Pros
The opportunity that Facebook offers for autonomy and career growth is incredible; coming in as a new grad PE I have the opportunity to grow based on merit and performance, not time in the role. Flexibility in when I work, how I prioritize my projects, and the scope of my work is invigorating and makes me excited to come to work each day. The company is mission-driven to a great extent, and I have been impressed with the way we have owned up to prior mistakes and fixed them head on. The Production Engineering role is well respected within the company, and the importance of reliability and scaling increases as our services reach more of the world. As a PE you will gain the knowledge necessary to build and operate real hyperscale systems capable of providing services to billions of people. My team is comprised of some of the smartest, experienced engineers I have ever met - some of which have been building Linux services since 0.01. Even though sometimes working at Facebook feels like drinking from the proverbial fire hose, I am grateful I have the opportunity to learn from some of the top people in their field. For example, in bootcamp I took a command-line efficiency class from Jim Meyering, one of the maintainers of coreutils and also a Facebook employee. Many other people have commented on this, but the perks and compensation are still top-notch. The company helps take care of your life so you can focus on work while you're working.
Cons
Facebook hires the kind of people that expect a lot from themselves. Despite some reports, you do not need to work long hours in order to succeed at Facebook. Bootcamp gives you the chance to find a team that matches you well, and new hires should come in intending to join a team where they can both find balance and grow in their career. The company is growing and there is some sentiment around slowing down, but most engineering teams are still bottom-up driven and innovating in their space. The things we are doing around privacy and AR/VR are on the bleeding edge and we are strong leaders in these areas. On the other hand, ironically, there is also sentiment around moving too fast as a company. Since we are people- and product-focused (as opposed to engineering-focused, like at Google), our primary goal is to impact the lives of people for good. Sometimes this means we opt for rapid prototyping over beautifully designed code. However, we are doing much better at recognizing better engineering work such as cleaning up code and improving monitoring, especially in the PE role.
