Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now?

Re:Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? by websap on Thursday November 09, 2023 @01:19PM (#38208670)

I'll work with whichever team most sounds like you don't want to commit. It takes at least a year to gather enough details about use-cases, issues, expansion opportunities. If the company really needs you to move they will ask you. You sound non-committal.

Also, not sure where in FAANG you had such wide scope. At FAANG either teams are mostly organized by business. For e.g. engineers working on Photos at Facebook, can't suddenly decide they want to work on implementing a feature for container orchestration at Facebook works.

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Re:Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? by pradn on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:33PM (#38209848)

Engineers at these companies are like little startups. Senior engineers are expected to take a general problem, nail down the ambiguity / get consensus, and own the project til launch and after. That includes writing docs, running meetings, getting other people to do stuff for you (approvals, coding), writing code, testing, and ops/oncall work. In this way, the role requires "vertical flexibility" - a lot of jobs in one product. It's not "horizontal flexibility" - being a programmer in a bunch of different projects. That's the general gist of it, but I suppose everything can vary given how big these companies are.

Still, we like to speak of all these companies in the same breath, but I feel like unless you worked at a few of them, it's hard to say what the actual commonalities/differences are.

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Re:Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? by francisofascii on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:45PM (#38210069)

> I'll work with whichever team most sounds like you don't want to commit

I didn't get that impression. OP sounds adaptable/flexible and is willing to work on whatever team needs the most help.

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Re:Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? by kevinventullo on Thursday November 09, 2023 @03:42PM (#38210952)

engineers working on Photos at Facebook, can't suddenly decide they want to work on implementing a feature for container orchestration

If they find a manager on the container orchestration team with open headcount who wants to hire them, there isn’t much that can stop them from moving.

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Re:Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? by Backslasher on Thursday November 09, 2023 @04:56PM (#38211919)

I appreciate your feedback. I don't think I'm non-committal, more like afraid of being boxed into a too-small domain.

The last sentence is factually incorrect. During my time at FB I contributed code to the container solution, the Jenkins-equivalent, the network routing layer, the bare-metal-provisioner, the monitoring solution and even wrote a feature for the website. I identified a problem, parlayed with the owning team, and shipped that feature. This was the best part IMO about working at FB.

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