Readit NewsBackslasher commented on Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? · Posted by u/pizzafeelsright
How did you go about find a "fixer-upper" company?
I bumped into them when looking arouns. During the interviews you could tell the CTO had a huge backlog of juicy items that had a healthy mix of "things I have a clear idea of how to deliver" and "areas I'd like to learn". The fact that the people seemed very nice and the company was actually doing good to the world sealed the deal for me.
Backslasher commented on Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? · Posted by u/pizzafeelsright
I'll work with whichever team most sounds like you don't want to commit. It takes at least a year to gather enough details about use-cases, issues, expansion opportunities. If the company really needs you to move they will ask you. You sound non-committal.
Also, not sure where in FAANG you had such wide scope. At FAANG either teams are mostly organized by business. For e.g. engineers working on Photos at Facebook, can't suddenly decide they want to work on implementing a feature for container orchestration at Facebook works.
I appreciate your feedback. I don't think I'm non-committal, more like afraid of being boxed into a too-small domain.
The last sentence is factually incorrect. During my time at FB I contributed code to the container solution, the Jenkins-equivalent, the network routing layer, the bare-metal-provisioner, the monitoring solution and even wrote a feature for the website. I identified a problem, parlayed with the owning team, and shipped that feature. This was the best part IMO about working at FB.
Backslasher commented on Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? · Posted by u/pizzafeelsright
If you appreciate wearing a lot of hats and roving around to create real value, it might be worthwhile to look into going independant!
I'm ex faang and have managed to carve out a comfortable independant consultancy where I can kind of join needful organizations as a roving 'fix-it-up' engineer at large, answering to the directors who (hopefully) only care about things working better.
It's gratifying to swoop in and fix real problems for teams, and also get a view on cross team efficiency opportunities that most siloed org-structures don't have good visibility or agency to tackle.
I tried doing that, but couldn't land a starting gig with reasonable pay. To my impression, the market is flooded with cheap-to-hire people and I couldn't make my quality stand out enough to get interesting clients. If you have any tips I'd be happy to read them either here or at cv AT backslasher.net
EDIT saw your reply. That's a great experience! I tried that but the timing / friends / luck didn't pan out there. I'm happy you got it working though :)
Backslasher commented on Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? · Posted by u/pizzafeelsright
> I'm doing meaningful work and making the world better, which was missing from the last couple of months at FB.
Does it mean you felt you were making the work a better place during the earlier couple of years at FB?
Most definitely. Most of my time in FB was spent at the very least making FB a better company. I was solving problems that impacted our users or our engineers. The last year though, not so much. I joined a team that I believed was doing revolutionary work, but as the company's leadership redefined what its goals, the team became vegetative and I was spending most of my time trying to find something meaningful to do.
By comparison, everything I do now improving the company I work at, and at most times has a direct, positive impact on our users and in a smaller way on society
Backslasher commented on Ask HN: Meta/FB layoffs a year later – where are you now? · Posted by u/pizzafeelsright
While interviewing post-FB to other companies as an SRE-type-engineer, it seemed to me that outside of FANN it's not common to give engineers a very wide scope. One company asked me whether I'd like to join the monitoring team or the container team, to which I replied "why can't I work in whatever team needs me the most, and switch whenever needed?". They didn't like that.
After trying and failing to find a part-time position I like (can expand on it if interesting), I ended up joining as an architect to a "fixer-upper" company, where I have a lot of things I can improve and wide scope. The money isn't up to par with FB, but I feel I'm doing meaningful work and making the world better, which was missing from the last couple of months at FB.