Year 2 Faceversary Reflection

2-Year Faceversary Reflection

Lately I have been going back and forth between a few sentiments:

1. I’m fortunate to have a job right now, and I can still be productive at this job while working from home - to that I feel incredibly blessed;
2. At the same time, separation between work and life has vanished as the usual physical boundary blurs, and it’s taking a mental toll on me; (3) lack of face-to-face interactions is great when I want to have focus time, but terrible when there’s tension in co-worker relationships/communications, and when everyone was trying to go even faster than normal times.

To that, I wanted to share a few thoughts:

1. I think taking PTO can potentially yield greater benefits than “normal/pre-pandemic” times. We should feel encouraged, and even empowered, to take breaks, especially mental breaks.

2. I’m thinking about my co-workers who are parents to young kids, and am being mindful of their schedules. I’m extremely impressed by all these warriors, yet I’m actively wondering and concerned how many are suffering in silence and trying to juggle many balls by sacrificing their sleep and/or putting extra effort, so their colleagues (me! us!) can be as productive as before. It also seems to go against the company motto, to ask people to slow down, but I think we all should recognize the need when it comes up and do so as best for ourselves.

3. At the end of each day I’m constantly finding delights in my interactions with co-workers and friends who are smart, funny, and keeping up a good spirit in these crazy times. I also friended a few of colleagues on Facebook and I have thoroughly enjoyed their status updates. I wanted to say thank you! dad jokes are cool. family “trivial” updates are cool. sharing memes is cool. Please keep them coming! I also feel so grateful and blessed to have friends and family reaching out and checking in - you inspire me to do the same and pass it on.

4. I find tensions arise in the lack of communications and “moving too fast” - which is clearly a thing, and exacerbated by cabin fever. It’s very challenging for me to have respect for someone if that person does not respect other people’s time, by repeatedly not reading written communications properly or taking effort to be thoughtful, more so in these trying times. I think it happens everywhere, and certainly in the schools and companies that I’ve been that I’ve seen people billed as “good” managers but are actually much less than that.

4.1 I often feel uncomfortable dealing with these situations and generally build up animosity towards such people, which oftentimes expose growth opportunities for me. What I have come to realize is that, (1) what I thought was a big deal usually might not be a big deal at all to others, so just relax and get it out of my mind - perhaps by writing up something like what I’m doing now; (2) “feeling uncomfortable” also comes from some naive notion of justice, in that “if I’m nice to everyone then everyone should be nice to me” - I’m yet to see our world work in this way other than Newton’s 3rd law of motion, so ditching this naive notion is the most helpful way forward; (3) there are right channels and constructive ways to express frustrations, which is usually a sign for room for optimization in the work system you have, and over time I’ve learned some of the ropes (but not all): a person, often in a different function/often a manager, can “cause thrash” by “escalating too often and inappropriately” or “not gathering proper context”, but it’s not constructive to outright say “okay I think A is stupid and lazy because he doesn’t read my posts and asks me to do this brainless shit that’s better left for B”.

4.2 I’ve come to realize that my manager is one of my most precious resources, and I need to use this resource to scale myself and minimize randomization. I’ve also observed that being a good people manager is hard, a great one much harder. But a great one scales her impact exponentially.

4.3 In Ben Horowitz’s “the Hard Things about Hard Things”, he categorized CEOs into peacetime and wartime kinds. I think this taxonomy applies to managers and ICs too, but less binary more on a continuous spectrum. Some folks thrive in a wartime setting, shipping products ultra fast to take a market/beat competitors, with perhaps some tech debt, some regression, while burning some bridges but in the end history is written by the victors. Some other folks might prefer to move less fast but with a solid foundation as in peacetime, with an eye towards diverse opinions, consensus-based decision-making, and fostering a culture of respect and compassion. I think as long as you work(ed) at Facebook for a day, you know which camp Facebook falls into.

In the end, as I celebrate the end of my 2nd year at Facebook, I’m feeling incredibly proud, humble, and happy that it is still keeping me engaged, challenged, providing me and my family with a stable source of income and benefits, and still making me feel that I can do my part to bring changes to the company however small, and to bring joy to the world however infinitesimal.

Is Facebook the perfect workplace? Far from it. Is my job the best in the world? Last I heard that title belongs to someone “house sit” near the Great Barrier Reef. But boy do I want to get in to work and fix ‘em damn SEVs and ship some epic shit while working with the best software engineers and data scientists and designers and researchers and product managers in the world? Sign me up. All day.

Year 3, let’s get it.