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I got to the end, got positive feedback and wording that said they wanted to move forward. Then the recruiter I was working with was let go in the 2023 layoffs. I tried reaching out but got nothing back. Pretty soured over the whole thing.

I go so far as to immediately say no to any candidates who have Meta in their history. Every meta person I’ve interviewed has been an asshole in one way or another, and not a fit for my team.

Meta, like many big tech companies, has some fantastic engineers, some lousy ones, and some in between. At this point I don’t pay too much attention to where someone worked previously, and try to get to know candidates individually. They’re all just different people, like you and me!

There are definitely things you should adjust depending on where a candidate is from. People tend to inherit things from the overall culture, particularly if it's been a major part of their career. It's better not to ask an Apple employee what they worked on in any detail, or an Amazon employee why they're leaving, for example.

Helps avoid potentially uncomfortable situations on both sides and increase the signal/noise ratio.

So what else are you prejudiced about?

People who worked for cigarette companies.

Or DraftKings/gambling sites. Basically those that exploit addiction for profit.

Job hoppers.

Cisco management - truly horrible people.

We see a lot of applicants from Red Hat who “drank the kool aid” there for way too long.

Not in my experience.

I've helped hire/onboard a couple of really great former Meta engineers, and currently collaborate with a bunch of great engineers at Meta.

Generally a bad practice to automatically say no based on a single entry on a resume, no matter what that entry is. If Meta was their first and only job, maybe you could justify that view.

But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.

Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.

Working for a company that knowingly harms children (especially young women and girls) to get paid “fat bank” is up there on my list of reasons to say they’re bad people.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/facebook-instagram-dangerou...

I'm going to assume that the people I'm talking to are the ones who are against that and trying to fix it.

At this point in my life, I've seen enough people desperate for work that I'm not going to fault someone for working for an "evil" company. Maybe they really needed that money. Maybe they really needed that insurance for a loved one. I really don't know their situation and I'm not going to judge them just for that.

If, after talking to them, they talk about how excited they were abound working on code that helped exploit addiction in young girls, then I'll reject them. But if they were just there because they really wanted to work on react.js, I'm going to fault them for that.

Just because someone needs a job doesn’t mean I need to blow up my well meshed team consisting of sane, non-assholes with some twat whose head is 100x the size it should be. They can work for oracle or something.

We tried meta folks before. Every other sentence was “at Meta…” what works at Meta does not work everywhere else.

Plenty of other places for them to work. I am not responsible for their well-being.

Yes I’m sure there were many plumbers that just wanted to do their jobs at concentration camps.

Maybe. Even as someone who lost most of their family in said concentration camps, I'll reserve judgement until I find out their motivation. If they were there because the SS held a gun to their head and said, "help us build camps or we will kill your family", then yes, I'm going to forgive them. If doing plumbing at the camps was the only job they could get to feed themselves, then yes, I will forgive them.

If they volunteered for the job because they wanted to kill Jews more efficiently, then I won't forgive them.

That's brutal. I had a recruiter get both dates wrong for both stages of an interview process at a company I really wanted to join.

Not that I don’t believe you, but how does that even happen?! And if it was truly recruiter error, wouldn’t any reasonable hiring manager get it sorted and reschedule?

Timezones. I was in one timezone, she was in another, company was in another. I got a "the company has moved on" message and ghosted by the recruiter.

Meta has always been hit or miss on recruitment. I don’t see much value in engaging with their recruiters at all given how flaky they are, it might be better to just go with an internal recommendation.

do internal recommendations not end up in the same pipeline (+/- one step)? Or is it that with internal recommendations you at least have someone on the inside following up?

Same pipeline, but if it's a friend who wants to work with you then you have someone who is not in recruiting who you can ping for updates if the process gets stuck.

Depending on the company, there may even be referral bonuses so there's a financial incentive for your "insider" to follow up.

For Meta in particular, I believe there are no referral bonuses anymore FWIW.

I just assume there was a ton of turmoil internally after layoffs and the outcome of that was me being ghosted.

I was ghosted even when they were aggressive in their hiring, so it’s not just that. They even come back and try to recruit you again while you are being ghosted, it’s insane.

> They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".

This is super tangential to this post, but All In is a wild podcast. While one guy is re-discovering the purpose and mechanism of taxes, some other guy is claiming that it's good actually that the entire government now has to justify itself, to him, from first principles. All to a cheering crowd of fans who think these guys are obviously the smartest guys alive.

It's an insane look into a completely stupid world.

You've pretty much hit the crux of the entire problem in this one comment.

Some decidedly very dumb people who have a lot of confidence and a very large sum of money are basically controlling the zeitgeist both politically and culturally and it is not looking pretty.

It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.

>It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.

don't listen to it or come up with something people prefer over it?

They are all on auto pilot. And they dont know how to disengage it. Its really scary being around these people.

Source: worked for 2 years on exec staff of large corp CEO. Had to leave cuz its really out of control heading no where. The main goal is survival. Thats it.

they’ve been caught doing it before, but now there isn’t a federal government who will prosecute them.

Probably true going forward. Though the previous administration had two years to investigate the quarter million job losses that happened under its watch. It does not look like either party is particularly interested in acting on this issue.

One side gutted the NLRB but sure, both sides bro...

A friend of mine went through the whole Meta layoff grinder last year. Guy is a Caltech PhD, literally any company would be lucky to have his brain available. It's surreal to me.

The narrative about there not being enough "talent" available in the US is such a hilarious, brazen lie. I'm disgusted at the entire industry. SWEs are negative on Amazon, Meta, etc but IMO nowhere near close to hating them enough.

They'll say whatever they need to to make the number go up, as if they didn't calculate all of this beforehand and then let people go when they saw the economy go down. Ignore the narrative.

Companies just want an excuse to save money without making wall street panic, as well as the usual cost cutting measures they've done for decades. They feel they captured the market so they aren't spending money keeping people away from competitors (and ofc startup funding is much worse too. No one to rise up). These layoffs are not a reflection of anyone's abilities as engineers.

Boeing moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago to DC. The American management class doesn't care about anything other the extracting money this quarter. Who needs to manage the widget making operation that's for 'someone else' to take care of. The entire country is going to come to a halt when the 'someone else's that can't afford to live stop propping everything up.

> So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??

Any employer who has that attitude isn't an employer you want to work for.

Just because someone didn't do well at one company, under one boss, in one team, doesn't mean that will be the case somewhere else.

As long as you come away having learned something - some new skills, what you could have done better or when you should have realized it wasn't the company/job/team for you, what you do well or don't, what work drives you or you just can't get motivated by. If it was a personality clash, did you come away with a lesson learned or realized you needed to work on interpersonal skills, that sort of thing.

>So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries.

Aren't cartels against the law?

Exactly. Slash staff, tweak job titles and descriptions, hire them back at lower wages and/or as contractors.

Go Zuck.

Shouldn't every layoff have some element of performance? If you're asked to downsize your team, why wouldn't you think about your lowest performer first? Now that doesn't mean the CEO should be shitting on his employees in public like Elon does, but CEO discretion doesn't change the natural incentive to keep your best people.

Layoffs might have to with what a person is working (project is no longer business priority, just cutting based on performance might lead to delays) or what team a person is working on (whole org gets the axe).

Their interviews were one of the easiest things I ever did. Pay 150bucks for Leetcode, sort by company, memorize the solution and show up.

Even when solving problems in the real world, nobody sits in a dark room until moment of genius strikes. We always try some tactics others have tried and only then innovate.

The last three Meta recruiters got a broadside from me about the insult of implying that I would join an organization run by a bottom-tier Trump lickspittle. I can't imagine how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances.

I wouldn’t have joined a year ago but it sounds like it’d be a good culture fit now. They can hire good software engineers who live in the middle of the country and happen to be Republican.

All of the meta jobs are in bay area and Seattle. They don't do remote work anymore

> how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances

Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.

Top SWEs tend to live in rich cities that have those jobs and lean left; they just blend in with the demographics of where their jobs are located. Like, I’m sure if there were a lot of SWE jobs available in a rich conservative city like…Riyadh…they would be leaning more right.

The top paying fully remote jobs are in AI and Crypto (blockchain). And my experience shows the top are libertarian, which is right wing if you only see the spectrum as left / right (I see it as freedom / authoritarian)

For people who don’t have to work in an office, it’s wide open, but I think even if we consider full remote employees, they are still likely to live in big liberal cities, and it’s the minority roughing it in the country/small towns that are likely to be libertarians. I don’t have access to any numbers though, so your hunch might be better than mine (I’m full remote but live in Seattle, my political ideology follows from that).

The reason why people see right libertarians as, well, right-wing is because the majority ends up aligning more with mainstream right-wing parties and candidates when it comes to voting.

FWIW left libertarianism is also a thing, but you won't find much of that in crypto.

Libertarians used to be left on social issues (they don’t want the right telling them who they can marry or what they can do with their bodies) and right on economic issues (traditional liberal unregulated economics, less socially funded services). It’s hard to see where they land today given Trump distortion (Trump as an obvious authoritarian shouldn’t appeal to libertarians very much, but does, so I wonder if their average ideology has changed).

I can’t imagine a lot of folks that excel at math and science are leaning hard into the party gutting the NSF and actively trying to undermine the entire scientific community.

I think that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos fit this profile, but look whom they are supporting now. Simply being part of the scientific community may not be a sufficient criterion. Other factors, such as wealth or power, may have a greater influence on their political affiliations.

The biggest predictor of political affiliation is located in the wallet. It’s not a perfect predictor but it’s pretty good, and it gets better the fatter the wallet is.

What is bizarre now is that the biggest wallets are supporting economic uncertainty.

I don’t know. I’ve met good scientists who were terrible human beings and would have been willing to defund everything except their field, because obviously everything else is useless. I have no stats, and I think they are far from the majority, but they exist. Scientists are not superhuman and some do actually vote for the face-eating leopard party.

“Left” isn’t the right framing at all. The axis of division these days is really democratic vs. authoritarian. Rule of law vs. “might makes right”. I know few educated, intellectual people who find the latter appealing (though they do exist and are loud).

The rule of law is authoritarian by definition. So authoritarian vs authoritarian?

Anyway you’re wrong. There are a good number of left wing engineers out there but they’re outnumbered by libertarian chuds in the industry.

That’s not true of any standard definition of authoritarianism: the whole point of the rule of law is that it applies consistently to everyone rather than following the whims of an autocrat. That’s why the Republicans being able to stop enforcement of the laws Trump broke was so worrisome for many people as it marks the transition away from the rule of law which had existed previously.

There are indicators such as FEC campaign donation data.

Despising trump and his groupies isn’t a lefty thing to do unless you classify John McCain, Romney, Bush, and Pence as lefty.

Given that these CEOs are all colluding in some form all the time, do you think it's still possible to start a company as an outsider and make it a big thing without getting eaten up by them, or is that just dead in the water?

Why? The comp is top of market, even with the stock award cuts.

"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that. Most employees don't do that.

> is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that.

Ironically, you made that up lol. I know a few people who have worked at Meta as SWEs. A close friend still works there as a PM. They've all been pretty open about the work culture at Meta.

Shrug. Your sample isn't representative.

Uh, it practically is dude

I worked there seven years. It is.

lol clueless

Life isn't all about money. Especially in this day and age.

>"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up

If you really don't think companies aren't taking advantadge of this strict job market that is putting a lot more SWE's in their seats instead of jumping; I wish you the best at your current or future job.

Life isn't wholly not about money either. Money is a tool that enables a lot of things.

I don't think Meta is uniquely taking advantage of job market dynamics; I think if anything, it's one of the most generous employers around. You could disagree, I guess. I've certainly worked other places that paid a lot less and were no less stressful.

>I think if anything, it's one of the most generous employers around.

My secondhand experience with some colleagues would not agree. They weren't the worst, but they seem to have felt Meta was the most cut heavy at the turn of the decade. Which was interesting to hear.

But sure, it was generally considered higher total comp than Google or Microsoft. If minmaxing money is all you care about, Meta is the way to go. Or was.

>Life isn't wholly not about money either. Money is a tool that enables a lot of things.

Yeah, hence work-life "balance". what are you working for if you spend all your days focused on money and not on life?

We seem to be talking past each other, sorry.

I guess so. I'm just saying that overwork isn't okay just because you're paid well. And "well it could be worse in non-tech" jobs isn't too reassuring.