overstimulationfest

A day in, I realized that this is my fourth (4) time onboarding as a data scientist at Meta. The first time, for my first internship, was in-person. The second and third times (second internship, full-time) onboarding was remote. The remote era meant that 1. they recorded all the onboarding trainings that are actually necessary, and 2. I didn't get a coveted new hire backpack. This time, my fourth time, Meta embraced the best of both worlds and flew me out to California to watch pre-recorded videos, but at least I got a backpack. Thank you shareholders!

There were like 150 people going through onboarding with me. Meta is hiring. Still, I could not believe how the same everything was. The offices themselves, Menlo Park, the onboarding programming: still the same weird cosmological stories, still the same Chris Cox butchering of McLuhan (abeit recorded). We did not just fall out of a coconut tree. We are still falling out of the coconut tree? It’s like the whole company is one big groundhog day, thousands of people just treading water. For years.

The only indication time had passed were little snatches of conversations. I overheard a girl said she was going to start peeing standing up (to bring more masculine energy to the office). A white guy called himself an outsider and imposter in tech because he's a lawyer and from Oklahoma. But other than that, there was scant little mention of the explicit, performance-based cuts looming on Feb 10th, or the cutting of DEI programs, or the fact that our oligarch of choice is dressing like a fucking Long Island TikTok teen.

The sameness feels both wearying and jarring. I ended this week back in New York (thank god), but really not feeling like myself. In California, I could already feel the bad patterns coming back. Eating too much, not working out, spiraling because of competition without actually doing anything about it. I need to make my own goals to stay sane here.

Goals to Stay Sane at Meta

1. No wrong numbers. This has happened to me a couple times now. Numbers that didn't pass muster for the Jack review at Twitter, wrong numbers in a stolen metric at FB, the slack thread that eroded trust at BCNY. I think the fix is more procedural than anything else: don't impulsively share numbers without sense checks, and if there are "wrong" numbers, never leave the scene of the crime. Ask questions, get to the bottom of what's wrong.

2. More systematic thinking. Also related to impulsivity. What do we need, to show that this is true? How do we present it in a way that makes sense to others? Straight LSAT logic.

3. Collaboration > Competition. I'm a professional. I've been distracted in the past by people at Meta who are my own age who seem to be doing so much better. If I can't control it, it doesn't matter. I don't want to seem, or in fact be, more interested in proving that I'm right than in uncovering the truth¹. Very tactically, this means that I should complain productively - do some pre-work before complaining - and be gracious whenever and wherever I can. "Give impact away," as they said in an orientation panel.

The same Oklahoma lawyer white guy said he likes to go to two places on vacation: Switzerland, which is small and controlled, and India, which is big and chaotic. Meta is like India, he said, because they both serve a lot of people. There's a slightly dubious edge to this analogy (he was in Policy, and so almost certainly visited India to negotiate with the Modi government). But I agree with the general sentiment. I'm going to learn to thrive in chaos.