At first glance "impact" sounds like a noble thing. But if you look at Facebook 10-15 years ago, we were not so heavy on having people proving their impact because their role at the company already naturally created impact. If you have to prove the impact that you had each performance review cycle, (PSC) it means you shouldn't have been hired in the first place. You having a job and doing that job is already impactful enough. An employer saying I should prove my impact is really saying they don't know why they hired me. Because of this pressure to prove "impact" employees are constantly not secure with the jobs they have and the projects they do. Which also then affects their self-confidence and sense of security in that job which then affects their mental health. Every job you do had a job description. That job description is your "impact". If you're checking the boxes on the responsibilities of that job description you were hired to do, you don't have to then prove your impact.
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You are correct. It’s almost as if they expect us to become entrepreneurs within the company who is not only supposed to do their job but first figure out what can be done and then convince others that it will have impact before actually doing it. I think it’s indeed an unreasonable burden.
What you describe sounds like what they expect from senior staff and up and is part of the level expectations. Since everyone is required to make it to senior levels or be let go, reporting on how well people decide what to work on is quite important towards evaluating readiness/ performance at terminal level and up. I'm not saying this is the best way of doing things, just that I don't think it should be a surprise
Sounds like the real issue is “up or out”, not that the demands on senior staff are unreasonable
I disagree. If you can’t demonstrate your impact, it’s hard to compare perf thus leading to politics and favoritism. It’s not ideal I agree but the alternative seems worse
If you are working at FAANG you signed up for competing with top class people. Showing impact is the only way to measure how you are performing against them. You are free to work anywhere any place where they don’t measure impact
You are correct. The discussion then is what is "impact"? Shouldn't impact be my core responsibilities of the job I was hired to do? The issue here is that the definition of "impact" gets lost in translation. On the one hand it should mean me showing up everyday and doing the core responsibilities of my job. But what it now means is my ability to create new things that the employer did not know that they needed but I was suddenly able to create it to prove my worth and if I can constantly come up with new ideas on what additional values I bring beyond my core roles and responsibilities then I am deemed successful. At some point people run out of ideas and they become exhausted which is why people say they are burnt out. Because showing up everyday and doing your job is not perceived as creating impact. And it should be.
@suckertino what do you do when you run out of ideas
Doesnt matter. For every 1 person leaving fb because of wlb / impact culture there are at least 25 in the u.s. and another 25 outside clamoring to get in. Unlimited resources.
This is neither here nor there.
Are you aware of what hiring looks like right now info leak?
Won’t there be any product managers who will give us ideas for making impact?
Touché
I do think it's an oddity that engineers are expected to find their own impact opportunities at FB. At Amazon, PMs and SDMs generally do that. SDEs execute on the impact opportunities through design and development. The quality of execution, scope and ambiguity of the opportunity are the primary mechanisms for assessing impact through L6 - getting to L7 and above, size of impact inevitably becomes more important though.
What is PSC?
I would say inability to convert issues/bottlenecks into projects and solitons causes mental health issues. Issues today are way tougher.. than 10-15 years ago when a script written well would get you accolades and possibly promotion. Those are done by college graduates nowadays
this is a nonsense that happens when large public company continues to function like startup inside: make impacc (read "bring money/users/etc"), because no time for quality, docs, tech debt and other stuff.
Increasing impact is how people move up
I think you doing your job successfully it's how you should move up. When and if you have outgrown that role and now have the bandwidth to take on more then you should be up leveled. The whole premise of this discussion is to demystify the mindset on feeling pressure to prove yourself everyday.
Seems like a lot of impact is driven by flashy showy crap or meaningless gamed metrics. The former leads to infinite Google messenger platforms and the latter leads to Agile/Scrum Jira hell. Pick your poison. There needs to be measuring impact in terms of keeping the lights on, code quality, getting rid of technical debt, documentation, testing, internal tooling, humble fundamentals.