Meta reviews

I was promised a role at the intersection of tech leadership, product strategy and people management. But it was nothing like that at all. I essentially spent 100% of my time doing operational things that I didn't enjoy, like following bureaucratic processes. Directions for the team were set from the top. People are moved around like pawns because of frequent reorgs. Everyone behaved like a career-obsessed robots, always looking for ways to game PSCs. But the most frustrating feeling of all was that I didn't see anyone try to innovate in any way. All the products efforts that I witnessed were either about copying a competitor or leveraging/abusing FB's dominant position in some market to push features to users (in a way that always serves FB's interest first and the user's interest second).

* WLB is not great if you come in not knowing a particular language, say, C++, because debugging through any codebase can be very tough * Many things to fix at FB, so you will be easily distracted and can put risks on achieving impacts on your primary goals for the half * While in-house tools are great from a "please fix it" approach, it's also usually come at the cost of usability and stability. We really could use more help in making tooling accessible and useful * Impacts is go big or go home. Everyone is obsessed and measured by impacts. This could be cpu win or engagement metric move or power reduction or productivity. But ultimately we are chasing the big stuff in the name of promotion, and forget we need to grind through the small stuff that are actually most important to a healthier WLB and relaibility.