I'll take "Dickensian Workplace Stories" for $370k, Alex:
> My typical day started at 7 a.m. I worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
> Even after work hours, I couldn't turn work off — I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work.
> For six months, from March to September 2020, I was at the lowest point in my life. Every day felt like a grind: I didn't know what I was doing or why I was still working. My performance started dropping — I couldn't focus on my code or keep up with the deadlines.
> In my opinion, there's a constructive way to give feedback: "Hey, I like the attempt you made here, and there might be opportunities to improve in this way." But some engineers at Meta lacked tact and nuance: "This is really bad. You shouldn't have written it like this." This kind of feedback makes it sound like this is a black-and-white issue, and it often overlooks the emotional aspect of communication.
> I remember one month, I was the only engineer on the Android team because people were either on vacation or taking mental-health leave. I didn't want my team to be held back because of me, so I felt pressured to perform. If I didn't stay up to speed and get those learnings quickly, then I'd be delaying future work streams, which would impact the whole team's progress.
> It was frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. I believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything — skills like mentorship, project management, and navigating interpersonal dependencies should also be valued. But my manager held a different perspective, and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta.
> My typical day started at 7 a.m. I worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
> Even after work hours, I couldn't turn work off — I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work.
> For six months, from March to September 2020, I was at the lowest point in my life. Every day felt like a grind: I didn't know what I was doing or why I was still working. My performance started dropping — I couldn't focus on my code or keep up with the deadlines.
> In my opinion, there's a constructive way to give feedback: "Hey, I like the attempt you made here, and there might be opportunities to improve in this way." But some engineers at Meta lacked tact and nuance: "This is really bad. You shouldn't have written it like this." This kind of feedback makes it sound like this is a black-and-white issue, and it often overlooks the emotional aspect of communication.
> I remember one month, I was the only engineer on the Android team because people were either on vacation or taking mental-health leave. I didn't want my team to be held back because of me, so I felt pressured to perform. If I didn't stay up to speed and get those learnings quickly, then I'd be delaying future work streams, which would impact the whole team's progress.
> It was frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. I believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything — skills like mentorship, project management, and navigating interpersonal dependencies should also be valued. But my manager held a different perspective, and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta.
What is...a job?