A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.

If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.

But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.

Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.

1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.

2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.

3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.

4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make

This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?

5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.

None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"

The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.

Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.

Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.

Realistically, you hit the lottery and had (still have?) it better than most. I'm not at faang, but I do pretty well at a tech company myself, and I've never thought of any of it as permanent, and I arrange my life accordingly.

> You’ve been at Meta for more than a decade.

It seems to be about someone who probably makes >$200K/year and should be set for life with stock options.

They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.

Sure but that's just because there are now different companies (AI labs) on this list instead

Whoever chose to work for them in the last 15 years really made a conscious choice. They chose money over ethics and anything else. And don’t tell me about student loans, there are other companies hiring (well, at the time anyway) engineers that would let you make your payments comfortably.