Facebook or local company?
I am a two-time Facebook production engineering intern, and will be doing my third this summer in between my final two semesters of my CS master's degree. My plan has been to graduate and work for Facebook full time in Seattle. While not working at Facebook, I have been doing contracts for a local company who is paying $90/hour. The CEO of this company is desperate to get me to join her team, and is offering equity + $181,000/year starting, with 401k and insurance benefits. The current dev team there is about 5 people, with another 15-20 in other roles in the company (QA, marketing, sales...). The CEO believes that her company's success is pivotal on hiring me, and this leaves me with a ton of room for leverage. Based on my peers' offers, I would likely receive $123,000 base + $160,000 RSU + $75,000 signing as my Facebook full time offer (IC3). I am extremely conflicted. I live in Utah right now, and some tools say that the cost of living would require a $263,000 salary in Seattle to match what I would get here, but others which take taxes into account say it's the same either way. (Washington has no state income tax.) Facebook looks really good on a resume, and would help ensure that I have really good chances at any company I apply to, whereas this company is mostly unknown and I would have to work harder to "sell" this on my resume. On the flip side, at Facebook I will be "just a developer" whereas at this company I will almost certainly ascend to a C-level and will have direct impact on the company's growth. At Facebook I feel imposter syndrome all the time and I get very stressed about the performance reviews, but at this company I am very very confident in the technology, always know the solution to the problems, and there are no formal performance reviews. However, at Facebook I get to enjoy a great work-life balance, lots of perks like free food and paid activities, while at this company I am probably going to end up working strange hours due to late-night deployments, and there are no food/activity benefits. I will also have pretty much no friends here. Thanks for reading all this, I really have no idea what to do. I love working at Facebook but I feel like I'll make a much bigger impact at this other company.. however I just feel like it's pretty lame in comparison. At Facebook I feel more professional because I'm surrounded by extremely smart people, but at this company I would have the highest level of education on the dev team and it sort of feels like a joke... Idk. I guess I should add that at this company I feel highly valued, and the tech is fun, but at Facebook I feel like just a gear in the machine, not anything special.. and the tech can be frustrating. But I've only done intern projects that I've had no choice in, during bootcamp maybe I'd find a more fun team. Any thoughts? Thank you #tech #facebook #career
You can always go back to FB. Do some fun stuff at a small local company you like now.
I suppose you're right, I could always apply again. I've made great impressions on the recruiters, so I think that should help. Thank you!
there are so many talented people wasting away doing pointless stuff at big companies, you have a chance to make a difference and build something innovative. I mean would anyone have told zuck early in his life to take a job at IBM?
That's a great point, thank you! And I agree, sometimes it does feel like wasting away. My last two intern projects have been abandoned even though I saw them through to completion, plus some. (And I get great reviews, it's not like I wrote bad code, they just straight up didn't plan it well enough.) This made me feel bad.
Go Local. Doesn’t sound like you’d have trouble clearing FAANG (or whatever follows next) later if/when you decide to switch things up. Your local opportunity is something a lot of people never get to do in their careers. It seems they already value you and you can contribute greatly. I also wouldn’t get hung up on TC early in the career. Optimise for skilling up, TC will come.
Thank you, I have been getting a bit caught up in the compensation I suppose. I do want to make sure I get equity though because this company is doing really well and I believe they could be bought out in the future. I super appreciate the advice, thanks much! I didn't realize this was a rare opportunity.
How did you like Production engineering at FB? Same as swe?
I've only done PE at FB but the work for interns is pretty much the same as SWE -- however you can get more opportunities to branch out and play with things like containerization and distributed systems since you're paired with a PE intern manager and you get to work on some of the same stuff they do. Personally, I loved the experience. I love the smaller team sizes and it's clear that PEs stick together the way SWEs stick together. There's some overlap but there are also many PE-only events which I always enjoyed. Really great people. There are also way fewer PE interns, especially in Seattle. The work is challenging but fulfilling! It's a great role if you're into backend stuff like load balancing, auto scaling, distributed systems, Linux, and that sort of thing. It seems that you spend less / no time writing frontend things and actually implementing software. Instead the time is spent more on making the software written by SWEs scale and stay alive.
How much time on average did they spend coding? And how transferable were the coding skills between PE and SWE
Definitely go Facebook or any other big tech company over local. Your career growth and learning will be galaxies apart. I spent half my career working at small, failed, and forgotten companies until I fought my way Tia senior engineer position at Facebook so I can speak with some personal experience. At Facebook you’ll have the opportunity to meet and interact with famous engineers and scientists. Eventually you could make your way to teams that create tools that shape the entire software industry. One example: have friends that work on PyTorch, I met Yann Lecun who works in our office and have attended internal presentations and talks he’s given. There are teams at Facebook that literally work on everything from robotics, to satellites, to our underwater data cables, to data center automation to the apps used by 3 billion people worldwide. There will always be some little company that wants you to build them a web app or some automation. Unique opportunities like working at a history making company like Facebook however aren’t evergreen.
Local. Sounds like you’ve got an interesting chance to build some cool shit early on a small team while you have (I assume) a higher risk tolerance at early career. Opportunity for impact at 3 at FB could be an order magnitude lower, dep on product/team/etc. While FB on the resume attracts recruiters spam on LI (at least for me), the stories and learning you’ll have from local option sound like the more interesting route to me. Or, chase $ first and come to FB or another AANG. Obv your call around your priorities.
I really appreciate your advice. Thanks so much. I do have more risk tolerance since I still live with my parents while I figure all this out. Also, if I go with Facebook then I need to immediately find housing, but if I go with this local company then I have a lot more time and ability to find housing.. so that's a bonus.
Keep in mind, we’re WFH through at least July in the bay. But, my gut tells me that it could be ‘22 til it’s back to office like before. Even then, things are also quickly shifting to more remote options and I’d be surprised if we don’t move more quickly on flexible 3/2 wfh/office options. We’re gonna have to keep pace with leaders, despite some of the old schoolers nostalgia for campus life & hallway chats.