FB vs. Google
Still interviewing, which is better and why? TC, WLB, Prestige, .. etc. Locations: FB London, Google Zurich or Munich YoE: 12 Current TC: 🥜🥜🥜 $130 #engineering #software #swe
Curious are you in Expedia in Europe? Location?
you can work for G and sell goog and buy fb
Why ? I see the offer number for same level is very similar??
Google is the best place to work at the start and end of your career. Start, because you learn good software engineering skills, and end, because it’s the best place to rest and vest. Once you get to L4, you should go to Facebook to grow and learn to use those skills to move fast at high quality and propel your career to L7+ where you can then go back to Google and take it easy for 10+ years.
Why rest and vest? As long as wlb is good in F, why not stay in F?
This is only if you want to work for FANG for your entire life. If so, yes this is optimal.
As prior G and current FB, I lean heavily toward G. Pay isn’t much lower. Growth is slower, but you’ll be happier in the meantime. At FB lower levels (E3-E4) you’ll be fighting to promo before up-or-out. At FB higher levels you’ll be fighting PIP, and even if you’re not in danger of it, you’ll work harder to make sure due to stack ranking. At Google you will promo slower, but once you hit L4 (eg not new grad) no more up-or-out, you can coast. At higher levels you have more responsibility, but you’re not in danger of PIP. If you don’t perform, schedule naps in your day and do activities like ping pong, soccer, etc, you’ll still get “consistently meet expectations” and be fine, it’ll just impact promo timeline. In some orgs the CME, EE, SEE ratings are so cyclic you get “exceeds” even for underperforming. Google does so much to make engineers happy it’s like a social club rather than a job. Lots of people leave because they aren’t promoting “fast enough” or because of 4 year cliff, but then you realize you shouldn’t have. /regrets
Wow I’m in this exact situation. A common answer in G blind group is jump ship to fb for a quick promo and then come back at 6/7. You seem to have taken that path. What are your regrets at fb?
Regrets: - wlb? Gone - code quality? Gone (tests in Fb product? No. Tests in Fb infra? Some, but not enough. Tests in G? Every CL) quality of code isn’t a metric, impact is. No more “nit” code reviews, if it looks like it works, ship it (and yes this will cause SEVs or “broken” things—oncall sucks on a lot of teams) - stress? None at G, regular at FB. At G, you can commit to some OKRs for a quarter, ship late due to some cross-functional dependency, and still EE. At FB, you can deliver everything you set out to, but if it didn’t have impact you can get MM for not foreseeing lack of impact. - if you land on a heavily Chinese/Indian team, you could just be fucked. Nothing against them, racially. But culturally for example, a lot of Chinese tech workers are used to 995/996. You’re stack ranked. If you’re working 40hr weeks and your teammates are doing 996, they will outperform you. And yes, they will send you diffs on Sat/Sun.
last few guys I know with both offers said FB offered a higher level and so TC wasn't close
Just got an L5 PM role at Facebook with 13yoe. What average/fast promo timeline to get L6 at F? (Product role)
All the new hiring at Google is in cloud where there is no wlb. You have the atmosphere of fb but with lower tc. I'll be interviewing at fb this year. They want me to do oncall during the weekends so wlb is getting worse.
This is false, I'm in cloud. It's nowhere near as bad as FB. The culture is almost identical to standard Google just enterprise focused
The whip was cracked for cloud. That will be more obvious after this perf.
Google will make you a better engineer
Google moves slower in terms of work and promo, but has better WLB in general. FB moves faster but might cost you in WLB. If you're ambitious and want to chase money, go FB. Google otherwise.
lol，is google promotion that slow？
Only if you're bad
Promotion is the only part where Google is the worst. HR present it as the easiest part while down levelling a candidate. I have lost two years of my career to move to the next level. I went through the hell and did L+2 work to move to L+1. The bitter fact is all non promo candidates perform at L-1.