Last year in a moment of career uncertainty I applied for a job at Meta, I think it was a M1 role in data engineering – I ended up giving up a few interviews in when I realised I still had 3 more interviews to go, I think for a total of 6, the recruiter didn't really explain the process very well.
I found the whole process pretty dystopian – no idea what product you'll be working on, they first give you a generic interview and then you get matched; the people you interview with are clearly very detached from you as a person (I'm sure it's great to reduce bias in hiring, but it feels very weird) because they know they're unlikely to ever interact with you again whether you get hired or not.
Also didn't like that there was no talk of compensation range, so I wasn't sure if they could even match my salary (I know they pay very low comp in the UK compared to US)
My Meta recruiter three years ago was excellent, answered questions really well and was very flexible, transparent, and responsive with scheduling. Probably my best interview experience so far, although I ended up accepting a different offer for a more senior position. The stars were aligned then, though... I was already working at a prestigious company, had competing offers, and performed well on the interviews (I suspect at least 1-2 "strong hire" or equivalent.)
They have a ton of highly qualified candidates. Why would they focus on optimizing the experience from the viewpoint of the candidate, when they are spending so much time and money cherry picking?
Because the supply of candidates aren't infinite and people talk and compare notes. At a certain point, a company _will_ become unattractive to the best candidates.
Whenever I hear that kind of argument I think to myself 'Youre right. This kind of thing needs to be regulated.'
6 rounds of interviews is insane. a law that said that prospective employees must be paid for their time to interview at a rate equal to the published salary or wage would go a long way to cutting this kind of bullshit.
I think we should allow companies a lot of freedom in how they hire. Outlaw discrimination in a few clear categories and leave it at that. If their interview process sucks enough then they'll miss out on good candidates and lose in the market. If you feel it's not worth your time then don't interview there.
Personally I've found that the companies with intensive interview processes pay twice as much as everyone else, so in the long run I'm compensated for the extra time.
Spent around 4 hours doing a coding homework, followed by 7 interviews, then ghosted for a few days. Chased, and it was then a "thank you for your time, no ta" email.
And you didn't even go to the office and see the Orwellian "MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS" and "WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN'T AFRAID" posters, or the internal newsletters put over the urinals, so you can read about HHVM while taking a leak.
That sounds like the sort of broad hiring practice that large corporations sometimes do to select recent graduates: a general filter of candidates, followed by managers picking the nost promising candidates, and a final round of interviews with one or more teams that are interested in you.
Salary is unrealistic to discuss early when they don't know which specific role you will be filling, and how much they want you.
That said, for more experienced people the process tends to be much more personalized, to the point where the very first person you talk to may be the hiring manager or their superior.
I guess I wasn’t expecting this process for a management role, I know that at the level I was interviewing I’d be one of hundreds/thousands in Meta but I would have expected a bit more of a personal touch for a role that required 10-15 years experience.
The actual interviews were actually very well thought out, great no-bs questions focused around my experience in specific scenarios, and my approach to people management. Just very impersonal.
That's very odd that they didn't give you a comp range. I know that when I interviewed with them they gave me ballparks for a few levels which was helpful in my decision making.
>I know they pay very low comp in the UK compared to US
What else did you expect? US wages in UK/EU? They don't pay higher wages in the US out of the goodness of their hearts, they pay it because the US market forces them to. They'd gladly pay European wages or below in the US if they could get away with it.
Exactly, I was pretty highly paid for the UK market so I was worried that I’d go through the whole process and then they’d present a total comp that was not a significant upgrade.
As the OP says in the article, I was also worried there was no clarity on what level I’d actually be, so I was worried they’d try to demote the role to M0 which on levels.fyi is lower than my comp was.
If you're already highly paid by your local market standards and you're also happy with your current job, it's not worth the hassle going trough a six stage interview as you've probably already reached the point of diminishing returns.
I'm guessing the GP expected them to tell them something useful about compensation earlier in the process, so that neither party would waste time evaluating a deal that couldn't possibly work.
I agree, that's pretty shit to not mention the salary range at the start, but Meta and FAANG wages in general are quite well documented already on levels.fyi, even for Europe, so it's normal to expect something in that ballpark as you go into the interview process.
The main takeaway is with any negotiating, its all about the information. Meta is trying to get as much information out of you and you're trying to hedge that information in order to gain a favorable position.
I think the article points out some very good and effective means of managing the information to gain leverage to maximize your offer from Meta. There are some very good techniques outlined in the article which can be parlayed not just in your interactions with Meta, but any big company looking to hire you. The scheduling of interviews and time table for your offer are both techniques I've used in the past to gain a better offer from companies looking to hire me.
Author here. I said this in the post, and I'll say it again here. If I hear from any reliable sources at Meta that I'm wrong, I'll gladly retract and issue a public apology.
I'm a SWE at Meta and do technical interviews. I'd say you're right on most things except down-leveling. There are some very specific things interviewers are looking for in the behavioral and system design interviews and I believe they accurately predict how an engineer will perform at a given level within Meta, which may be different than how they would at the "same" level at another company. In my experience and from speaking to other FAANG engineers, Meta expects engineers to do a lot more than just code past E4. E5+ ("senior") should be able to do some of what a PM does, generate impactful projects on their own, and be able to be a team lead (although that's usually for E6+), plus some more stuff. I know at least I was definitely leveled fairly, and even struggled a bit to get used to the expectations when I first started out.
Thank you for responding! Would you say the leveling criteria has changed in the last year? I ask because, while the current criteria could very well be legitimate, candidates weren't down-leveled nearly as often until the downturn.
There's no official policy or guidance that has changed on the expectations for the behavioral/sys design interviews I know of, which is fairly transparent. I saw your stat for 55% self reported down-levels, do you have a stat from before the downturn?
One thing I have noticed is that in my experience (around 70 interviews total since I started giving interviews in 2021) the average performance on the coding portions dipped sharply around the time that our stock did. My theory is that the more talented candidates focused on companies with a better outlook and so it was weaker candidates that were making it to the technical interview stage. I've noticed that in the last few months I'm seeing candidates do better on the coding interviews which supports my theory.
I wish we did. Honestly it's not something we collected because we didn't hear about it happening from our users.
That's a cool hypothesis. I think we can actually pull something similar: grab average performance in Meta-themed mock interviews on interviewing.io over time and graph it against the stock price.
There's something there... but it's not a very strong connection. Of course, mock interview performance isn't necessarily in lock step with how all candidates are performing in real interviews at Meta.
Are there any risks associated with just saying you have competing offers from other companies that have the shape of the contract you’re negotiating for?
> Team matching. This can take days or weeks, depending on how many teams you speak to and how many conversations you have with the people on each team
> Getting those offers doesn’t start when you’ve received your Meta offer. It starts months before. Make sure that you get enough initial conversations with other FAANGs, FAANG-adjacent companies, and late-stage sexy startups to end up with at least one other offer, ideally at least two.
This is insane. This is literally months of work, just for the chance to maybe get a job, maybe with a team you'd like to work for, maybe with a salary that reflects the work you'll be doing.
Meta outpays pretty much all of FAANG right now, and thats saying a lot when FAANG companies are already in the top [0-5]% of compensation in the US.
The uncertainty of joining an unknown team is a little annoying, I'll give you that. But for a 350k - 700k do you really expect their interview process to be a couple of softball calls into an offer?
Thats life changing money, and I'm sure many people would be willing to put in a month or two for that. If your insensitive to compensation and more sensitive to the type of work you'll be doing, sure there are better options.
Not badly enough to respond to the recruiter who keeps nagging me about "ML infra" role there. I went through their process before and it was even worse than Google's.
There might be a difference between having an offer right now versus being able to have an offer later (or having had an offer earlier). Especially when everything about the processes involved is trying to shorten the period the offer is actually open.
All offers get weighed against WLB, perceived bureaucracy, perceived reputation of the company, perceived alignment with role and level, perceived value that the company derives from the position, and the expected competition for the role. The combination of all of these could lead someone to reject or negotiate the highest dollar value offer.
I guess market rate isn't a thing? Time is a limiting factor with regard to getting offers. What this is saying is don't waste time on making Meta your first offer.
I’ve never really found it useful to hide the fact that you’re interviewing elsewhere from a recruiter. If anything, it often lets you align timelines and indicate your time constraints to them beforehand, rather than them trying to send you an exploding offer for no reason. And it often skips them giving you a garbage, below-market offer because it makes no sense to do that and then have you walk immediately when someone else offers $100k more.
Author here. The main reason not to share is that if you share at the beginning of the process, they will inevitably ask you how things are going with Company X, Y, and Z. Let's say you get rejected from a few of them. It's going to be increasingly hard to hide that, and now you lost leverage. Better to share when you control the flow of information.
I mean, you don’t have to tell them the exact details. Just tell them you’re in the loop with other companies, and you plan to have offers start coming in around $DATE, and would like to align things so you can evaluate them together. Of course if you end up not getting any other offers that might be a problem but if they understand that you are actively involved in multiple options I find that recruiters will move things for you. I think this is true even if they’re secretly trying to hurt you (e.g. by running their process faster and hoping that you take their offer first) because if you’re firm about your timelines (and you commit to it!) nobody really wants to be in a process where they string you along for a month and get you to the offer stage and then miss signing you on because they didn’t want to wait a few days to get extra information from you (about, say, how you’d really love to join Meta if only they bumped their comp $20k).
I honestly thought this was all common knowledge, but I guess that's from friends having gone through meta process and myself as well. The only way I've seen people get super big starting packages at any of these FAANG's is by leveraging multiple faang's against each other. But good lord, that's a lot of work.
A single process is already demanding, especially while holding a 9-5 job. Two simultaneous ones I can see. For three or more, I don’t reckon working full time at the same time is possible.
That also doesn’t account for all the factors outside one’s control, such as speed of the processes. One might finish with an offer on the table weeks before others do, even if initiated at the same time.
So, to get decent (market rate) compensation from Meta, you need 1-3 job offers of similar prestige and comp level. But if you have those, why would you ever take a job at Meta?
The same reason as any other, the mix of WLB, compensation and career growth. But notably the article isn't stating Meta will meet other offers, they may also beat other offers. Its merely saying they won't be compelled to offer in their upper range of compensation if they don't believe you have any leverage, i.e. why would they negotiate if they don't need to. Also unspoken is that both the lower and upper are still high -- I wouldn't be surprised if the lower is higher than a majority of other companies' median or even upper brackets.
So much "negotiating" advice just boils down to "get a lot of companies interested in you". Which is certainly good advice, and maybe will encourage people to take a lot more interviews than they would have otherwise, but for most people it's just not that helpful.
The author calls Meta's process "reprehensible", but they seem to be acting like any large company when there are lots of people competing for fewer jobs. It's pretty standard with FAANG (or whatever it's called now) that they simply won't negotiate over their offer unless you've got another better offer in hand.
But the advice of this article to "make sure you have other offers" is pretty much impossible to pull off in practice. If you have offers from startups, they're generally going to be for less than Meta is offering in the first place. And if you have better offers from the rest of "AANG", then the whole point is you can just take one of them. But this article starts with the premise that they're not doing much hiring right now, so I don't know how you're supposed to get those offers.
And all of this ignores the fact that coordinating the timing of offers, so that you have an open offer from another company, when Meta makes you their offer, is virtually impossible. You have no idea, when you start interviewing with another company, if they'll make you an offer in 3 days or 3 weeks or 2 months. And they generally give short deadlines as well.
So I don't really get what this article is trying to achieve. What Facebook is doing is pretty standard for corporations in a powerful hiring position, and the advice to try to counter it is nearly impossible to pull off. This is just how capitalism and labor markets go.
But, this article is definitely useful so people know how the process is working right now.
Yeah I hate how companies abuse this crap regarding having other offers on the table. It's built to make candidates lives as stressful as fucking possible and create a sense of urgency since now you have to handle all of this in a short timeline, while potentially working another job at the same time and trying to not come off as completely aloof there. And you need to convince the companies themselves to delay in which time the given position could slip away while you went to interview elsewhere.
Sometimes the exploding offers are real, because a specific team or startup needs a single new employee with a very specific skillset yesterday, and if you don't take it they're going to make an offer to their next best choice -- and by the time you decide you're ready to take it, the position is filled.
And sometimes they're totally made up, to try to get you to take a lower offer because they want a decision in the next 3 days and the other company you're interviewing with is going to take another 3 weeks to decide. When the reality is that if you came back 3 weeks later, they'd still totally hire you, despite everything they said previously. "I swear we never do this, but with your interview performance, we'll write up a new offer letter."
So it's always just a gamble.
But at the same time, you can also do it to companies -- I did once. I had an offer from one company that was exploding at the end of the week, and I went to the company I wanted to work for that had been delaying scheduling interviews, and said here's the deal: if you want to consider hiring me, you've got 2 days to interview me and make a decision. That lit a fire under their butt, I interviewed the next day, and they made me their offer at 4 pm Fri, when my other offer expoded at 5 pm. And so I got the job at the company I did want, faster than I ever would have otherwise!.(And possibly for more money, but I'll never know -- they simply matched my other offer which was pretty high at a really boring terrible company.)
Author here. We have a whole section on timing, including specific advice about how to control it (slow-playing team matching, delaying interview scheduling, etc.)
Interesting projects. Pushing your code to a billion users. TC in the $500k-$1MM range.
I would really encourage people that don't mind big companies to study for the interviews and just get the job. I promise you that you'll someday run into the algorithms questions you studied in real life. And you'll grow your software engineering career and make a lot of money. Dismissively writing it off feels cool, but you're really missing out on a good experience.
(I don't work for a FAANG anymore, but I did once, and it was fun. Super smart coworkers. Interesting work. Great pay.)
Not unless you managed to get hired as a (quant) trader with a performance fee. Privatized gains, shared losses. Of course, it's very hard to get hired for such a role.
I have a ton of friends in finance. Many worked for the most prestigious IB firms out of undergrad and moved on to PE/hedge funds where they make mountains of cash. I don't know 1 of them who has even considered retiring anywhere close to 35, nor of anyone in their professional networks who've done so. Not saying its impossible but the likelihood of doing so is vanishingly small.
It's interesting to see how things have change. Granted, my sample size is 1 for negotiating with Meta a few years ago. In that, I had competing offers, but let the recruiter know up front that I wouldn't share exact details other than company and level. The initial offer from Meta was greater than my asking, and after asking for more to get closer to parity with other offers, they went above that number as well.
Of course, that market looked nothing like this one.
And here I am as some sap who hasn't even gotten past the screening interview because I didn't spend a couple of months first memorizing Leetcode problems.
Is it a lot? You’re looking at hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a one-month interaction, of which the time you actually spend is a few days at most. Why wouldn’t you put up with it? Especially if your other options are not generally much better.
There are generally much stronger influences on who decides to work for a company than how their impression of the hiring process was. That is, unless the process is really broken (e.g. the founder shows up to the interview and talks about how he likes to hire hot women).
Not op, but I’m guessing the answer is because Meta is showing that they are more than willing to be the abuser in an abusive relationship if/when the labor market gives them the leeway to do so.
Maybe this is some sort of hiring strategy to select extremely compliant employees, but if so, I imagine it will backfire over the long term since overly compliant employees typically just do what they are told and don’t really lead or innovate.
I’m guessing a lot of this behavior is driven by internal KPIs (esp. at recruiting and hr), some/many of which may not have the incentives aligned optimally with overall org goals.
That said, I would never put up with this sort of treatment, especially from a company with a scarlet letter reputation like Meta.
My “negotiation” rebuttal (after their offer) would be something like “here are the teams I am willing to work with, and here are my minimum total comp requirements”, and most importantly, I would have a compelling BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement).
I’m pretty sure I would never get hired at a place like Meta except via a high-priced acquisition, and I’m totally ok with that. I am very content running my own company.
> My “negotiation” rebuttal (after their offer) would be something like “here are the teams I am willing to work with, and here are my minimum total comp requirements”, and most importantly, I would have a compelling BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement).
This is generally how most people approach the negotiation, no?
> This is generally how most people approach the negotiation, no?
Definitely not, or if they do, they cave to whatever the counter is.
Edit: I see many people state their preferences in negotiations, but they rarely take non-negotiable stances with large corps when negotiating working conditions. To be fair, I’ve seen the other extreme, where people have non-negotiables that are not feasible or realistic (e.g., reserved parking in a building with no parking, 2x-3x market rate for entry level positions, etc.). That said, I think these are rare, and these excessive asks reveal the wackadoodles fairly efficiently.
I’m guessing a decent percentage of those hired take the team they are assigned to at roughly the total comp that they were initially offered (e.g., maybe a few thousand more rather than 100k more… or maybe just the initial offer).
People default to being bad at negotiation, and many aren’t willing to walk when an offer is insulting. There’s some room for discussion about accepting offers and then bolting when the labor market shifts towards labor, but I’m not sure that’s optimal.
I'm not reading the complaints about the time per say as much as you'd just be doing it for Meta. People in the know of what Meta does behind the scenes are becoming (have been) very disturbed by the practices used and just the corporate ethos in general so that there is a stigma attached to anything Meta. So even having a conversation with them instead of anyone else just puts that stink on you immediately
I didn’t get into software to chase money. If I did, that’s a pretty dumb decision as there’s way more profitable careers. And working at Facebook seems pretty hellish.
I also didnt get into software to chase money, but I'm curious what those careers are, and what the cost of entry is for those careers?
Software seems like a pretty clear winner when it comes to compensation and what you have to do for that compensation.
Edit: Medicine and law are the only close competitors I can think of, and I didn't need to bury myself in debt or do 10 plus years of specialized training to get paid to build software.
Finance seems like a fair enough answer, although it always sounded a bit like a meat grinder, and how many of these jobs are there?
Consulting seems like something you need ivy league status and/or the right connections to get into, and probably requires lots of travel, and again, how many of these jobs are there?
If you're half decent at some corporate friendly language, you can have a pretty above average salary without needing to work all that hard. Current market notwithstanding, there are loads of people employed doing this, some of them entirely from the comfort of their own homes.
First step: realize that Meta is an incredibly lousy company producing fantastically terrible products and coasting on momentum of the past. There was never a product as ripe for competitive disruption as Facebook, for example.
There is some really excellent, concrete advice in this post. This is definitely a company that is on the side of candidates it works with.
The challenge with negotiation is that, like most things, the only way to get better at it is to practice. But a typical employee almost never gets to practice negotiating, other than once every couple years and maybe when buying a house.
Even if you're in sales, or recruiting, and you negotiate every day, it's still not the same as negotiating for your own salary. It's better than nothing though.
IMO one of the best things you can do for your career (and life) is to spend some time in a position where you do a lot of negotiating. Maybe that means founding a startup, or maybe it means working for a car dealership. But the more you can practice this skill - because it is a skill - the more you'll benefit from it throughout the rest of your life.
The best, most generally applicable advice I ever received about negotiating was while raising my first VC round. We got the first offer, so I asked our advisor what to do. He said "make a market. Get another one." If you don't have another offer, you're not negotiating. You're begging. ALWAYS get another offer. Yes, it sounds like "draw the rest of the owl" but it really is the one weird trick to winning a negotiation. Everything falls into place when you've got a market of offers. You can play them back and forth to maximize each of them, and then choose whichever comes out on top.
The other advice is to find the knobs you can turn. In employment negotiation that would be things like salary, equity, company stage, WFH policies. Use these knobs as "justification" when asking for a higher bid (which you might do multiple times as you go back and forth). "Well, they're offering $50k lower but they're WFH..."
Oh and of course, never say yes to the first offer. Everything is negotiable and the sharpest counterparties expect you to negotiate, so if you don't, you're accepting their intentionally low offer.
(The blog post also has a footnote alluding to, and warning against, the sociopathic solution to this, which is to simply lie or exaggerate about your other offers. Personally I would never do this, because it's a small world and you don't want word to spread. But let's say you think you can get away with it or don't mind getting caught. In this case if they call your bluff, you'll either need to fold (and they'll eventually see you didn't end up working somewhere else), or go deeper into the fraud by making a fake offer letter. It's never a good sign when you're going deeper into fraud.)
Author here. We sell mock interviews at interviewing.io, in the styles of specific companies. Sales data lets us see what's popular, which in turn, let's us gauge how much hiring is happening there.
Our sales data has lined up with previous events like hiring freezes and hiring booms (e.g., when Amazon briefly when on a hiring spree after Google and Meta froze in 2022). You can see more historical data here: https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
> You might say, “Aline, why can’t I just make up offers?” We could never, in good conscience, advise that. It’s unethical, and though I’d argue that while Meta’s negotiation practices are also unethical, that’s not the way to win. Outside of ethical considerations, while the risks of getting caught are low, they’re not zero. Lying about offers, in our mind, is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Exactly. Like hiring managers, recruiters and their cousins do not lie to the candidate. It is a game, and one has to use the necessary tools, including lying (in a reasonable neighborhood of truth) about one's experience and the offers received, to achieve the goal, which is to earn as much as possible from the company we want to work for.
For the people in the back, being honest makes you, and me, and everyone else undesirable. We've all had moments, days, even weeks of frustration, anger, disillusionment, technical incompetence, days we'd rather spend fighting with a gorilla than showing up for work, but we certainly don't say that when asked, "How do you handle conflict at work?" So I usually lie and present myself as a saint, but in a pragmatic way. I don't want to be perceived as a weak person, after all.
How about just "walk away" - it will atleast signal your self-respect and confidence (ok if you are truly desperate thats a diff thing). I was asked to share my counter offers - I told them that is unethical so would never share confidential letters from other companies. Seemed to have worked just fine - Ofcourse in this market where each job has a 1000 applications short of being the BDFL of a hot field - almost nothing else is not going to help you negotiate.
I like how they argue that its unethical and for that reason you shouldn't do it, while also stating they know that Meta itself is unethical in their own negotiation.
Sorry if the company is willing to lie and extort me I have no guilty conscious doing it back. Hell, I'd even argue that it'd be incompetent to NOT do it back for your own benefit.
Ok, and then Meta hands you an offer and then when you go to sign it suddenly becomes $100k less. Do you not think there are generally agreed upon standards that people negotiate with?
So, what’s the process like for an experienced engineer (say over a decade in the industry) who has wholesale avoided FAANG and FAANG-likes and stuck to other S&P 500s because they wouldn’t tolerate the dysfunctional interview process at these tech companies in the past?
And can you even get one of these jobs outside of California? I would not leave Arizona as a home owner for this nonsense.
Funny how people still call the corporate conglomerate tech outfits 'FAANG' apparently because 'fang it, bro' sounds tough and cool and predatory in the comic-book sense - but really they're steadily transforming themselves into their monopolistic predecessors (e.g. Ma Bell), so a new acronym - MAMAA (Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Alphabet/Apple) - is needed.
Also, 'Homo sapiens' should be renamed 'Homo ignis'. Sign the petition.
I like the fact that the author gives so many valuable tips on how to play this situation.
There's an even bigger over supply of labor now more than ever. So, META is using this to their advantage. The author states that this strategy is short sighted and will show future attrition from Meta because eventually the industry demand for SWE will recover. I'm just not sure about that last part. Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff. I would imagine other companies will aspire to this goal as well, especially now that the days of crazy growth are over. We're no longer in a growth economy anymore.
EDIT: I have not confirmed that X is profitable. And I don't know their numbers. but, I assumed after laying off 70 to 80% of staff, it probably should be right?
I think that Twitter is an anomaly that shows the strength of the architecture they built. Certainly you don't need those people around to keep the lights on, but if you want to attract new users with new features, someone needs to design those to work at scale, and then implement them. As far as I can tell, X has basically added subscriptions since the acquisition. In the meantime, they've lost many users and advertisers. (I only see ads for drop-shipped crap, which probably isn't too profitable compared to someone like Disney.) It is very unclear whether this is sustainable for X; as tech debt accumulates and real debt becomes due, the situation could be pretty dire. With equity you are strongly encouraged to grow. With debt you have to grow faster than the interest payments or you're literally dead. It is unclear to me whether or not X is growing; a lot of people are at the very least supplementing X with Bluesky and Mastodon. (They say they've moved away, but I kind of doubt it.)
Musk would probably be the last person on Earth to admit that X isn't doing so well, so I wouldn't really trust him. The most insightful thing he's said is "Fuck you, Bob Iger" which doesn't sound particularly indicative of advertising success. Meanwhile, he's advertised X payments, X email, etc. and these have not materialized (much like "FSD is a year away" in ... 2017).
AFter 15 years, what could they possibly that would actually add to the bottom line? I mean, craigslist never seemed to add a single feature and yet they dominated for well over a decade and then some.
For some products, at some point it makes sense to hunker down and go into maintenance mode. Not every business can keep growing exponentially.
I agree with that. But you don't borrow 44 billion dollars from a bank to buy a company in maintenance mode.
I think Elon's vision is to make X an "everything platform" like they have in China. Someone is going to have to type in a lot of code to make that happen.
Musk didn't buy Twitter to make it profitable.
He bought because he felt freedom of speech was being cratered by the previous owners and moderators of the platform.
Musk claimed they were on a path to profitability (i.e. not currently profitable) and that was before he scared off more advertisers by claiming that Jews were scheming to replace white people with immigrants.
I found the whole process pretty dystopian – no idea what product you'll be working on, they first give you a generic interview and then you get matched; the people you interview with are clearly very detached from you as a person (I'm sure it's great to reduce bias in hiring, but it feels very weird) because they know they're unlikely to ever interact with you again whether you get hired or not.
Also didn't like that there was no talk of compensation range, so I wasn't sure if they could even match my salary (I know they pay very low comp in the UK compared to US)