This week marks the end of my tenure at facebook. This is the only company I’ve ever worked for (outside of internships) so I’m feeling a rollercoaster of emotions right now. To begin with, I’ll start with a really quick recap of my time at the company.

My condensed FB story

• Feb ’14: Joined as an intern on Applied Machine Learning
• May ’14: Received a return offer to join the company full time
• [internship at Box; accepted full time offer at FB; dropped out of the University of Michigan]
• Nov ’14: Rejoined the company full time; joined People Search out of bootcamp
• Jun ’15: Transitioned from People Search to Commerce Search, working on infra for the Marketplace launch
• Jan ’17: Joined the Safety Engineering team in London, working on curbing the spread of terrorist propaganda
• Oct ’17: Started up the Scams team; got my first experience as a Tech Lead
• Jun ’18: Started up the Credible Threats team; got my first experience as an Engineering Manager
• Jun ’19: Started supporting the Child Safety team
• Feb ’21: Leaving Facebook

Some gratitude

• The company: I’ve spent pretty much my entire professional career at facebook. When I started, I never expected to stay for as long as I did, but once I got up to speed, I never really thought too seriously about working anywhere else. This is a company with incredible opportunity to land impact, solve challenging problems, and to meaningfully contribute to initiatives that really do have a positive effect on the lives of many people. I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to work on timely and important projects that balanced value to the company, to our users, and which allowed me to develop my skillset and grow my career
• The people: The best part about facebook is the people. I’ve always had this romanticized vision of life where I can surround myself with enough smart people that I’m the stupidest person in every room. I’ve been fortunate enough to build a team around me and work on highly talented cross functional working groups so that was pretty much always the case. In integrity, we get to work with highly passionate people who’ve really committed themselves to a particular mission with real societal value and it’s so inspiring to hear their career stories and about what motivates them to keep going. At first glance, I remember being a bit concerned about the resiliency challenges of working on emotionally charged topics like terrorism or child safety, but my experience working alongside these people has made it more fulfilling than anything else I’ve ever worked on. Thanks!
• My mentors/managers: I legit hit the jackpot and had the best mentors and managers at Facebook. These have been people who’ve:
  • given me honest and actionable feedback and built the muscle in me to take it gracefully and also to give it to others
  • challenged me with exciting projects, but also taught me to look for them on my own and eventually to help others identify projects for themselves
  • encouraged me to think about not only what’s best for the team, but also what’s best for my career — really getting me to align my work with my life aspirations instead of just aimlessly pushing for a promotion without being intentional about growing in a direction that would be helpful for my longer term goals
  • effectively balanced building my skillset and building my confidence. They provided me with support/recognition when I was feeling low and with direction/context when I was motivated, but confused (as an aside, “motivated but confused” could probably be the title of my autobiography). They supported me in building sandboxes where I was allowed to fail and by throwing me in the deep end when I was ready, regardless of whether I knew that I was
  • encouraged me to pursue a healthy work life balance and ensured that I was optimizing for long term success instead of setting myself up for potential burnout
  • most importantly, served as role models for the kind of manager and mentor I’d want to be for others

Parting thoughts for the company

• We can’t become prisoners to measurement, because some things are easier to measure than others. Imagine an (contrived hypothetical) experiment which increases time spent on IG Reels by 13-15 year olds to something like 5 hours a day. This is extremely successful if we look at growth metrics, but is that really good for our users? Is there an amount of time spent that we’d think is too high for kids? Time spent is easier to measure than the psychological health of our users, but that shouldn’t mean that it’s all that we optimize for
• With increased reach should come increased accountability. Shielding and verification are very effective at mitigating false positive risk and should be celebrated for the countless over-enforcement decisions they’ve prevented. However, I believe that if a user has access to an increased audience, there should be an obligation that the minimum bar of conduct/decorum for their content should be higher than an average lower-reach user. For example, perhaps it makes sense for the verification badge to have an obligation that published content can’t be ambiguously violating (instead of the current standard which is that it can’t explicitly violating)
• Misinformation matters and I don’t think political exemptions to enforcement are appropriate. With increased polarization and increased usage of facebook as a means of informing oneself, we have an increased responsibility to potentially optimize our “newsy” content based on how informed our community is instead of how much they engage with it. Again, this is harder to measure and potentially politically controversial, but this is better for our community. We must be wary not to fall into the trap of trying to ensure a false balance where that’s misrepresentative of reality
• We need to give users more control over the contents of their newsfeed. I attempted to make my feed less stressful / politically charged last week after feeling a post-election-news-hangover and failed miserably. Every politically charged post that I hid was replaced with another one and I wasn’t able to enjoy content from my friends and loved ones without being inundated with information about elections or rising COVID death counts. Ideally this is something where I could just dial a knob or set temporary preferences around the type of content I want to see

What’s next for me?

First things first, I’m going to take a week off on a beach with Tiggr, tequila, books, and burritos (no phone or laptop) so that I can unplug and recharge. As a Californian, this is pretty much my paradise.

After that, I’ll be packing up my bags and moving to Cambridge, MA to work at the Broad Institute to contribute to genomics research as an Engineering Manager. I’ve known for a few years that I wanted to transition my career arc to organizations that optimize for social good (instead of balancing social good with stronger profit-seeking incentives) and I’m excited for the next chapter in my journey.

Working on an entirely new domain has some pretty clear downsides and upsides. One downside is that I’ve naturally got a ton of imposter syndrome again — maybe I’ve only succeeded so far in my career because I’ve found a niche that I don’t suck at; maybe leaving my comfort zone means that I’ll be exposed as a fraud; maybe my team has been carrying me and masking my incompetence. I think it’s totally natural to have some of these feelings, but I think it’s also pretty important for me to attack them head on and to use them as fuel for motivation even though it feels a bit scary in the moment. I’m also quite sad to be leaving the community and lifestyle I’d built around me in London.

On the upside, I’m incredibly fortunate to have been presented opportunities to contribute to solving some of society’s trickiest and most prominent challenges and that I get to use my skillset across different domains so I can constantly be learning from others around me. I really admire some of history’s great thinkers who were able to process information laterally, leveraging some knowledge from one context to apply in a novel manner in another context, and that’s a skill I’m hoping to develop in myself also.

Overall, lots of emotions, but primarily feeling blessed, but also a little bittersweet. With that said, one chapter has to close for another to begin and I can’t wait to find out where this one leads!