After working at Meta for many years and seeing the current situation of Meta layoff employees, I feel Meta has screwed up many tech roles with rest of the Industry. The PSC and Promotion culture has deviated the role and competency of people so much from the rest of the tech industry that almost half of the folks are un-hirable at the same level within the rest of tech industry. This may not be a surprise that a lot of people including tenured Meta folks wants to leave the company. But even when the Market was good, a good majority of them were not able to land to the same level. And now in this Market, and if they layed-off, it is just becoming lot more difficult. - Engineers - We have staff Engineers who can't even write or articulate a proper system design and can't even clear Senior (IC 5) level system design interviews, forget staff level. - TPM - Meta had this worst industry hiring practice where they brought college hires and made them TPM directly. TPM role is lot more influence driven, but it's joke to see some of the IC3 and IC4 TPMs. A good majority of them were laid-off. A friend of mine who is hiring TPM has said they just started resume rejecting all Meta TPMs after seeing the bad interview performance. - Product Manager - The role of Product Manager in other companies are lot more influential and requires a heavy ownership for Product. But Meta PMs are just Metrics chaser and don't even bring the right user problems in front. You might have seen the tiktok videos of Meta PMs. - EM - This is a pure people Management role where many EM cannot even describe the architecture or understand the key dashboard of the service they own. They have no technical decision making and just spend 3 months in a year just on performance review. The upper half of Meta is really good and better than many companies. But the bottom half has a large amount of unfit folks with respect to what rest of the industry expects. The challenge is now these guys are forced out in the Market. They were previously hiding at Meta, but the dirty laundry will be now aired in the open. If you are hiring/interviewing, just don't get upset with these out of fit folks. I am hopeful they will learn eventually and will align with the rest of the industry. Edit - A lot of people are pointing that Amazon is even worse. I agree with that and I am not putting Amazon better than Meta. But my opinion got shattered that it is just a slightly better version of Amazon. PS - My Meta account is blocked with some community Policy. Using my old Amazon account.
Source: Op’s friend’s wife’s dog’s crush
I have a neighbor who was a PM for meta and got axed in the first layoff. Don’t think he has found a job yet.
The market is bad
Correlation is not causation. The fact that they were laid off for a long period of time can not be directly attributed to their abilities. Try losing a job in this market and see if you can find a job within a week.
I can confirm what you said about their TPMs is entirely true. They are the worst
Well, you always have half of the folks below average and the other half above average. So…🤷♂️
But the bottom half might be better than other places, which is not true.
Average of what? The company, sure. But the entire industry, not true. I will say 80+% of Google are above industry average, not sure about you.
What BS! Having worked at multiple FAANGs, they’re as good and professional as any other teams I’ve been at. Remember making into meta is super hard. Most of the guys outside the company are below the bar for meta! That speaks for the people who are inside. Just because someone is laid off or looking for a change of job in this market doesn’t make them unfit. They need time to reset and deliver.
The promotion bar at Meta optimizes the wrong metric. External bar is still good, but the internally promoted IC3->IC6 need a lot of work.
It’s well known that meta is the place for fast promo. Make hay while the sun shines. Hire them at a lower bar elsewhere if they apply at your company. Domain specific knowledge is key for most hires outside of meta.
I can confirm this. My recruiter friend at Amazon said the same thing about Meta folks.
Meta TPMs are the worst
All the useless PMs I know at Microsoft Bing went to Meta over the last couple of years.
The one thing meta optimizes for is just the raw “get shit done” metric. Even if the quality isn’t as good, most Meta engineers would be good to hire, unless you’re building something that requires quality, like heart machines. We’d brainstorm things on Monday and be in prod with them by Tuesday. The velocity is unreal, even if the quality isn’t as good.
This is what keeps on getting Meta in trouble that they can't even create a system that don't leak data for user privacy, follow some of the compliance practices, and make the Product safe.
When I was at Meta I worked on so many absolute garbage projects/product ideas. Things absolutely no one wanted , poorly executed, half thought out copies of something another company was doing. Meta can do this because they have the money to throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks, but it doesn’t scale. Now I’m at Reddit where I have so many former Meta colleagues trying to do the same thing and the company’s finances are f’ed while DAU is dead. Lesson learned, don’t hire from Meta.
It’s not as bad as you describe. Meta employees are still a top talent. Although I agree that the longer you stay at Meta the more your skillset concentrates around PSC requirements and you tend lose focus of doing the right things.
all the fb pms i met sound incredibly sharp and polished and can nail just about any pm interviews the problem is, when you sit down and really think about some of the ideas they’re proposing, it doesn’t actually make any sense. despite how polished their frameworks are and how convincing their argument is. something just doesn’t make intuitive sense sometimes
@QHuG54 that’s because there’s a huge difference in PM interview grinding (broken process imo), and actual real life effective execution such as bringing your own project to life. Many such cases these days