[smaili]

It's quite the lengthy article but the crux of what they believe led to his suicide is here:

Relevant sources unveiled that before Mr. Chen’s last PSC, he had already been under pressure from the advertising department, so he expected to shift to other groups to maintain his job in Facebook and the opportunity to work in the United States.

According to informed sources told PingWest that, Mr. Chen’s group had undergone organizational restructuring, during which the group’s original manager hopped to another group. A new manager was hired to lead Mr. Chen’s group, but the manager soon realized that many of his ICs were already transferring groups, resulting in a sharply-increased workload per capita within the group.

Mr. Chen, who was already in high pressure, submitted his transfer request as well, and was pre-approved by another group, meaning that all that’s left is to have his own manager sign off on the transfer.

The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the "Meets Most" rating, which factually voided Mr. Chen's transfer request because the other group is very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Chen, who had been on the verge of collapse, was mentally pushed off the edge by a Facebook robot, according to people familiar with the matter as well as other employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace social networking app.

Two weeks before the tragedy, the Facebook advertising system experienced a Severe Site Event (SEV), which is essentially a server crash. A SEV management bot created a task for the SEV to be resolved and assigned the task to Mr. Chen, requiring him to fix the bug and submit the SEV report before the deadline, which is roughly one hour after the time of his death.

Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change and maintained the deadline to be met in 12 days.

It sounds like the already existing pressure in Ads + reorg + new manager blocking his transfer request + SEV caused him to just give in. Given Zuckerberg's public push on transparency, openness, and wanting to connect the world, I'm honestly quite surprised and disappointed at how secretive they've been on this tragedy.

[munchbunny]

The new manager reportedly gave Mr. Chen verbal approval and told him to stay on the team until the PSC, but eventually gave him the "Meets Most" rating, which factually voided Mr. Chen's transfer request because the other group is very unlikely to accommodate a new IC who just received the worst possible rating, according to Facebook internal sources close to Mr. Chen.

I've heard this pattern (manager drops performance rating to block transfer) more times than I can count on two hands. I've heard this several times within two steps of my professional network. This story shows up regularly in the gender discrimination story piles.

At this point, it should be standard practice that sudden drops in performance ratings coming after team transfer attempts should trigger raised eyebrows.

[catalogia]

Something to consider: there might be a legitimate drop in performance from somebody who intends to leave a team because they are no longer satisfied with it. In those circumstances, permitting the transfer could quite possibly improve the performance of the worker since the worker is once again working on something they care about.

[michannne]

Man, I can't imagine working in such an environment. It feels so detached to normal human interaction.

Couple questions as I don't (and largely have no intention to) work in Silicon Valley:

- Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the employee to switch teams?

- > Mr. Chen tried to push the deadline to be delayed but another bot monitoring the SEV rejected the change

Maybe someone who works at FB can clear this up but how does this work? A bot opens a ticket, dev attempts to change a dropdown field and another bot decides whether to revert or not? Or is there a human involved, and do they have override powers?

[bcyn]

> Shouldn't the bar for transfers be roughly the same as the bar for initial employment? As in, give the candidates a similar interview process as if they were coming outside of the company into that team? Why would a transfer be based on the current manager, who is already disincentivized to allow the employee to switch teams?

1. This allows internal transfers to avoid reinterviewing. I think many would agree that going through the same interview process is not productive, especially with the types of interview questions asked at FB (predominantly Leetcode style). This reflects FB's standard hiring process for engineers, where engineers are hired into a "general" pipeline and not to a specific team, with the implication that once they pass FB's interview, they are qualified to work on basically any team. The performance requirements are there so that engineers cannot just change teams every time they perform poorly.

2. I think the incentives are intended such that the very worst case for a manager is being forced to fire an employee for poor performance -- it means the manager was unable to help the employee improve their performance. Having them transfer within the company reflects much better on the manager. In practice, this may not be true in all situations.

In the general / common case, this system is great for engineers in terms of internal mobility.

[Lammy]

FB uses a Tasks tool. A task can have an owner, subscribers, tags, blocker/dependent relationship to other tasks, can be associated with one or more code diffs, etc. Bots have internal accounts in the same way human employees do, and for the most part any human or bot can make a drive-by change to any of your tasks.