Meta reviews

It's still a big company. With that comes some of the big company downsides. Being smart politically can advance your career. If you keep your head down and just do a good job it's less likely to be noticed. For example, I see good engineers not going anywhere with their career even though they do good work, while I see average ones advance up the ranks if they make it a point to post in FYI for every feature they create. You also have less of a chance to make an impact as a new hire since you're more likely to work on existing features rather than new ones. If you joined about a year ago, your stock grant was over valued (by about 2x), so you're making a lot less than if you go to another company. None of the cons are unexpected at a large company. If you're looking to work for a larger, post IPO company, then you're not going to do better anywhere else.

- Many (though not all) engineers tend to work lots of hours, mostly because they just enjoy what they're doing. If this isn't necessarily your lifestyle, you may feel like you're not "keeping up". This is really all in the eye of the beholder, though, as there are many engineers who are very effective and productive and use that to work more limited hours so that they can enjoy family/non-work activities. - Most teams have rotating on-call rotations, wherein the engineer must be available to be paged 24h a day (typically for a period of a week) to respond to issues with their product or service. This is more of a burden for some teams than others (e.g. a core piece of infrastructure vs. a little-used feature). This isn't particularly fun. - Rapid pace of product change means it can be a challenging place to be in infrastructure. This isn't necessarily bad, but it does require a flexibility in planning and mindset, particularly if you come from a company where software releases are measured in months-years.