The first three years I spend at Meta were great, but the culture at Meta has gone downhill tremendously the past two years, and especially the past year. Stress is high and work life balance is not great for most engineers. The company has gotten more intense, and it uses twice a year performance reviews, with performance-based layoffs, to incentivize employees.
Coupled with this intensity, engineers are expected to create their own scope, even in work areas with too many engineers or not great impact. Managers and leaders will say "there's plenty of scope here" without digging into the details, and engineers are held accountable if a project doesn't meet the bar for "impact" during performance reviews. As a result of this, engineers are competing with each other for the best projects. Such a heavy focus on metrics that people will try to distort data to make things look better than they are. Engineers are pressured to create aggressive and risky goals. There is a huge emphasis on making Workplace posts to sell your work to others.
I've also noticed a pattern of overhiring recently. Some teams are growing even though there is not enough high impact work. This happened in 2022 before they did the first round of layoffs, and I see it happening now. This allows managers and engineers to grow (more people means more mentoring) but it does not accomplish more impact, and it puts teams at risk for layoffs (which are normal now).
