What changed?

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had been at my corporate job with Facebook/Meta for over 6 years. It wasn't an overnight change that led me to re-examine my life and make the decision to quit. Instead, it was a gradual evolution—both within the company and myself— that took me in that direction. Today I'd like to look into those.

When I joined Facebook, there were about 800 people in the London site. While that's already massive when compared to many companies, it still felt manageable to me. By the time I left, the Meta London site had grown to around 5,000 employees. While the numbers are not exact, they give a sense of the fast-paced growth that happened during my time there. This growth rate is not uncommon for other Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon or Netflix. Additionally, a lot of this growth happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. What made the situation impactful for me was the return to the office post-pandemic. The landscape had changed so dramatically that I no longer recognized any familiar faces. Everyone seemed like a stranger. This might not be too important for those who prefer to work from home or those who maintain a level of detachment from their coworkers. But for me, this change created a sense of distance and made me feel like I didn't belong there.

As you can imagine, the nature of the work underwent significant changes along with the company's growth. We transitioned from the "Move Fast And Break Things" culture—which gave Facebook a startup-like atmosphere—to a far more bureaucratic, slow-paced environment filled with processes. These changes made sense though. The company faced numerous challenges following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, European privacy regulations and other things, so adopting a more careful approach was a necessary adjustment. However, this meant I now had to spend a significant part of my time working on tasks that I found draining such as filling out legal forms and attending privacy reviews. I had never trained to do this kind of thing, nor did I want to or find it interesting. So why was I spending my time on that? It didn't make sense. It felt like a waste. Surely, I thought, I could be spending my time more wisely.

In addition to the bureaucratic shifts driven by company growth, there were other repercussions—particularly due to the layoffs that occurred between 2022 and 2023. As the company expanded, the competition for top positions intensified. It's naturally easier to become a VP in a company with 20 people than in one with 80,000. Coupled with layoffs that affected a staggering 25% of Meta's workforce, employees became scared of losing their jobs. This led to increased competition among employees, but not always in the healthiest of ways. By the end of my time at Meta, it was all too common to see senior employees fighting for ownership of projects. This often resulted in duplicated efforts across different orgs and, in some cases, led to colleagues backstabbing each other for personal gain. While I didn't witness this behaviour in my immediate team, it was hard to ignore that this had become a widespread issue throughout the company. This experience made me question whether the organization was setting the right incentives for its employees.

Amidst this environment, I had no motivation to move up the corporate ladder. Seeing the dynamics around me, I realized I'd be trading too much of my time for a bigger paycheck at the end of the month. But I believed my time was worth more than that. Consequently, the nature of my role as a Senior Engineer—which hadn't evolved much over the last four years—felt stagnant. Although I was learning valuable skills like navigating a large organization, understanding company politics, and building relationships, I wasn't solving problems that truly ignited my passion. I wasn't growing in areas that piqued my curiosity like technology, philosophy, human behavior, culture, and fitness, among others. This disconnect had likely been there for a while, but given the macro changes happening around me, it became impossible to ignore.

So, I started paying attention to my growing doubts and discomfort. My motivation at work plummeted, leading me to realize that staying on was doing both me and the company a disservice. At the time I thought maybe I was burned out, but didn't look too much into that. Later, however, talking to friends and reading similar recounts over the internet, I realized that was probably the case. Burnout is not necessarily the result of working 16-hour days during a very long period of time. Burnout can also happen when there is a big disconnect between what you value or want to do and the environment in which you are. Looking at it from this angle, now, it's clear there was a huge disconnect which probably burned me out. I felt like a fish out of the water, staying in that environment as a means to continue surviving.

In summary, my journey at Meta had given me much to be grateful for—from invaluable experience to lifelong friendships. But the changes within the company and within myself signalled that our paths had diverged. As much as I had been a good fit for Meta in the earlier stages of my career, the transformations in the workplace and my evolving interests and values were clear indicators that it was time to seek a different course. My departure, then, wasn't just about leaving a job; it was about pursuing a more authentic version of myself and the life I want to live.