FB -> Google? Need career advice
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.
If I can list your problems there are this 1. Sort term vision 2. Not challenging role 3. No WLB Did you to talk to people in other teams. I know that data infra at Facebook has good projects, and they aren’t that short-term visioned. Talk to other teams in other orgs and then farm an educated opinion with regards to vision and work challenges. Coming to WLB, that’s something you alone can decide buddy. Even at google , it you want to grow at the same pace as you would at FB, I am sure you have to say bye bye to WLB. But yes in google you can survive without working so hard, while at fb you can.
Exactly, except he doesn't have to work so hard for below EE
The question is, given the trade-offs mentioned, would you switch to Google? Things are going pretty well at FB which makes this harder to decide. But realistically, I’m not sure I can sustain this long term. So jumping ship is definitely a must somewhere in the future but without a guarantee that I’ll get an offer from Google at that time.
If you can get to e6, it might be worth it to stay.
The poll result says it all, do it.
Lol, 24 to nil. I’m inclined to say wait for E6, also have a longer tenure at FB, and then jump to a L6 equivalent position after interviewing. It’s a longer, harder road but with a higher reward at the end. But yeah, I agree with the overall sentiment that FB is not a company to retire from.
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.
Are you guys brothers?
🤣🤣
Maybe switch to Infra for better coding hygiene and rigor if you like the work.
Thanks, considering that as well.
Don’t even try that if u care about WLB, you need time to ramp up and have pressure to perform.
Everyone knows in the industry about wlb at Facebook. I'd suggest going to Google.
stop projecting
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
At FB every other kind of time away from work (leave of absence, parental leave etc) does not count for or against you at PSC. Except PTO. Other companies I’ve worked at treat the PTO the same way. At FB it’s more explicit than who you’re compared with in that the goals for the half are the same irrespective of PTO. I find that pretty absurd because it does diminish the value of PTO.
I don't know what you're talking about. If I take 2 weeks off at Google (since you only have 15 days off anyways), I'm still compared to those that didn't take 2 weeks off. Deadlines at google don't move based on the goals you set at the beginning of a half due to pto.
You mentioned you’re married and have kids. This is a huge factor in all this. Now, TC is vastly less important if you don’t have time and energy for your family. So, G is a no-brainer. By the way, what do you mean by “business impact” ie what kinds of metrics are we talking about here? Like, are you expected to increase user retention by X% in Y country within a 6-month project? And do you have to come up with the ideas yourself or do you have help/direction from product/design/management?
Thanks for the input! Regarding impact, it can be any metric that is of value to the team or wider org but generally things that can be translated into revenue dollars are preferred in my org. For eg. improved perf leads to measurably more user engagement and therefore more $. Regarding the ideas yes, you have to come up with them. You’ll get support in terms of brainstorming and sanity checking your ideas/designs/plans but not too much in terms of setting the direction. You have to always have your ear on the ground and see what the direction of the org, the partner teams etc is and find themes that you can turn into people projects. I’m sure that different orgs in FB do things differently but that’s how things stand in my current org.
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.
Thank you for the thoughtful response!
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.
Yeah, in retrospect I should have. If I knew what I know now I probably would have. Now, it’s not as clear cut because I worked hard to put myself on that path to E6. Stock is also up 20%+. TC and perks are top notch but I can’t see myself working here more than 2-3 years. Maybe it gets better after a year? However I can’t really stay too long to find out without closing the door on the Google offer which seems like a safer long term bet for my mental and physical health.
What are perks you are so fond of? Most of the companies provide food, phone bill etc. If you are talking about laundry etc than it doesn't make sense. You can find much better tc at other companies. I am senior swe at LinkedIn but make equivalent to most of e5 at fb with much better wlb. So there are much better options. Just look out better.