I joined FB as a newgrad E3 in mid-2019. I had previously interned there and absolutely kicked ass, finishing my project in half the time. My intern manager even told me to stop working so many hours and didn't believe me when I told him I was working <40 hrs a week. I had ~5 years of experience working on passion projects that would get as big as 100k LoC across hundreds of modules. I also graduated in the top 1-2% from a top CS school, so I generally set a very high bar for myself. I don't like boasting but I think it's important to fully understand the crushing disappointment that follows. During bootcamp, I joined an org which I later found out was one of the bad ones. As a naive and optimistic newgrad, I thought that FB enforced a high bar for employee satisfaction across all teams. I expected every manager to be extremely personable and passionate about supporting people, spare a few bad apples who wouldn't last too long. After all, they were hiring the best engineers in the industry and wanted to give them the best experience possible so they don't leave. Right? I was in for a huge shock. My new manager seemed friendly enough, though not as personable as the other managers I talked to, but that didn't matter to me then since I thought I could be successful as long as I found interesting work. And he had the most interesting team I could find. I had no idea what the PSC was and what my manager's job was besides delegating work to me and telling me how I'm doing. So when I joined the team he gave me a few ramp up tasks and then quickly scraped a few loosely related tasks off the backlog, consolidating them into my "project" for the half. These were mostly PM-like tasks with almost no technical work involved, but I already felt like my technical skills were strong and wanted to learn soft skills. In order to have something to work on in between pinging people though, I voluntarily picked up two more small projects off the backlog. While working on these, I called out a lot of the atrocious code I saw throughout FB and even published diffs to refactor them. My manager told me I had great intuition as an engineer but should focus more on speed over quality. I didn't agree with pushing garbage to the codebase and throwing the cost on other engineers to deal with it, but if this was the engineering philosophy that created a trillion dollar company then there had to be some merit to it. Come the mid cycle review, I had finished my two small side projects and was making good progress on my main project. My manager told me that my main project was larger than average for an E3's workload but I should make sure it lands this half to meet expectations for my level. It felt significantly smaller than an E3's workload, but sure, I'm trusting you as the manager. Being an E3 must be a breeze then. I thought that I was on track for an easy MA or even EE considering I would finish my main project and multiple side projects. So I continued to execute on my main project and voluntarily picked up an additional medium-sized side project to keep my diff count up. Throughout the quarter, I regularly asked my manager if I needed to do anything more to guarantee a MA. He kept telling me that as long as I shipped my main project, I shouldn't worry about it. I shipped my main project in late November but it still didn't seem like a lot so I took on one more small side project in December for safe measure. By the end of the half, it was still in experiment, but I figured I would still get credit for it since we would ship it very early the following half. And it would be really unlikely for the PSC to not recognize projects that span multiple halves. Right? Come the PSC, I get great feedback from my TL and peers, emphasizing the focus I put into quality and the amount of additional work I picked up. I'm expecting a MA and maybe even better. I sit down with my manager excited to hear the good news, and he tells me I got a MM. Specifically, I was "below expectations in driving work through to landed impact, and in seeking out more work and responsibility". He cited the side project I picked up in December as an example of the former and left out out the other projects from my review to justify the latter. At this point, I'm in shock and I don't expect to get anything useful out of this guy, so I just take his BS without any pushback. He then leaves the team a few weeks later, telling us the team is in a good shape without him, and the team dies before the end of the half, leaving just me and one other engineer to get reorged. After a few months I reach out to HR and explain the situation, asking them to reevaluate the rating. They say that they didn't find any policy violations and tell me not to worry about the rating. When I pushed back on this, the guy started gaslighting me, coming up with all these floaty generic reasons for my rating. He told me that it wasn't the quantity of work that was missing but the quality, which is why my manager omitted my additional projects from the review. This is directly opposite of my PSC report, which clearly cites quantity as the limiting factor and actually encourages me to lower my bar for quality. Now, this would be easy to get over after some time but it blocks me from transferring to another team. E3 MM sounds terrible to any manager and they're always going to interpret that as "this guy was a mishire" over "this guy got shafted by his manager." It's absolutely crushing to see how a manager's face turns as soon as I tell them I got a MM as an E3, and I can't explain this entire story every time without sounding overly defensive. I had already been losing motivation to work at FB because of the dog shit code, toxic culture, and uninteresting work. Not to mention how much of a cancer the company is to society as a whole. This was the final nail in the coffin. I don't think it's possible for me to give 100% or even 80% at this company, unless I somehow miraculously find a manager who acknowledges that I've been fucked and does what they can to try to re-motivate me. However, it seems like every manager religiously defends the PSC as if HR is constantly watching over their shoulder. Anyways, thanks for reading my whole rant. I'm mainly posting on Blind for a sanity check that this was actually a bad manager experience since HR would rather gaslight me and there's no way I could post this non-anonymously. Acronyms: MM - Meets most MA - Meets all PSC - Ratings process
Toxic company turns out to be toxic.
I am wondering if you mentioned all your deliverables and impact of your work in your self review? I understand it's completely bull shit to be listing out every shit you did for 6 months, but that's pretty much what's expected, if you delivered something and forget to mention it in your self review there's good chance it gets discounted. Fwiw, I wrote a 5 page self review 🤦♂️🤦♂️ I don't agree to it, but it is what it is.
I dedicated most of my self review to the main project and provided a few sentences for the additional projects. I probably could have been more clear on what the impact/scope was instead of just saying "I also built x". Was kind of hoping my manager would be able to provide these but I definitely wont make that assumption again.
FWIW no matter what company you’re at it’s expected that you fully write down all the key things you worked on that you’d like considered in the review and to frame the impact yourself. Never assume anything will be filled in for you. Control the process as much as you can
jesus
Amazon sounds like heaven compared to this
Whats his name? I will smack him for you 👹
You sound way too invested in a corporate job. If you’re so good at cs, go work elsewhere
Where?
Citadel
sounds like a nightmare. hope it gets better for you.
I'm so sorry to hear your story.... I was ducked over buy my managers too. As I'm reading this story I can feel my own pain in my chest
Thank you, it honestly feels great to just get this off my chest. Previously I'd only shared this with my HRBP and it turned out horribly. If you need someone to rant to I'm all ears.
Please elaborate on those details with HRBP.