Thanks, sadly it didn't pick-up on HN
The diff per region/state would be fantastic!
The stats are shared, nothing "per user". At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There's a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great
This is fantastic! The voting statistics of the community would have been very interesting. I have emailed the moderators to see if they would consider giving this post a second chance at /pool.
I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were:
- Working on something I care about
- Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations:
- Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
Thanks for the honest assessment. I'm certain it took guts to open up about this, especially to the hostile crowd on HN. This comment is a good counter to the no-nuance "Everyone who works at Company X are terrible people!" narratives. Also, it brings up a point that often gets overlooked: These companies are absolutely enormous, and there are very likely small pockets within each of them with people who are at least trying to do good and stay out of the evil lanes. Not everyone working in BigTech is actively churning through Torment Nexus JIRA tickets, and at the very least, if you're working at one of these places, finding a team that is not actively harming the world is a good compromise.
I used to work at a company that had a client that was... let's call them morally dubious, because if I start typing out what I really think of them, there'll just be a paragraph of profanity that dang will probably remove.
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
Rather than donating 5-6 figures, what about saving enough cash to live on? Roughly speaking you can "make" ~$200k/year on $5M in T-bills. You could live comfortably in the US or Europe, or basically like a king anywhere else in the world. You could work on the software you want, even pro-bono, and walk away any time. I believe this is called "F U money".
My initial offer was $400k total comp (E5), so I didn’t really consider FIRE as an option in the near term considering my spouse is a full-time parent and this area is HCOL.
I’m nowhere close to $5m, and I’m hoping to leave Meta in the next few months. But I’d love to be able to “retire” and work exclusively for companies that match my morals.
I figured the amount I’m donating doesn’t make a huge difference to my FIRE date
That 200k is a reasonable amount to start withdrawing from a 5M portfolio (exactly the 4% rule from the Trinity study [1]), but you’ll want to adjust it for inflation every year. My favorite tool for planning these strategies is TPAW Planner [2], which visualizes the distribution of withdrawals under various market outcomes. It’ll also suggest a portfolio of stocks and bonds that’ll be safer than just T-bills, which have a high risk of not beating inflation.
If everyone who works at META is a bit like this, then it will be an overflow of good when y'all find your new place. Thank you for doing your part. Gratefulness
If you ever actually see the work or something charities on the ground and the people they help you might change your mind very quickly. They certainly do more good than another million in some index fund.
No that’s never happened to India you’re right. If you “support” relocation of a Ukrainian like Iryna Zarutska they might end up moving to Charlotte, NC where they get stabbed on a train. Road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.
No, but the UK did support the relocation of my great-grandfather who fought alongside the British against the Soviets and Nazi's leaving him no home to return to once the war was over.
He dedicated his life to the defence of his home, then to Britain and then spent 37 years in the coal-mines powering the country. All the while being a refugee.
I totally understand your worry about globalism, and to be clear: very human feelings about demographic shifts and change are being stoked by both sides of an ever polarising political spectrum.
But, I think it's important to remember that the reason refugee protections even exist as a concept is because there are real people who suffer, and we offer protection to those who need it not because we think ourselves superior: but because we hope that if the day were ever to come for us: that other nations would help us live our life so we could return home.
Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, even though he settled in the UK; he would have returned, but his part of Poland had become part of Ukraine, and Ukraine was the Soviet Union: the entity he went to war against.
I can tell you there will never come a time when American or UK refugees will be able to look to Poland or Ukraine or Afghanistan or India for rescue. It is that level of idealism and high trust naïveté that makes first world civilizations nice places to live but also dooms them to be taken advantage of by tribal mooches if there is no careful pragmatism.
People who work at Meta, the ones I met in London, didn’t seem too far removed from people working in the financial industry.
They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after they’ve done their part. They do the necessary work to keep the system in motion, without caring too deeply about what happens next. They worry about their locus of understanding and control and don’t mind much what happens after. That was my impression.
Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?
On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?
(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)
I think if something happens in the universe, It probably has its function, otherwise it wouldn't exist.
If there was no reason for it to exist, it wouldn't. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's a question of accepting the construct of existence as what is not what I hope it could be under different circumstances.
There's probably an evolutionary reason why we need people who don't get paralyzed by second and third order effects.
I've known many people that worked at FB/Meta, though most of them served between 2010-2020. The scale they deal with does lead to some very interesting tech challenges that can be very satisfying. Most of them eventually moved on, and my impression is that the culture really has changed post-covid.
I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.
It's the material reality of what people live through. When one is entirely alienated from the product of their own labour, what do they care for the mission and culture of a company who will fire me at an irrational whim? Better to have a vibrant life outside of work to keep oneself sane.
Well, especially if the mission of the company who will fire them at a whim is driving "engagement" at any cost in order to sell ads, or (as in the case of the company I work for since the company I originally applied at was bought out), sell sports data to betting companies, who can blame them?
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure...
You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.
And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.
But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.
Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.
(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)
> Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.
Good (or at least smart) employers pay quite a lot of money on quarterly anonymised surveys precisely to hear what their employees truly think about the company. I think some shareholders care about those numbers as well enough to want to see them. Of course there is a difference between saying what is obvious to anyone interested anyway (like above) and crying publicly over some petty grievance.
Besides, if the company only seeks spineless lackeys would you want to work there anyway?
I don't understand the mindset of being surprised that people are honest about their own opinions about their work. I don't have any uniquely bad concerns about my employer so I don't think I've ever written anything like the GP, but I have spoken honestly about my past experiences. If we can't be honest about how we think and feel about something we spend the majority of our time and energy doing, aren't we just being oppressed?
I mean, from the post it sounds like they already have a bank account large enough to say what they want without any repercussions having any side effects, such as unemployment.
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.
Cool. Maybe you can tell me why when I reported a private message that was like "Looking for a super easy part-time job? Earn $100-$10000 per day working from anywhere! [...]" as spam, I got a response that the message didn't go against community standards and no action was being taken.
The usual bet is that you double your salary by tolerating a toxic work environment for a few years.
If you are not in the Bay Area, the absolute numbers might seem unbelievable but here you go - I have seen mid-senior engineers (4-5 years exp) get Meta offers with 700k yearly TC.
No one is getting $700k tc for senior eng outside of speciality AI roles. That’s beyond even staff level.
You can stay at the company and get stock appreciation up to that but you’re not getting a new hire offer at $700k below staff level. (Even for staff, it’s high)
If you look at HN salary threads and self-reported salary websites, then everyone in tech makes $700K, drives a Maserati and owns a vacation home in Tahoe.
A used Maserati is just 15k and you can’t afford the mortgage on a Tahoe vacation home on a 700k salary, so I’d say your made up stereotypes are a bit off in both directions :)
For future reference, here’s all that’s needed to exhaust a 700k TC without liquidating much in assets: Bay Area mortgage, private school for a kid or two, 3-4 family vacations.
When I worked there pre covid it was just a really fun environment. Lots of smart people, a lot of autonomy to choose what you work on, good quality dev environment and tooling, a culture of collaboration and problem solving (“nothing is someone else’s problem” actually was a real thing). And the pay was top of market.
Now I guess all that is gone though so you are only left with the $?
I saw a comment by an anonymous Meta engineer who said that it's difficult to leave when you see $2m worth of unvested stock sitting in your account. How many years would you be miserable for $2m? Many people can be easily seduced by that amount of money
I guess it depends - if the miserable conditions and work I was doing only affected me, maybe a couple of years. The problem here is that Meta is a company that actively does harm to the world. They've contributed to genocide in Myanmar, harmed children, and overall have been a net negative on society. So my answer to your question, if we're strictly talking about Meta, is none. I would never work for a company like Meta because I value other humans more than money.
Money is a proxy for other things. In the places where meta has offices, the cost of living (housing, childcare, healthcare, etc etc) is so high that working for a company that pays like Meta can be the only way many can afford it all.
It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.
Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.
However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.
Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".
Money?? Isn't that why we put up with any of this shit? The stress in this industry is intense, espically in big tech companies, and the only reason it's worth it is the extremely high salaries and stock vests.... I've been at Amazon for 4 years and if I didn't get paid like I do now there's no way I would stay.
But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.
Yeah it comes with a compromise.
Tbh, if it was an option I would sacrifice a tiny bit of my screen to not have the notch while keeping a uniform bezel.
There’s another solution, much faster, it’s to use Screen Time and have your partner own the passcode. I hold my partner’s phone passcode and it’s fantastic to control when he’s allowed to doom scroll
+1 SO MUCH
After two years I couldn't understand them. Sometime one notification appear, then it disappear, is it in the bottom stack? No, it just disappear.
Also when there's many of them grouped, will tapping expand them? open the app? It's random.
But mostly, on Android, having quick actions on notifications. Receiving a useless email? The "Delete" action is right there. Boom, done. Move on.
In retrospect, I think it's why I find Android so functional. Just from the notifications you can do everything. No need to unlock your phone and end up distracted.
I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.
I remember my iPhone, on my desk, turning up because of a notification, then hearing the vibration for a failed FaceID unlock. This very smart system wasn't able to understand that it was looking at a ceiling. So I always ended up having to type my password due to too many failed FaceID attempts.
FaceID was highly ranked in the reasons why I disliked iPhones.
