I’m 5 months into Facebook. I am L5 “generalist”, and after the boot camp I chose an infra team. I like it so far though oncall responsibilities might get stressful at times. I wonder what is the experience of other folks who just joined. My understanding is that infra in general is more privileged than product - in Seattle we take 2 top floors in 10 story building, as an example, but OTOH we don’t have any women whatsoever. Are there any people who worked in both product and infra and can shed some light on what the actual differences are? If any
Always go for product. Always.
Just do this : look at team leveling. Sigma (Number of engineers * band )/(sigma(number of eng)) and see what the ratios look like per group.
Levels are not visible at Facebook.
Titles are. Do a rough approximation. Trust me, folks that bring in money or users are going to get faster promo velocity.
I have done both infra and product development in my career. I am not sure what your ideal role is, you seem to be confused with oncall stress, privilege and women. Stress is going to be there in all of Facebook, I don't think infra engineers have privilege, people move across teams a lot, it is what you accomplish that matters. You can build the next infra framework/library and open source it or you can come up with the next big product idea for Factbook, prototype it and influence a group of people to build and ship it - there's "privilege" in both of these. As you are new to FB, I would recommend you to do something familiar for the first 2-3 halves, get a few wins under your belt and then try something new. Lot of things depends on your background, career goals etc, find a mentor in another team for a better advice.
Solid advice
Oculus
“but OTOH we don’t have any women whatsoever” » OP is confusing it/devops/infra work with “summer surf camp”.
Right, because women equals hot girls equals summer surf camp commercials? Wtf even “summer surf camp” means?
Wtf cisco dude