Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
I wonder if that's still the case.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.
Cool exciting and meaningful science job: 200k
Big Tech surveillance capitalism job: 800k (at the low end)
The calculus has only been about affording housing and providing for the family.
“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.