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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?
by maxwellito 4mo ago
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?
- tinfoilhatter 4mo agoI'm not a Meta engineer, but if I had to offer a guess, the answer would be money.
- scottious 4mo agoI 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
- afavour 4mo agoTotally understandable, and probably another reason why morale is so low, as employees watch the stock price and their personal fortunes fall.
- tinfoilhatter 4mo agoI 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zipy124 4mo agoGiven it's like 30 years of my salary I'd probably be willing to be miserable for a number of years.
- mullingitover 4mo agoHaving a passion for personal financial solvency is a major motivation for a surprising number of people.
- danans 4mo agoMoney 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".
- kranke155 4mo agoPeople 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.
- kaladin-jasnah 4mo ago> I’m sure we need people like that 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.)
- kranke155 4mo agoI 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.
- analog8374 4mo ago"Desk and bank account" makes for a very small world. Have we shrunk? Are we dwarfs now?
- revscat 4mo ago[dead]
- mrhottakes 4mo agoNot a Meta engineer, but I've known a couple. It's money.
- willio58 4mo agoThe same for any FAANG, money.
- rsweeney21 4mo agoI work at Meta. 1) Work with top minds in ML 2) Money 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.
- cj 4mo agoWhy do you stay?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hirvi74 4mo agoDo you think both are worth the harms your company is causing to the rest of the world?
- mrhottakes 4mo agoActions speak. Of course they do.
- rsweeney21 4mo agoI 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.
- Sohcahtoa82 4mo agoCool. 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.
- sillysaurusx 4mo agoAre 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.
- fooker 4mo agoThe 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.
- bradlys 4mo agoNo 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)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 4mo agoIf 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.
- toasty228 4mo ago700k a year and not finding anything else to buy than a maserati is the saddest thing ever
- fooker 4mo agoA 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.
- jopolous 4mo agoI work at Meta (for now…) 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
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoI 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.
- simpaticoder 4mo agoRather 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".
- hasteg 4mo agoMoney?? 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.
- llmslave 4mo agoalot of them make 1M+
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zeroonetwothree 4mo agoWhen 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 $?
- upupupandaway 4mo agoI had an offer for $1.2m / year for an M2 position in a MCOL location in the US. So this is the answer. Money.