Meta reviews

The worst part about Facebook is the culture. With the excuse that you should 'focus on impact', people will fight for 'sexy' projects and things that will obtain them a good performance review. Since middle and upper management often do not have a clue about what their own teams actually do, whatever you can make sound important (e.g. with fake metrics or tales of potential impact), you are onto a winner. Unfortunately, the same managers do not enforce a culture of fairness or trust; instead, it is a culture of rewarding back-stabbers and people who 'get the work done' but who, at the same time, treat their colleagues poorly. By that, I mean stealing projects or not giving credit to those who get the work done, for example. It is an awful environment to work in. Some teams are worse than others as well: You could end up reporting into a bad apple who steals projects from you. It happens, and it happens often. Good people managers are never rewarded, as people management is not something Facebook recognises as important. Yes, in the orientation they will give you a big speech about it but when was the last time good people managers got promotions? Managers should focus on people, and ICs should focus on things. Unfortunately, bad managers who are good at IC work get rewarded often to the detriment of their teams, who have to suffer under people who should have never become people managers. The so-called Pulse survey is a joke, as no importance is given to low-scoring managers. If 10 people in a team say they would not work with their manager again, something must be wrong, don't you think? To any potential employees: Do not get fooled by the appearances. Facebook makes people feel trapped because they make you think this is the 'best' company and that you should be grateful you are part of Mark Zuckerberg's dream of making the world more 'open and connected'. It's a fallacy. Do not fall for it.

Looking back at my experience there, I can clearly see that I was unfortunate to end up in a team that I was in. The fact that no one internally wanted to move to that team should have alarmed me, but having just moved to FB I didn’t think of leaving that early. Internally, people were very open about how they would rather quit than join our team. I figured that’s the reason why they hired a complete new team, instead of just moving some people around. However, people at FB are generally blinded by the perks and the status of the company. They make themselves believe that they are happy, but in reality everyone is constantly anxious. They just learn to cope and make it feel normal. The pressure is HIGH and the workload tremendous. Because of the amount of silly meetings that you can’t say no to, you will end up spending more than 50 hours per week to make sure you are up to speed. Some people at FB told me that work consumed every second of their life (they just couldn’t switch off). I knew of other colleages that they come in on a Saturday to do some extra work, and some dedicate their Sunday evening on projects to add to their internal CV. You can’t really switch off, at least not before 9PM. So, if you’re in a relationship/have kids, don’t go there. As a single person I felt bad for my colleagues with a family. In my situation, and I also speak for the rest of the team, there was no support, no proper internal onboarding and literally no one around to be able to inform you what the general expectations were. It’s all very performance driven, so you have to Build up that amount of work you do, cause everything gets tracked. They don’t care how you do it, just do it. This explains why people work throughout the weekend to make sure they hit a certain amount of finished tasks for that week before the new week starts. You will be compared to Peers on your level, so it’s important to make sure you hit at least average to receive some bonus after your review. We had a new manager starting a few months after us, and hierarchy was the management style. Having anything to say went against the manager’s principles and clearly we weren’t liked. So were other colleagues of other teams not liked by this manager, because of their opinions. Be mindful of what you say...not everything is appreciated. At FB, managers are more valued than IC’s and they rather keep a bad manager than a good IC. So please be careful and try to make your manager your friend, trust me it will help you. They have amazing trainings on how to manage bias, but in all honesty, everyone was biased. The way they hired people, they way they treated people and the way they rated each other. During the annual performance cycle, you would only ask feedback from the people you had a good relationship with to help you get your bonus. Up until now, FB was the least favorable experience for me. I only say ‘worst experience’ when I talk to friends. They saw the negative impact it had on me working in a toxic environment. I do want to say that 2% genuinely loves working there, unfortunately the majority doesn’t.