I'm changing teams at work. The end with my old team was fairly harrowing. My manager got fired, and an IC on my team got fired. Two hunger games cannons, three hours apart on the same day. A fifty percent reduction in DS team size. An engineer I liked, and recently, this week, a PM on an adjacent team — all had their last day at Meta, as the email read. Meta as a company is still not good at this, despite doing more of it. It feels like a disappearing, like Saddam era Iraq. My skip scheduled 15 minutes with me that day to tell me that my manager would not be backfilled. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
At the same time, an engineer I hate posted his rating in the workplace compensation data points group. He redefined expectations, the absolute highest possible rating, one some people never get. His refreshers were worth half a million dollars. The reason? He is an AI maximalist. He adopted AI early, he follows roon and sama and boris cherny on Twitter and he got designers to land diffs fixing typos all around the Facebook app, 6 months before leadership mandated it.
I am deeply cynical about this rating and its cause. Combined with this engineer's comments to "lock in" on anxious co-workers posts about their job security, and his relentless insistence that programming was always just about getting the phone to do what you want it to do, about accomplishing things, this feels like the rise of the midwit, the careerist, the sociopath, the influencer. God help me for defending the University of Chicago, but when we complained about the intro CS course being in Doctor Racket, the response was always "we train computer scientists, not programmers."
I wonder how much of this distinction is style versus substance. This engineer is a forty year old man with a cybertruck, so obviously antithetical to everything I love and hold dear that I didn't even have this thought until my therapist pushed me to articulate exactly why I hate him.
His style plays very well in Silicon Valley. People eat it up on workplace, his manager worships at his feet. The cybertruck: no swag, no smoke, no motion, no hoes. Agency without a goal, without any actual sense of what makes life worth living. This is what a redefines expectations for AI maximalism rewards.
This engineer actually got another Redefines Expectations, two years ago, for raising Facebook's App Store rating. He realized that we did not send app store surveys on iOS. Adding them after positive experiences (posting, receiving engagement), raised it 2 stars in 2 weeks. This is the kind of thing I can get behind, callously you-can-just-do-stuff and programmer-y though it might be. This solves an obvious issue, one that had probably been ignored because of the years of shitty incentives at Meta.
The more I read his posts, the more I find I agree with what he says, or at least find him to be a useful strawman. He believes that we are overly data-driven at Meta, not product focused enough. I agree with the existence of data science brain worms. He believes that seniority is given for stepping up for the team. He has a nose for that most nebulous thing, impact.
Impact is probably where he is most strawman to me. My rating history is very different from his. I am a Meets All merchant in the truest sense, intern through layoff, right up until my first half back. I just got my first non-MA in 3 years at Meta, and it was the rating just one above Meets All.
Impact at Meta has been defined to me a delta, the thing your team would have done without you vs. what they did. That makes it both collaborative and subjective (you have to have some artifact, something to point to, you have to have other people recognize that something as important). Subjectivity can be won on style. Every rating after this engineer I hate's first has been higher than a Meets All. We can quibble about app store ratings as a vanity metric, especially for an app like Facebook, but he could point to that rise and by the time that happened, he was well-positioned for others to recognize his work as important.
My problem is that so much impact at Meta feels zero-sum these days. Before the DS IC on my team was laid off, my manager had suggested that I look into the space her team was working in. One week after I announced my team change, my old manager announced that the last remaining DS IC on the pillar would be taking over my scope, and the scope of another DS who was pushed out of the team. The post got more likes than my team transition post. This is probably the truest sign of an empire in decline. Chips are just being shuffled around, paths are cleared for the fair-haired of the day. This gives people who have a lot of impact a utility-monster-esque quality. Sure, sometimes, you can create value out of thin air. But more often, at Facebook at least, it feels like you just need to collect a lot of chips in front of you, and, this engineer at least, doesn't particularly seem to care where it comes from. Marty Supreme style, everyone else is just collateral damage.
This, like owning a cybertruck, feels antithetical to me. I was not born lucky: I was lucky to be born. I have to hope that that there's still a way for me to find my own way to it.