Facebook Performance Reviews for H2-2019

Following up on my previous blog on my feelings over performance reviews of Facebook in H1 2019, I was thinking of writing another one over my H2 2019 performances. And lo here was the performance results just a few days back giving me some content. This time around, I am happy that I got a promo in just my second performance cycle. In both the performance cycles, I secured an exceeds expectations rating which means that I performed better than what was expected of a full-time engineer in my role in my level globally from Facebook standards.

I would like to touch upon two points: how performance reviews are calibrated and what changes after a review season. First, my manager had inputs from various cross-functional colleagues with whom I closely worked. I had nominated them based on my projects delivered and the quantum of time spent together. Mind the leeway that work or project need not always be very commonly known project goals like delivering a certain revenue or product or getting to a product adoption goal, but also could be bringing clarity to vague projects like delivering an actionable plan on making business resilience to industry changes of future which would involve aligning with several teams on our team’s deliverables and deciding on the future course of action for a certain product, which in my case was user signals (S2S) for advertising. My contribution to making Facebook business resilient towards industry changes was also accounted for while deciding my ratings.

Of course, there was no single factor in my promotion, I had to ‘behave’ at the next level for 2 consecutive performance cycles. And I had programmed a product almost alone without being an active developer in the team who wrote it in the first place hence giving enough signals to hint a strong engineering capability.

Now there are certain things which would change with the bump up of level. I am expected to pick up even more vague concepts and drive them to completion. Given my role - Solutions engineering, is unique in its way to expect teammate to pitch an idea to solve a business problem (internally called as ideating a business problem), align various stakeholders for a possible deliverable, plan the project, get buy-ins for faster delivery, and at the end get clients happy which ultimately drives more sales for Facebook. With such a cast scope of work, I cannot play on something which I am not interested in working for - example tools around creative images and videos for advertising. It’s very boring for me. However, things like AR and VR excite me but there’s a sharp learning curve in that which makes me cautious to pick them up for a half year. It all comes down to higher the level bigger becomes the problems to solve for and even more vague becomes its apparent solution.

While I am gearing myself mentally up for it, I wanted to thank everyone (in case it reaches them) with whom I work at Facebook. It’s a great place to be and work. Looking back it feels that I have been able to achieve much which initially would seem daunting to even me. Gives me a proud feeling and also satisfied with a massive 50% hike that I got. I think my promo was clubbed with an internal pay revision but this is nothing less than having a dream come true.

PSC is not who we are, it’s just a reflection of how well we achieved in the last half.