With tech and social media firms together with Twitter, Meta, Google and Microsoft shedding hundreds of staff internationally, a 28-year-old former software program engineer with Meta mentioned in an interview that he give up his $370,000 job at Meta on account of rising panic assaults as he hit the bottom level of his life.
Eric Yu, talking to Business Insider, mentioned, “I know it sounds crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of my life would have ensured financial security, but I knew it wasn’t right for me.”
In 2016, Eric obtained job gives from Google and Facebook, nonetheless he selected Facebook as a result of he cherished its campus and it “seemed more like a startup and less “corporate” than Google”.
He mentioned that the primary 12 months and a half on the firm have been “pretty great” however about over two years later, Eric started experiencing nervousness.
Explaining his schedule, he instructed Business Insider that he began his day at 7am and labored until midday. After taking a break for lunch and some conferences, Eric used to dive again into intense coding blocks from about 2:30 pm to five pm.
“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.”
Recalling his first panic assault throughout work, Eric mentioned that when when he was working from house in 2019, round 4pm his left pinky finger went numb and inside an hour his ears have been ringing alongside together with his coronary heart beating extraordinarily quick.
“I was zoning out and felt intense thoughts. It felt like a water dam — like if too much water pushed against it, it might break, and all the water would pour out. The more I tried to block my feelings away, the more it felt like bursting out all at once. Fortunately, my girlfriend Wanda (now my fiancée) was there and recognized it as a panic attack,” mentioned Eric.
While Eric thought it was a one-time incident, within the following months, these assaults saved recurring and bought “progressively worse”.
He mentioned, “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.”
Eric emphasised on Meta’s expectations when it got here to code high quality. He mentioned that whereas a number of locations have been lenient with code critiques, that wasn’t the case with Meta. “At Meta, there’s a strong emphasis on writing code the right way, and you have to follow specific design patterns and architecture styles.”
Adding that code critiques have been tough, Eric mentioned that a number of instances he was left feeling dangerous.
“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.”
Eric highlighted that there have been instances when he labored greater than his teammates. He mentioned, “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…So I went the extra mile to get things done: I worked until 8 p.m. (much later than most employees), and I also spent about four hours a day on the weekends just to make sure I was keeping up with the pace.”
He added, “My workload at that time was potentially unhealthy. I should have just told my manager that I couldn’t handle it and that I needed more people to help me out.”
During his final days at Meta, Eric was triggered as a result of when he switched groups his supervisor instructed him that his commit depend — the method of writing code and including it to codebase — was low. He defined that in his onboarding to the brand new workforce, issues weren’t made clear to him.
“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.”
During the pandemic, Eric determined to give up Meta and after intense planning invested in home hacking. Once he and his fiance started making $10,000, he determined to give up Meta.
“The experience was underwhelming. I was at home and didn’t see my coworkers in person; there was no farewell party or formal goodbye. After my last meeting, I closed my laptop and felt relieved: ‘Wow, I’m done.’”
Source web site: www.hindustantimes.com
