I have a SWE offer from Facebook Bay Area for level 4, 250k TC. I'm also expecting an offer for Asana for a fullstack position.
Which to choose? There are a few things important to me:
Working in SF. Facebook team match would be through bootcamp, but they seem to have plenty of openings for the SF office. Asana is based here so SF is guaranteed.
Work-life balance. I've heard the horror stories about Facebook (long hours, PIP culture) which is the main thing I'm hesitant about. I'd try to join a team that isn't so intense but that could be hard if I'm limiting it to SF. Things like no on-call and 40-hour workweek are definitely attractive to me. I'm not sure what Asana is like in that respect, everyone says good things about their culture but I haven't heard much about wlb. Facebook PIP culture worries me, I'm not planning to underperform but the fire-happy culture makes me uncomfortable.
Team/project. I'd like to do product work, something backend or fullstack. Both should have plenty of opportunities for that but Asana says they won't be able to team match before the offer deadline. I could be stuck with something less exciting because of that. With Facebook I'd get to choose through bootcamp.
Compensation. Asana seems to be doing well but Facebook's liquidity is pretty appealing. Asana's comp will probably be similar, though if it were much higher I'd accept for sure.
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comments
Addressing your questions (and some raised in the thread), point by point:
WLB: It's good. It's not something I hear people gripe about. My manager regularly checks in on me to make sure I'm feeling comfortable with the pace of work, and if I feel too heavily loaded, he'll quickly try to de-scope and/or redistribute work.
If you want to work 40 and call it a week, you'll be fine here. Many people do that. I don't see a lot of folks working nights and weekends.
I've not joined an on-call rotation yet, but the Product Engineering ones don't seem that bad. I've heard some of the Infrastructure ones are more challenging due to staffing issues, but they're working on training people up to fill out those rotations.
PTO: We have unlimited PTO here, and people actually use it. My manager tells me I should try to use at least 20 days a year. My observation is that most folks use about that much.
Team-matching: Most teams are good. I'm not aware of any teams that "suck", i.e. they have a reputation as being ones to avoid. There's obviously variance, but if you don't like the team you're on, you could always switch. Team switching here is pretty low-friction.
Compensation: It's tricky to value Asana's offer, since we're private. My L4 offer was around where your FB offer is, so I'd expect we'll be in the same ballpark. If FB goes much higher after negotiation and we aren't able to match, I'd suggest thinking about whether the marginal N dollars/year is worth the potential quality of life hit.
I've never worked at FB, but it sounds like quality of life can vary greatly depending on team. At Asana, inter-team variance is low. Most (maybe all?) of the product engineering teams are good ones to work in. Another thing to call out: at big companies, the teams with good WLB are also often ones with lower promo velocity and doing less interesting work.
I work with a couple of folks that interned at both FB and Asana, and they picked Asana and are happy with their choice, so that's another data point. But there are probably people working at FB who chose it over Asana and who are also happy with their choice, so I'm not sure how much that helps.
Outlook/IPO: I can't talk about company outlook b/c we're in a quiet period ahead of our public offering. But I can say that management has been very transparent through the entire process and I trust they'll handle the public offering the right way. Since our founder is already a billionaire, he doesn't need to try and squeeze an extra buck out of the liquidity or fundraising events. So no bad terms or excessive dilution, etc.
I haven't been promoted here yet, so I don't know what the process is like. Promo decision are based on the typical stuff: scope, impact, how much you improve the team, etc.
superlyft: We're probably not going to do permanent WFH/remote. It's not something the leadership of the company is into. So all engineering will stay in SF/NYC/Vancouver.