Hi everyone, Been doing some more research on FB before I decide on the offer. I've been seeing a lot of posts about "PSC" and complaints about the "PSC culture". Can someone please explain what these mean? Also so far from taking to employees and reading posts I've gathered: - Facebook engineering moves fast (fix forward approach, etc) - Code quality is not as good because of this (was told similar to AWS?) Anyone have any inputs to the engineering part too? I think this is the biggest turn off for me, I'm not sure I want to work at another company that encourages scrappiness for my next job (nothing wrong with being scrappy, just want to see what its like at a company that values quality over speed) tc: still negotiating
PSC culture is performance review every 6 months. FB moves fast in engineering as well as in laying off people who don’t deliver results. Code quality depends on whether you work at a product team vs product infra or pure infra. Code quality is indeed crap in product teams, but product engineers are more than traditional engineers in other companies because product engineers are responsible for driving collaboration with many other cross functional roles e,g, Product marketing, UX research, data science etc. WLB is pretty bad. You cant slack as you have to show results every 6 months. FB is not for everyone. Have seen many MSFT and Goog join FB and then they went back just after one PSC due to this. Amazon will never pay you FB TC and FB gives you complete autonomy on what you work on as long as you deliver results. But comes at a cost of way less job security, and probably a lot worse WLB.
How to define "Deliver Result" ? Number of pull requests or number of bugs?
Deliver results as in there are metics and you move them with your work.
PSC culture is a thing indeed in facebook. PSC is typically at the center stage of all engineering decisions unfortunately. Something I have not seen in other tech companies. You have to deliver results inside the span of 6 months, which biases the engineering culture to short-term wins. The engineering culture here does not value long-term planning, if it does not result in immediate tangible results in production. I’ve seen lots of rework of poor quality new products in a month or two after hitting production, because they were rushed out in under 6 months (otherwise someone would have been PSC-axed). You will find that most of the time when the team is debating priorities and engineering decisions, the central question at the back of everyone’s mind is how a decision will impact their PSC. So yeah, call it “PSC culture”, “PSC cult”, or “PSC-driven engineering”, it is all true and real. That also impacts WLB, as lots of people are constantly anxious about having significant impact in under 6 months. But pay is competitive, and that is the reason many people are sticking around.
Thank you for the note
How many people get fired every cycle? It seems crazy to be living in constant fear of losing your job for a company doing well. Thanks for the informative post btw
Is this PSC culture more impactful on engineers and less on managers ? I.e - easier for engineers to get MM and hence PIP. Managers are shielded from MM and PIP
I think it's easier for a manager to blame an IC for the managers shortcomings and shield themselves, but managers are at a similar risk to get MM and PIP.
Got it Thanks eofns
If team does not meet the goal, managers are screwed in psc along with senior engineers in the team(AkA TL)
Got it Thanks. This makes it more clearer- managers in order to avoid PIP will push team members , and if team members are falling behind MM them.
Is this not standard (two perf reviews a year)? We had it until recently
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