Taro Experts

Alex's advice is spot on. Being proactive/working well with others is a good defense in itself. There are ways to be proactive about your fate without playing full-on offense, such as covering all your bases like Alex mentioned

You're definitely not alone in disliking this manager person. And you're not the crazy one (in case anyone tries to gaslight you)

Congratulations on your offer! I agree with Rahul's assessment. While every organization has its strengths and limitations, here's my perspective on working in Ads at Meta:

The workload in Ads tends to be substantial, with most people working 60+ hours weekly, though some smaller teams may have lighter schedules. However, this intensity comes with notable benefits: you'll work alongside exceptional colleagues, and promotion opportunities are more plentiful (up to E7). During the 2022 major layoffs we lost only one person out of 30, which was significantly lower than other orgs, making Ads a relatively stable place to work.

As an E4, your primary focus should be advancing to E5, since Meta is up-or-out system at that level. Keep in mind that pursuing promotion typically requires more effort than maintaining your current level. 80 hours for a few months is expected.

One bonus piece of advice regarding PSC (Meta's evaluation process): while it's important for you to understand how it works, it's even more critical that your manager does.

Based on my experience, I would strongly recommend against joining any team where the manager has less than 12 months of tenure at Meta. Even with the best intentions, newer managers simply lack the deep understanding of PSC's nuances that comes with time at the company.

Yes, don't limit your self to planned work! For every SW team, there is a constant effort in operational work, tech dept, and unplanned migrations.

Book a constant percent of your time, look around, there will be a lot of areas for optimizations, new ideas, and great POCs, just keep mining for impactful changes, look for cost optimizations, operational enhancements, or new unfunded ideas that you think will have great impact.

Don't spend too much time on that though, if it succeeds, you will be having all the credit, but if it goes bad, you will be asked for that time.

I used to work for the Ads team at Meta and I moved to the infra org 6 months ago. Everything that was said above is true. Your expectations are higher in Ads vs other teams. The bar is high and people tend to overwork in Ads because of the pressure of psc and also it's intense because of the revenue generation. Some of the oncalls are pretty stressful because again you need to stop the $$ bleed. Having said that. I have seen people getting promoted faster in Ads, it's easy to show impact ( $$) If you like working in a high pressure environment and like to grow faster.. then take it. ( Also remember you need to get to E5 in 33 months at Meta ). I now work for an infra team and it's much relaxed here but again the growth is slow. DM me if you want to chat more

There's a third option -- unicorns/pre-IPO (minimum series D, preferably E/F+) companies that I think provides a nice middle ground