Meta reviews

What can I say, working here literally gave me a severe anxiety disorder, I actually had to take therapy after I left to treat it. There is a cutthroat culture deeply ingrained here, you are quietly going to be pitted against your own team whether you like it or not, this is amplified by the fact that the company does stacked ranking during performance reviews, if you don't know what that is, look it up, its terrible and its morale crushing for employees, they are aware of it but are not willing to change it. Managers are semi supportive but will not put their hands to the fire for you, their expectations are ridiculously high and borderline unrealistic especially when they provide very scarce guidance and almost no structure. This the only company I've ever worked for that actively punishes you for your mistakes no matter how small they are, once you get a bad performance review there is no coming back, it will haunt you forever until the day you quit or are laid off. Save yourself some mental sanity, there jobs out there that pay the same if not better and are not as stressful as Meta/Facebook.

- frustrating performance review process (called PSC), it feels like it's very hard to improve rating or get promotion at a senior level, it's more about being liked by the manager and get a great scope to work on - code quality is surprisingly abysmal - would again blame the PSC structure - most of the code base is unowned or even abandoned, not documented, and to accomplish anything there are lot of painful processes to go through - consequently the coding experience is quite bad Surprisingly, this is no longer a company where SWE is the ideal role, nowadays it's much better to be an Engineering Manager, as they get rewarded mostly for team impact, but they don't need to prove correlation. So they can just cuddle a few high performers and make the bad ones' life miserable so they'll change team fast. Hardest part of being a manager, helping reports' career, is really not a thing at Meta (for senior engineers).