What is the work / life balance like for engineers at Facebook? Is there any balance? I always had the impression they were pedal to the floor all the time, but I wonder if that has changed as the company has grown up. Does it differ by group/division? How about at subsidiaries like Oculus or Instagram? I put this under comp because $300k total comp @ 40 hours a week is different than at 80 hours a week. Just curious. No offers or anything.
It heavily depends on your team. Usually WLB is much worse in infrastructure teams, specially during oncall rotation. On product teams it tends to be better. WLB was one of the main reasons I left FB for Google and it's been a good move so far.
^ what sstrefv said. Varies a lot by team even within an org, and on-call will definitely make it worse. If you're hired through boot camp and have a fair range of skills so you have a broad choice of teams, you should be able to find a team where the WLB is good -- remember that the real benefit of boot camp is to interview teams and managers to find one you like.
How do we know which team has good wlb at bootcamp
Talk to people on the teams. As you start narrowing down, spend a day or a couple of days bringing your laptop over to sit with the team. You have 3, maybe 4 weeks from when team matching starts
Define “good”, people seem to have very different scales for WLB.
You write code all the day, very unfriendly environment.
Wasn't my experience at all. Frabkly I wrote less code (and did more ops stuff) than at either the jobs immediately before or since. Of course I was so deep in the bowels of infra that my customer teams were mostly in infra...
pulse survey showed 30 out of 100 for wlb
The driving factor behind any stories of bad WLB at FB is that expectations are high. Can you work 40 hours and meet expectations? Yes. You just have to be smart with your time.
they wanna you to work smart .............. and hard. smart is not enough.
I left yelp for FB. Previously, I worked from 10am - 6:30pm. Now, it is 9am - 7pm. The pace here is faster but not that bad.
Probably can't be too specific but what part of the org do you work in?
9 to 7 every day? That’s insane.