FB -> Google? Need career advice

Nov 27, 2019 49 Comments

Hey Blind,

TLDR;
I need some geniune career advice: I’m thinking of jumping ship to Google after the 1 year mark at FB.

The Details:
About 8 months ago I joined FB Seattle as E5 SWE. I also had an L5 offer from Google for the Kirkland office. After negotiations FB’s offer was better overall (~405k vs. 375k @ Google). I chose FB because of better offer and better growth opportunities.

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about that. I’ve become a tech lead and am driving several small to medium sized projects with bigger projects on the horizon. My manger and skip love me and I see a good path for E6 within a year to a year and a half. I’ll likely have a very solid EE rating for my first PSE. TC and perks are great but that’s about where it ends.

I’m not liking the company culture at all.

1. The PSC process incentivizes short term impact instead of long term investments. Move fast = shit code. I’m actually surprised everything even works to the extent it does.

2. Having to come up with short term high-impact projects every half is also stressful on in its own way. If the projects fall short of the forcasted buisness impact you’ll get dinged in your PSC. If your project propsals use more a cautious impact forcast it will likely not get approved/funded by the team which is another way to get dinged at PSC time.

3. WLB is not great. Day to day it’s not bad (~45h/week on my team) but you can see how the company just wants to suck every ounce of blood from you and then force you out. Take PTO for example: you are given 21 days of PTO per year but the same level of impact is expected for a half where you took no PTO or all of your PTO. If you have to work twice as hard before PTO or after PTO to make up for the “lost” days it’s not really PTO, is it? I don’t know how it is a Google but at Microsoft you are not evaluated for the period of time you’re on PTO.

4. Not that excited about the work itself. I’m a BE engineer and while our team does have full stack projects they are not really challenging on either BE or client side. So I’m forseeing little techincal growth and more leadership, scope etc growth in the near future.

5. I feel like I could do this for another year or two but not much more. I’m very tempted to jump to Google given that I wouldn’t have to interview if I were to do it within the next coupe of months. If I were to interview again there’s a high chance I wouldn’t get an offer. Same is probably true for FB. But regardless, I feel like maybe this is my only chance to get Google on my resume.

6. I’ll most likely be a regretrable departure so that will leave the door open for me to go back to FB if I ever want to do that in the next year or two.

So, Blind, let me know what your thoughts are. Stay at FB or jump ship to Google? Please let me know what made you choose one over the other in the comments.

Either way, in the spirit of Thanksgiving I am really thankful for this community. The information here helped me get off my behind, put the nose on the girnder and land offers at the two companies I dreamt of.

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TOP 49 Comments
  • I mean, it's the same at google. You don't get evaluated less because you took PTO. You're still evaluated against those that worked the full half. 45 hours per week at that TC is a fair trade off - from my experience, you might have longer hours at google and you definitely won't be getting L6. If you want to go at a slower pace, you can do so. Not everyone has to get EE
    Nov 27, 2019 6
    • OP
      Again, this is not about who you’ll get stack ranked with. Yes, someone who never takes vacation might produce more (although that may not work out well for them on the long run).

      This about your expected output in absolute terms. When you’re planning for the year or the half ahead the question is whether you expect the sam output from a person regardless of taking one month PTO. Facebook apparently expects the same output while other companies do not count the PTO towards the performance review.

      You can defend Facebook all you want but on this particular point I believe the company has it wrong.
      Nov 28, 2019
    • Google
      burnItDown

      Go to company page Google

      burnItDown
      Y’all. Google doesn’t stack rank like you’re mentioning.

      You take up KRs (key results), and dedicate some timeframes to them. If you are taking vacation, you take less KRs. And at the end, your KR scoring determines where you land.

      Almost no one gets lower than meets expectations. Over half the people land in exceeds/strongly exceeds and about top 5% land in Superb.
      Nov 28, 2019
  • Due to all the reasons mentioned above I declined fb offer and took much higher tc with better wlb. You should have taken Google initially. 30-40k doesn't matter in long run.
    Nov 27, 2019 8
  • Snapchat
    🐨 koala

    Go to company page Snapchat

    🐨 koala
    Do you have a family? If yes then jump. Otherwise promo to E6 and jump ship elsewhere is also not a bad idea. Because it’s hard to get Google L6 even after F promo. And if you join G now you are resetting yourself for another 2 years at least. 5 to 6 is a big jump in both scope and comp. So unless it’s about family I’ll stick around.
    Nov 27, 2019 9
  • It's funny, despite all of the wide spread documented concerns about FB, everyone has to experience it for themselves to personally validate. I knew within my first few weeks I wouldn't be there long term - left after 2 years - and although there are different challenges at Airbnb, I am now much happier overall. Go to Google but just don't expect things to be amazing. Different challenges everywhere... just need to decide what you can live with.
    Nov 28, 2019 1
  • Facebook / Eng
    SwJi48

    Go to company page Facebook Eng

    PRE
    Google
    SwJi48
    I was in a similar position as you-- maybe a half or two away from e6, but I jumped to Google 3 months ago at 5 with a ~10% paycut. Pretty happy so far; with the equivalent amount of work I'm getting feedback that I'm on track for strong ratings. The difference is I feel like I can start slacking for a half or two and it would be totally fine.

    I feel more aligned with the company mission and values, though I definitely see slower career growth. At the same time, I respect the l6s at Google more than the e6s I've met at fb, on average. There's also way more optionality at Google in terms of switching teams/projects/domains/technologies/offices.

    I was an xoogler (worked at Google for 5 years previously), so I knew pretty much what I was getting into.
    Nov 28, 2019 1