Perspectives

It’s been three Februaries since I started working at Facebook, and I feel like every time around this time of the year, work always accelerates to an almost unsustainable pace and becomes the new normal, never slowing down. The first year, it was releasing our next generation haystack to important AI customers. The next, a bunch of data loss sevs and reports kept me incredibly busy. This year, I get put on a high priority org level project because another senior person left.

I guess it should be accelerating at this time, since this is also around the same time I get promoted to the next level. Looking back, I still find it kind of incredible that I am now supposed to be a senior engineer with less than three years of work experience coming out of university. Coupled with stock appreciation, my salary has more than tripled from where I started, and I’m expected to operate at the same level as people that have been working in the industry for decades…

From a technical perspective, I feel like compared to other seniors in the org I have enough information and domain expertise, given that two and a half years of tenure on our current team is considered pretty long. But being a senior engineer is a lot more than just remembering peculiarities of our system, resolving complex oncall issues, and finding code pointers to prove your point. It’s a lot about firmly communicating long deadlines to demanding management, defending your technical decisions and designs, and influencing others to do what you think is correct.

And honestly I am pretty bad at that type of stuff. I dread meetings with people more senior than myself, my manager tells me I should hold on to my own beliefs more firmly, and am always reluctant to speak up in large meetings. I feel like these ‘social’ aspects of my job come harder to me than coding or technical expertise, and is one of the reasons I feel a bit uneasy about how my next performance cycle would go.

There’s this new caucasian new grad production engineer that joined our team in the previous few months, and I swear, white people are built different when it comes to this kind of stuff. He’s never afraid to ask questions (and they’re good ones too), and always sound so sure of himself when he does so. He never hesitates to offer his perspective on whatever we’re talking about, whether it’s about the design of our system, or about whether wasabi and horseradish are part of the same family during our lunch conversations.

From what I observed, I think his self-assured attitude actually comes from the way he treats other people. We have a lot of diverse people on our team from a variety of backgrounds, and this coworker gets along with everyone on the team and it’s pretty clear to me from the way he behaves around everyone that he never really sees or judges anyone’s differences. For example I thought he would have a hard time getting along with one of our chinese coworkers who speaks not very good English, but it didn’t seem to affect him at all, and he always asks the chinese guy for help when he needs it. Because he’s never amused by other people’s shortcomings or feels any prejudice towards other people for any reason, he has no reason to think other people will feel the same towards him for his actions, and as a result is able to operate without fear, because for him there’s literally nothing to fear.

Unfortunately, I feel like I am a pretty judgemental person - I judge my coworker’s broken english (I still think he’s a good engineer, but his bad english is something that I can’t help but notice), I judge how much work people do, I judge what people contibute to meetings, and as a result I’m afraid of what other people judge me for. If I can learn to be less judgemental and see less of other people’s shortcomings, I’m sure I would be a more outgoing and confident person as well. For example, when I go out with people I haven’t met before, I would hold some parts of myself back for fear of judgement, but honestly, there’s no reason to hold back the things I do, and as a result it leads to a less interesting conversation because I’m always filtering myself to a more plain version. Of course there are certain things that should not be said, but general second-guessing all my perspectives before offering them isn’t a sustainable way to operate.

Switching gears, I feel like me and grace are in between two worlds to some extent. Compared to our coworkers, we are at the very early stages of our career and wealth-building - my coworker makes fun of how insignificant and how bad of a deal I got on our small townhouse. Our coworker’s wealth and lifestyle seem so unattainable from our vantage point - they came from places where the tech stocks they’ve received 10xd and then some, resulting in a solid financial freedom that we can only dream of - who knows if ai is going to take our jobs in five years.

On the other hand, when we catch up with our high school friends who are not in tech, they’re still deciding whether they want to continue living at home, and move out and tank the rent. Some of them have side hustles so they can earn some extra income, and need to decide which trips they want to go to within a year. Talking with them makes me really appreciate the immense amount of privilege I have to be working in a tech job - it is definitely a tiring job (sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, finding myself dreaming about doing work and debugging), but it also definitely has one of the highest money to effort ratios in terms of careers. Even if you were a high school teacher and wanted to earn extra money, maybe you can put in two times the effort and work two teacher jobs at once, it still wouldn’t come close to a tech salary.

Something unique to the tech career that other industries lack is the incredible amount of reach a small group of people can have on the entire world. Just look at Instagram, it’s an app that started with a few engineers, and became a global phenonemon that everyone uses. At the ski lodge, on the sky train, at a restaurant, it’d be almost impossible not for at least one person to be using our social media app anywhere you go. Instagram doesn’t have a big presence in the world because it has a big team of people behind it like it does right now, it has a big team of people behind it because it has a big presence everywhere, and the revenue it brings it can afford a big team of people. Tech salaries are high because of its incredible scale and scope.

Driving around the Palo Alto suburbs lined with 3M shabby-looking rancher houses during my offsite, the place feels almost like a drain, where the world’s wealth is being sucked and condensed into this one central location called Sillicon Valley. People here design chips, build hardware and software products that are used by the majority of the worlds population, in the process siphoning their wealth and concentrating it within the people working at these companies. On one hand, I’m absolutely grateful to Mark Z for refusing to conspire with the other big tech companies to artificially limit the tech workers’ salary and keeping more for himself, but on the other it feels kind of uncomfortable how the world’s wealth can be so unequally concentrated.