Navigating at Meta: Incentive-induced rivalry culture
Hey everyone,
I'm new to Meta, and while I’ve enjoyed the onboarding experience and the sheer scale of the work here, I’ve found myself navigating through this incentive-induced rivalry culture.
On one hand, the competitive atmosphere can be motivating, but I also sense it might lead to employees chasing artificial metrics or competing for scope in ways that don’t always align with the bigger picture. Everyone talks about this, and I’ve caught myself wondering if I’m slipping into this mindset and whether it’s making me feel jaded.
There had been a few instance where a coworker would ship something that is half working, claim impact and then move off to a different thing, where I am left to fix and get it actually working.
Have any of you felt this way before? It feels less like I'm playing regular chess and more like I'm trying to navigate 5D chess—or maybe even alien chess! If so, how did you approach it without losing sight of the impact you truly want to make?
Looking for some candid advice or strategies to stay grounded and authentic while thriving in this environment!
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 218 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
In cases like this, I feel prevention is the best cure. You mention:
a coworker would ship something that is half working, claim impact
How come it's so easy for them to claim impact when their project is clearly buggy or broken? Could you help to define cleaner criteria for what it means to "ship" a project?
Ideally, this is something very simple with a binary outcome, like:
- Getting leadership approval to ship an experiment to 100%
- Some metric moved by a certain percent
- A suite of unit tests or integration tests passing
- A proof-of-concept video or demo (although this can be easy to fudge)
- 0
18 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroThis is a good idea (ideally a team should have clear success criteria, we had experiment evaluation guidelines back at Instagram), but formalizing this is tricky for a new E4. Regardless, OP should definitely talk to the EM/TL and figure this out. Going further is to deliver feedback if they feel like the criteria is too lax and allows lazy engineers to deliver stuff that ultimately hurts the end-user.
If the entire team legitimately has super loose guidelines though, there's 2 options, neither of which are the smoothest:
- Also cut corners (lol) - If the game is exploitable, might as well exploit it
- Go to a better team - Yay, high road. But also harder to do...
- 118 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Hey, you need to talk to your manager ASAP.
Right now, they are reaping all of the benefit while you are reaping all of the downsides. This is 100% not cool. You should tell your manager about this in your next 1 on 1, and hopefully they will deliver the feedback to this (these?) coworker(s).
The critical thing here is to make sure you aren't sounding accusatory; otherwise you will come across as the cutthroat person gaming the system:
- Bad: "[Teammate] shipped this feature, but it's super broken, leaving me to pick up the pieces. They should do better."
- Good: "[Teammate] shipped this feature, but I couldn't help but notice that it had a 25% regression in Brazil. Is that okay or is that something we should account for? As a heads up, I was able to track down that regression (localization issue) and fix it."
In the bad scenario, you are pointing fingers and coming across as someone focused on throwing others under the bus.
In the good scenario, it's almost like you are approaching it with a gentle curiosity. As a bonus, you casually mention that you played a silent hero role to fix it, in the spirit of the team.
Attach as much proof as possible. No matter how you approach it, you want to construct a clear case. Meta is all about attaching data and evidence.
- 118 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Unfortunately, I have seen this kind of behavior at Meta and heard about it from many other Taro members there. This has only gotten worse since the "year of efficiency". Everyone is a lot more high-strung right now as the performance review bar is higher and way more people are getting managed out (PIP, fired directly).
There are still healthy teams though at Meta, and I recommend not sinking down to the level of others who are using more unethical tactics. I still genuinely believe that you can succeed in your career with integrity and quality (many Taro Meta engineers are doing this and getting promoted super fast still) - I have championed that mindset my entire career, and things have gone pretty well. Be empathetic and diplomatic when trying to fix things. If a team is truly toxic, leave.
Here's another good thread about a similar topic: "How do you deal with zero-sum situations where one's success comes at the expense of another?"
