[zug_zug]

So I did my whole career at startups mostly, and then joined Meta last year, and left already.

I found Meta wildly more work than startups (just one datapoint). I feel in the industry at large when we say 40 hour weeks we mean "35-40 hours in front of the computer per week, average, with 90 minutes minimum of distraction per day." My experience at meta was like straight 40-hours and I was still always feeling like I was behind.

Also at non-faang the idea that you'd hide broken things from coworkers so you could do all the work yourself would make people laugh out loud.

Then the whole Performance cycle and "4 axes" of performance is really a non-issue at startups. At a startup you just excel for a few months, and then basically the whole company knows you're awesome and you're rarely met with skepticism from then on (which is good). I feel like getting a good review at non-meta is a non-issue mostly for someone in your situation.

The hard work didn't drive me nuts, but the fact that I felt like people weren't building the right things did. The idea of working that hard toward a hacky system made my soul bleed.

[deanmoriarty]

> Also at non-faang the idea that you'd hide broken things from coworkers so you could do all the work yourself would make people laugh out loud.

This is so incredibly true, having been at both a FAANG and not. It’s insane (as I also described in my comment sibling to yours).

[allisdust]

I'm curious how there is so much work to do. Is it specific to a product?

[duckduckmoose]

The surest path to promotion is to build something new. Maintaining and scaling existing systems to fit our needs is meager in comparison. The result is abandonware which are kept on life support until they cause enough fires to justify spinning up a team to revamp them. Rinse and repeat.