Driverless World

Friday was my last day at Meta. I worked there for a total of 1 year and 7 months.

Why talk about a job working for someone else? On the path to entrepreneurship, many people continue working jobs. The eBay founder Pierre Omidyar continued working his day job and building eBay on nights and weekends until the site had over $7 million of goods sold.

Job changes, the reasons for them, and when to keep a job versus quit are all part of the entrepreneurial journey. The more I work at different places, the more confidence I have going full-time on something else. It validates that I have skills that companies value if and when I want to rejoin the workforce.

Expectations joining Meta

I joined Meta from Microsoft, the familiar place I’d worked over five years, and I was incredibly excited.

I felt sheltered at Microsoft. I knew how to do things the Microsoft way, but no other. Meta (née Facebook) was a thought leader in tech. They were known for being data driven. I’d heard they were more open but didn’t know what else to expect.

My title was going to be “Product Technical Program Manager”, but I gathered I’d have similar responsibilities to my Microsoft Product/Program manager role.

Right away, the culture was way different than what I’d seen before

The culture was way more open. They use their Workplace app for internal communications, which is basically Facebook and Messenger.

Some tactical things I noticed right away:

• Emails were uncommon. Workplace posts were the main way to communicate changes and updates (much better!).
• I could find out information about almost any product by joining their Workplace group (ex. FB dating).
• There is a fantastic set of internal tools for doing everything. I will sincerely miss some of them.

As I ramped up and learned more, I observed more meaningful cultural factoids:

• There is a lot of emphasis put on topline (or north star) metric definition. I learned a lot about setting goals against metrics.
• ICs are encouraged to speak to metric improvements as a result of their contributions (i.e. ‘impact’). Choosing the right metric is important, it can become the team’s main focus.
• Engineering managers and high level engineer ICs who focus on team health and technical architecture, but don’t typically write code. This seems common in the industry, but wasn’t how things worked on my team at Microsoft.
• Zuck does a weekly Q&A, which is actually pretty cool. At a company this large I would have expected something less frequent but he’s kept it going from earlier days. I always felt I understood major company priorities and focus areas. He doesn’t shy away from hard questions.

I learned how to be more data driven and collaborative

My time at Meta was enjoyable and I’m glad I took the opportunity. I got exactly what I wanted out of working there.

I learned to be more data driven because it was so ingrained in the culture. I also learned the downsides of being data driven. It can be hard to justify UX improvements or take action based on user research if it cannot easily be tied to a metric.

The performance review and metric focus generally rewards individual impact. Especially for software engineers, it means many of them will look to have incremental metric increases on their review. This can encourage short term wins, or ‘metric hacking’, and discourage long term efforts that don’t realize immediate impact. This isn’t always the case, I had seen cases where good managers were able to work around this for impactful work that didn’t yet move metrics.

I learned how to be a clearer writer and presenter. There was much more focus on this on my team at Meta than in my prior experience. I got an incredible amount of feedback on everything I wrote, which was hard at first, but I learned how to manage contradicting feedback and go with the direction I most believed in.

I learned how to be more collaborative. At Meta, it’s common to include the whole team in every step of road mapping, for example. This is great, because it encourages having a roadmap that everyone is bought off on and understands, but the downside is that it takes large amounts of everyone’s time.

…and then there were the layoffs

I’m leaving just one week after the layoffs of 11,000 people. It’s a tough time for the company. Several people I worked closely with were let go, and even more in my extended network. The layoffs were broad reaching and demoralizing.

Looking back to when I joined, I remember being surprised at the extreme rate of hiring. After being there for a year and a few months, I’d been there longer than ~50% of the company. This couldn’t last forever.

Leaving Meta, onwards to Amazon

My experience was positive. Why leave? While I liked my team and thought we were set up for success, I felt I needed a role change. A big part of my career goals involve being a Product Manager. While my job at Meta involved Product Manager responsibilities because there were none in my org, that was uncommon elsewhere in the company and even more so in the industry.

I accepted a Product Manager role with Amazon under the Amazon Music organization.

With layoffs occurring all over tech right now, it’s a risky time to move. The risk is worth it because I feel like I’m traveling on the right road, even if there are bumps along the way.

I thank my team and Meta for having me. I’m looking forward to the next chapter.