It was a life goal of mine to break into FAANG. For years I didn’t think I could make it, and then for years I started to try - finally breaking into Meta as a Software Engineer.
My first 4 or 5 months were great. Low stress, meaningful work, and my technical skills matched or exceeded expectations. I loved the free food, the free transit, the dental services, the people, everything. With a corporate policy mandating working from office 3 days a week, I joyfully came in all 5.
But things changed. I found myself on a new team, all with the same perks… But less meaningful work. It’s hard to explain what lack of work and lack of interesting work does to your motivation.
- There’s less work to go around, so you have a looming feeling that you should be “doing something”, but you don’t know what
- You spend time justifying your work to higher-ups, even though you don’t believe in the work yourself
- Meetings become politics, and you start counting the days until the weekend
The months I worked on interesting projects were amazing - I felt like I could stay at Meta forever. Climb the ladder, and be somewhere. Yet less than 45 days on this team - and I can’t believe it’s only been 45 - makes time feel so wasteful. 진짜 아깝다.
During an honest chat with a great teammate, he said I was “unlucky” for how I got team transferred and will get a subpar rating despite being a “Great engineer”. I don’t think I’m unlucky. In fact, I’m very lucky to still be working at FAANG making bank. People who never got a job after college are unlucky.
But still, I want to go back. I reminisce about returning to Korea every day. If I spend 6, 7 years here - When will I get married? When will I start a family or my own business? When will I go back to Korea and have fun? These thoughts become so much more intrusive when the days go by so slow.
It’s kind of funny. 8 months ago I wrote about how great my job is. In that post, I wrote a line near the end:
I don’t regret anything, and I will come back and touch grass
It seems like I may go back and touch grass sooner than I expected.
(Post blog note: I’m not “giving up”, so to speak. I’m solving my issues at work by turning “Nothing to do” into “Let me push this project idea” - Hopefully this will rekindle the motivation fire, which is something I need regardless of how long I stay here.)