Meta reviews

If you are a data scientist, you need to really care about two things: - Impact. Unlike SWE, who can prove their impacts by finishing pre-planned coding projects and rolling out pre-planned features, data scientist does not automatically get credit if you only finish beautiful analyses. You have to suggest eng team to apply your suggestion from analysis, and prove how much of the product growth are from your analysis. So sometimes your impact can be subjective. - Skillset. You may be asked to do a lot of ad-hoc analyses from eng team, which I am sure are very important and can guide engineers whether to implement certain features, but that will prevent you from doing some deep dive analyses and learning some new techniques in data analysis. Maybe after a year or two, you will find that you did not build any statistical models or haven't touched any machine learning. But that's the skillset what other companies will ask for when you apply new job. Who cares you did how many ad-hoc analyses or AB test or wrote how many data pipelines. It's the fancy machine learning model that will earn you respect. Also, total pay is lower than SWE for the same level.

- The constant talk about growth. Facebook is not growing as fast as it used to, yet the company hires like crazy. To be honest I think this is too much at this point. All these people are doing "projects" but these projects are in 3/4 not useful at all. The sole purpose of them is that someone can write it in their performance review but no one really uses the outcome of the project after that. - Despite the management saying how international the company is, every decision is still taken by Americans/British/Irish and according to their worldview. Which sometimes has awful effects on the company image in countries that were not part of the Commonwealth or are the US. It's particularly visible when there is a PR fire in American or British media, they can change something overnight based on that not thinking about how it will impact other parts of the world. Also it's worth mentioning that a huge majority of managers is Irish/British, and there is little internal mobility for non-natives. - Performance review is somehow not fair. Technically there are career expectations but if you fulfil all of them, you'll get the lowest score. There are people from certain parts of the world that would be working 16h a day (I'm thinking East Asia in particular) to get the best score so then people from other parts of the world need to work longer as well, otherwise their achievements will look pale compared to those working overtime. And performance assessment, potential promotion and bonus, are based on your place on the curve rather than on whether you fulfilled criteria of your job. - Internal mobility rules are very unfair. As an external applicant you'd meet and even exceed all the criteria for a particular role but if you are internal you cannot move to a role that is higher grade than yours. This leads to a situations in which people who applied internally were rejected, left the company and were soon approached by recruiters for the very role on LinkedIn if they'd be interested.