FacOps - The perks and local coworkers are great, the rest is insanity.
Pros
Salary/Stock/Insurance Flexible time at work allows for great work/life balance Local team members tend to be level-headed and great to work with Free meals when working within the data center If applying for Meta, you will likely have a bedazzling first week, Orientation is fun and you'll likely walk away w/ lots of optimism for the future and your role in it. Data centers are very clean, and sure beat working in a traditional factory/mill setting when doing PMs/corrective work.
Cons
Leadership is a joke. I've been through ~4 layoff periods within 3 years, two of which involved re-orgs. I've had 5 different team leads during this time, all w/ varying expectations and management styles. Give us another 8-16 months, and I'm sure we'll hear the next wild update to roles/responsibilities. Maybe we'll get new job titles with fun acronyms? Exciting! On that note, I've experienced better job stability working as a drive through attendant at a fast food joint than working here. Tasks that are straightforward outside of Meta are overly complex processes that are usually broken within the organization. The vast amount of red tape to navigate in order to perform simple tasks is overwhelming and stress-inducing. Including, but not limited to: drawing revisions, ordering parts, work management w/ EAM Hexagon, using a USB connection to connect to nearly any device, persuading leadership to trust your recommendation on a technical matter as a subject matter expert, etc Meta loves to tell FTEs that we need to move fast and break stuff, this does not apply at all if you want to join FacOps. For example, a recent job to replace a simple component took ~30 hours of admin time from 5 people and ~1.5 hours to actually isolate, replace, and restore the unit. If I had logged these hours w/ a previous employer, I would have gotten reprimanded if not fired, however work like this is often seen as a success from management when all administrative tasks are done per standards. Keeping servers online is akin to working at a nuclear power plant. With the strong Navy/Nuke influence, everything is documented, tasks take 10x longer than they should anywhere else, and you will rewrite a procedure multiple times until you use choose a verb that people like. Thankfully, radiation isn't a concern here, but you will likely have all passion and joy sucked from your life to comply w/ the bureaucratic madness that makes leadership receive a warm/fuzzy feeling regarding their job security. Due to that, you too will need to learn how to play bureaucratic and political games to ensure you stay employed. Two recent laid off coworkers were renowned within the company for saving us millions of dollars due to their skill set, drive, and ownership of maintenance/corrective tasks no one else was willing to take on. However, they struggled with adhering to the vast amount of unnecessary work management standards and excessive additional job responsibilities tossed on them from the re-orgs. The ones who stay the longest don't tend to do the best work for the company, but lie low and do the bare minimum expected from them while pushing accountability onto others. This isn't true for all, there are some truly great long tenured folk that have stuck around, but they seem to be the minority.
