Meta reviews

At Facebook I got to know what "gaslighting" really means. Gaslighting is exactly what is the culture that is imposed top-down by management. It starts at the bootcamp. There, you'll be properly brainwashed how cute and cuddly Facebook is, how unfairly it is being treated by everybody, how great and kind the Czar and his ruling gang is, and how grateful and privileged you (a despicable useless worm) should feel to be here! Right there, in the bootcamp, they will start the abusive treatment by telling you "why on Earth did we hire you? You do not submit any code during last 24 hours!" This abuse and fostering of your impostor syndrome will keep going on. Typical Facebook-style management is when you are being repeatedly told "I have no idea how did you got here, and if how come you were not fired yesterday - but OK, we'll give you one more chance". This is part of this culture! There is a STACK RANKING! It's in tooling, in manager training materials! The fact that Facebook officially denies doing it is a yet-another confirmation that this company doesn't shy away from crime. Stack ranking means that all colleagues see each other as a competition. When I started my job at Facebook, my closest colleague didn't want to talk to me, because he knew that the better I succeed, the worse is for him. This is very profound and affects everybody: it's a hostile work environment. Performance reviews is a complete sham. There is one "axis" which is related to your actual performance. The other 3 (three!) axes (direction, etc.) is a complete baloney, and can be used to justify ANY rating for anyone. All managers are deeply ignorant schmoozers. Cult means there are plenty of taboo topics for which you'll be fired. There are, for example, internal "non-managers" groups, which are patrolled for any signs of dissent. If a person posts anything out of line there, this gets straight to his manager and HR. HR is the worst people I've met. They enforce the authoritarian rule ruthlessly and with cynicism. Working at Facebook has permanently damaged my faith in humanity. I realized that people can still do horrible crimes, given enough brainwashing. That people can treat each other like animals, given stack ranking. I wish I never joined this scam of a company, a lousy swamp filled with ghosts who pretend to be humans!

If you're a manager, this place will drive you nuts. Employees are snarky, entitled, and disrespectful brats. They have no concept of critical thinking or any desire to do real work. Unlimited sick days in the hands of overpaid children is impossible to manage, my team would somehow always manage to catch a "cold" on Fridays and Mondays. (Interesting that they would Tweet and post about their weekend party binges though.) While Facebook does a great job recruiting Ivy League talent, I was underwhelmed by the level of intelligence of "Facebookers." They are so busy congratulating themselves on being "awesome" that they never stop to consider they didn't have any real world work experience to back that assertion up. It's really hard to manage and lead people who "know it all." Kitchy inspirational posters everywhere you look. "Be Bold!" "Dare Greatly!" Yet, I didn't see any substantive work or product coming out of anyone, which makes sense since Facebook really is just a glorified website - users are the product. Communication is an absolute nightmare. You are forced to "friend" everyone you work with and join an incessant amount of internal group pages where you had to filter through all the BS people would post (memes, YouTube videos, snarky hipster comments…clearly these people didn't have enough work to do) to get to any relevant work related information you needed to know for your job. I actually thought I was going to get dumber working there. Meetings - the sheer volume was mind bending. None of them critical to doing actual work, more self congratulating on unearned awesomeness. Being social at Facebook was far more important than doing anything meaningful while you were there. Anyone serious about doing meaningful work need not apply. You'll make it a few months and then quit out of frustration.