Avoid GMS org & supporting functions if at all possible
Pros
- Salary - Free Food - Health Insurance but you'll need it due to issues this place causes - Meet lots of cool people - Good for your first job but if you are experienced coming from the outside be very careful as they don't value this. - The FB experience varies widely between teams. I have friends who love their job and role on the team they are in. This wasn't the case for me. Your company is as good as your manager and I had no good ones.
Cons
1. Work/Life Balance If you don't make this boundary clear yourself and actively work on creating it - it will be exploited. Communication is broken in the company so you'll get messenger pings, quip notifications, emails, google doc updates at all hours. They even do long term project planning over chat groups in some teams. 2. Loads of unnecessary stress/anxiety related issues suffered by employees due to: (i) Managers fawning over each other showing "impact" of their teams - god help you if you don't make them look good or disagree with them. Anonymous reviews come through some of the time and people can say what they want about you. (ii) Unnecessary fighting between individual contributors due to performance review system. People "strong arm" you into doing work when it makes no business sense so it can make them look good. (iii) Bad reviews stick with you and you'll be treated differently - people are managed out/disappear/don't pass probation all the time. Speaking with friends in other companies FB isn't that attractive anymore and it's reputation is changing in the jobs marketplace. (iv) Performance reviews for the most part are opinion based (see 3 below) and not work based (v) Bullying/Level-ism. I've seen so much of it go on here and nothing done. (vi) Decisions a lot of the time are made from MPK and a lot of the time opinion based and not fact based which is scary. The 'Holier Than Though' engineering 'Move Fast' culture creates loads of chaos and is unnecessary. 3. You are goaled a lot on "collaboration" i.e. how much you are liked rather than the work you do or numbers you drive. This is a cult like characteristic where you have to be "happy" and "always on." I joined FB to work on projects to drive numbers but all my feedback was about how I got on with other people. Collaboration is important for most companies but it's fake at Facebook due to performance review system. 4. There are no formal processes for a lot of things in the company. The only analogy I have for Facebook is that it's like a big building, you go inside, peel back the wallpaper and all you will see is the pipes - the walls are missing. It's "XFN this" and "XFN that" so you reach out to teams to get things done and rely on "collaboration" rather than formal processes/business requirements. It's a huge surprise to me how it has gotten this far. I've seen parts of the operation down/backlogged for weeks on end due to bad planning but you can't complain about it because you won't be "liked." 5. GMS Summit - This event is a mix between Jonestown and being in North Korea. People stand up and applaud Zuckerberg when he comes on stage and don't sit down until he sits down. A VP (one in particular) gets on stage and tells the audience how lucky and special they are to have a job there and how grateful we should all be. Another one at the EMEA one told us to start sharing positive news about FB on our personal feeds.
