as a company pays, I doubt many will leave. Even if they don’t approve of company.

Just hired a guy from FB for less than half of his FB comp.

> Out of more than 1,100 votes, the person was urged to take the Netflix job, where he said he was being offered $580,000 a year.

Are these real salaries? How??

I know people getting packages well in excess of that. The difference between the bottom and top of software job pay packages is starting to resemble athletes or actors.

Please, not this again. Just go to levels.fyi and see for yourself.

580k per year is reasonable considering the value that one engineer can provide to a company that large.

also, I’ve heard that Netflix salaries in particular are higher than most other tech giants because they don’t offer any other benefits.

I think benefits are as usual and the salary is making up for no equity. They do sell discounted shares (and apparently OOTM ten year LEAPs?)

Well, they call it total compensation, and it includes salary, bonus, and RSUs.

How many engineers actually want to work for Facebook? I am sure many do just for the money, but I doubt it is a first choice for most.

I'm not a technical person, can someone explain to this layman what is Facebook doing that the other FAANG companies are not doing?

For all the folks singing doom and gloom, please remember that Microsoft is doing better than ever.

Should we be saying meta employees instead? Or it is just the FB part that employees leaving?

Since no one mentioned so far: The LOD law suit made FB unable to get any approved green card app since last few months of Trump. This is the top reason why Indians & Chinese are not taking FB roles. It has been recently resolved. If hiring gets better for them I'd attribute it to green cards than the rename.

The only good thing about facebook to me is creation of ReactJS.

They actually have a lot of really good open source stuff.

+ React Native

+ Cassandra DB

+ pyTorch

+ Jest

+ GraphQL

+ Oculus Quest

I am looking forward to fill an open position in the future.

just because Mark's visions are dystopian nightmares ?

ITT: people who didn't pass the bar

The company is having trouble recruiting? Maybe Facebook should insist on their employees to be vaccinated.

Behind a paywall very sad

One of the recent thought experiments I've been pondering: "What if there was a blacklist that you would join by taking/continuing employment at facebook?"

The idea being that companies would agree to a pact in which they would blacklist anyone who works for facebook. What would be the consequences?

Some sub-questions:

1. Would a blacklist be legal? Do employment laws prohibit hiring decisions based on one's prior employment?

2. Would companies agree to join the pact? 2.a If tech workers were unionized, would the union have any power to persuade companies to join a pact?

3. What effect would a functioning blacklist have on facebook?

* The only effect I can thing of is FB would have to start paying more to retain/attract employees.

....

This is all just a thought experiment. A what-if question. I'm not seriously proposing a blacklist. I'm just curious about what would happen if one where implemented.

I guess the consequence would be to have a list of pretty good engineer at (maybe) lower prices for other companies, which would results in a competitive disadvantage.

It would also probably have a chilling effect on other potential hires : I know that I would think twice to work for a company that has this kind of blacklist. And if they do have a blacklist, I would think it thrice if they put in a company like Facebook, when other companies have a way more disastrous effect on the world in general, even if there is more publicity about facebook at the moment.

Finally, it would definitely be illegal to have at least european people on this list, but hopefully it would also be illegal in other jurisdictions.

What incentive would any individual company have to join such a blacklist? Re 1, California says you can't refuse to hire someone because of criminal history (https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/discrimination/ban-the-bo...), so refusing to hire b/c they worked for FB sounds like it would be doubtful.

I didn't really imagine any sort of incentive to join the pact. The motivation to join would be something akin to a protest against facebook's product. The goal would be to make it more difficult for facebook's product to exist.

I did consider laws that prohibit asking about criminal history. I don't think those specific laws would apply, as they are designed to help the previously incarcerated re-enter society through employment.

That said, I could see a court challenge to the blacklist with those laws being cited during arguments.

> I didn't really imagine any sort of incentive to join the pact. The motivation to join would be something akin to a protest against facebook's product.

The second a company does something like this (aka no real incentive event that can only potentially cause damage, solely as a "protest") is the second that company is going to look like a pretty bad place to work at. Mostly because it just means they care more about public outrage and putting on a show than actually doing their work.

And despite not having much interest in working for FB, I have way less interest in working at a place where other employees (and the leadership) are supportive of such proposals.

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