[geekster777]

I work at FB right now, and one of the more stressful things are the timelines for promotion. I think you have a year and a half to go from New Grad to E4, then 2 and a half years to go from E4 to E5. If you fall behind on those timelines, your performance reviews just start getting measured against E#+1 until you either get promoted or more likely fail. A lot of pressure is placed in those early levels to get promoted quickly and efficiently, with not a lot of opportunity to coast. As someone who's very ok with the compensation and responsibilities at E4, I don't really want to get promoted and it's exhausting. It means that "meeting expectations" isn't enough. I need to be exceeding expectations so I can prove I'm working at the next level. This often involves seeking out ambiguity for ambiguity's sake and making projects unnecessarily formal.

The other main "issue" is how incentives are structured, although this one seems to be working as intended. By focusing so heavily on personal performance and impact, Facebook can pretty reliably delegate project planning to their engineers in a bottom up fashion. Engineers will then adjust to ruthlessly prioritize only the most impactful work on the team. Velocity also gets highly prioritized. You don't have to assign many tasks, since engineers are afraid of the mythical "poor performance review". This leads many teams to feel chronically understaffed, and bad for choosing impact over polish on many projects. The flip side is that if your team is overstaffed, it's a struggle to find enough meaningful work to get more than a meets expectations (which may be too low depending on what level you are).