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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blind
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comments
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.
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.
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.