I transitioned from AWS (5 years) to FB (Infra) more than a year back. We recently had a discussion of ex-Amazonians to share experience with FB transition. Summarizing my personal experience and others experience so that you know what you are signing up for. This is mostly applicable for E5+. TLDR; - Its a big role change for SDEs, your first year is going to be really hard till you unlearn Amazon way and learn FB ways. Be flexible and come with open mind. - FB has more tenured (Years of experience) engineers than Amazon. 10% of FB engineers have < 2 years experience vs Amazon is 40%. Infra is more extreme, may be less than 2%. - Bottom up culture; It's going to be your job (not SDM or PM job) to define the roadmap and what you are going to work on next. - At Amazon, Manager is the tech lead. But at FB, you will have an engineer dedicated as TL. - Daily execution, coordinating of tasks, organizing related meetings, meeting with partner teams and cross functional regularly will fall on the TL. - Dates are given by you. Usually there is only one deadline that people tracks, which is the Rating deadline (PSC) - happens twice in a year. - Teams usually have 3X scope to manage than similar team size at Amazon. - You are responsible for selling your work, not your manager. Be ready to provide constant updates and write lot of posts. - No daily standups at FB. Most teams meet weekly to discuss the work. All the communication with status update and blockers are asynchronous through groups. - Be ready to be good on task management. You will decide to do a ton of work for next 6 months and its your job how to prioritize it and keep track of it. Your manager is not going to remind you anymore. - No Amazon kool-aid like 6-pagers, PR-FAQ. Engineers don't write that. "At the beginning it feels like a role reversal for you where you have to do an SDM, PM, and TPM job apart from coding. Your first year will be really hard till you dont get comfortable." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - At Amazon, you can thrive and get promoted even if you lack empathy and do not help your team mates. This will not work at FB. - At Amazon, Managers who can get delivery done even if they burnt down and lost the whole team is completely OK. At FB, if your manager pulse score is bad, no one will join the team and manager career at FB is mostly over. - No TPM/QA turned SDM. Role transitions are much harder. - Levels are hidden. So people cannot use levels to boss around. Also promotions are not celebrated. - Other engineers will not be voting on your promotion because they don't know your level. - You cannot use your level to get things done from others. You need to work on influencing skill as you are still expected to get things done through others. - Feedbacks are core part. You will get a well defined written feedback every Quarter. You will not be surprised if you are handed a bad rating. - Everyone have a clear actionable plan on how to move to next level, not just cryptic role guidelines written for the entire company. - Promotion are evaluated based on real impact you created (even if it is 10 LOC), vs Amazon is "Delivery complexity and Perceived impact". - Promotion process and goals are so much clear here, that you will see a lot of people getting promoted almost every year. I have seen multiple folks who reached to E6 in less than 4 years. - PSC Deadlines are taken very seriously as they have huge financial impact (Bonus, refresher) which leads to all kind of shortcuts. At Amazon, at your first 4 years, no matter how good or how bad you are, it will not have any impact on your compensation. - You need to get customer obsession out of your mind. Its all Impact obsession and PSC obsession here. You will start ignoring issues till it is impacting a good number of customers. "You need to unlearn lot of LPs (Customer obsession, Insist on High standards, Bias for Action, Deliver results) and learn the new ones (Empathy, Move Fast, Deliver impact, Building positive relationship)" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - You will get sufficient time for ramp-up and it is acknowledged here that onboarding is hard. At Amazon, you are evaluated at 90 day mark and you can be PIPed as early as that. - You are not allowed to change team for one year, choose your team wisely. - Lots of re-orgs, you will have more manager changes here than Amazon. - Lots of all hands and leadership meet. Instead of two times in a year, it will be two times in a month (Company Q&A). Org level will be around once in a month. And hard questions are encouraged. - Things move a bit fast here (mostly 2X faster here than Amazon). - Benefits are top notch. Paternity (4 months) / Maternity (7 months) are nice, and it does not impact your rating, bonus, refreshers, stock vesting etc even if you are on leave/majority of the half did not worked. - Tooling are lot more better. Oncalls are much better because only high priority issues have alarms. Also Production systems are owned by SREs, so they take care of most of the non-code related issues. - Hardware is refreshed every 2 years and you will get the top laptop and mobile phone for your use. You can also buy hardware from Amazon, there is not much frugality, just your manager approval is required. "You will have great tooling and support, but also expected to move fast. You will be as busy as you are at Amazon. But I can plan my week much better here as there are no constant fires." TC - 700K (E6, 14 YOE). #amazon #facebook
Great post
Excellent post. Thanks for taking the time!
Great write up, thanks!
Is WLB that bad ? And thanks for the great insight
Amazon has different type of bad (always fire going on). Its definitely high, 50 hours/week in first year till you get used to the culture.
Thanks for the post OP! Wanted to know, when you mean 50hrs/week, but not bad like Amazon, does that mean less Stressful than Amazon?
Very helpful - even to folks who may not be SDEs as it gives insight into the FB culture. Thank you for posting this.
Great post, OP. I wonder hours it is good PMs
Thank you ☺️
Could anyone elaborate in brief this transition for E4?
Great post. I am guessing Salesforce folks would be having a huge culture shock
Why is that?
Two of my friends joined as E5 from intuit and salesforce and could not survive the heat. Both left fb within 9 months !!
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Can you also share what level you were at AWS, and what level you joined at FB, and how many promotions you got at FB (if any)?