A reflection on six years at Facebook

Do we have to say goodbye to the past? / Yes I guess we do

At the start of November, some incredible folks on Meta’s people analytics team and I got laid off. As much as I’m enjoying some rest and recovery in the present, and looking forward to my next gig, it’s fun to look back sometimes, too — so I’m sharing a reflection on my time at Meta.

When I joined Facebook (now Meta) in 2018 I was excited to be part of one of the bigger people analytics teams around. Instead of being the only person who knew what R and regression modeling were, I got to work alongside both top-rate people scientists and analytics business partners who taught and mentored me about behavioral science, stakeholder management, and clear communication.

As the team grew, my workload shifted from owning several topic areas (attrition, employee surveys, career growth, etc.) to going deeper and deeper on fewer of them. I onboarded people hired to take on, say, surveys as their full-time job instead of the partial focus I’d been able to give. After a while, I was spending most of my time working on attrition analysis. I eventually managed a team of people who did research on attrition (and how it overlapped with other areas such as recruiting success metrics and compensation), got our attrition reporting automated, and put together Board-level presentations.

Meta did a great job making sure you could grow in your career (…to a point!) without going into the management track, but I had wanted to try my hand at management for a long time. A part of me has always wanted to be a teacher, and even in non-management roles, I’ve cherished chances to mentor and tutor others. I even wrote three years ago about how much Clayton Christensen’s quote from How Will You Measure Your Life? impacted me:

I [have] concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like [they had a good day].

After layoffs hit in 2022, I was moved back into an individual contributor role. I still got to do a lot of mentoring, and explaining things to executives satisfied some of the desire I have to teach. It also solidified for me that even though I can make a big impact for my employer without being in a management role, I’m highly motivated by the impact I can have on the people around me. Being a manager — the way I learned how at Meta — is a way to have a consistent meaningful impact on people’s careers and work/life and, well, their lives, and I look forward to getting back to that.

I hope I had as positive an impact on the people around me as they did on me. My managers all cared a great deal about me and tried to help me have short- and long-term career success. My teammates were always my favorite part of my job, even after various reorgs and layoffs. I’ve made friendships that, against the odds, I’ve kept up with even after they’ve moved on to new opportunities.

All that to say, I wouldn’t have chosen to leave Meta the day after the election. But I’m here now, grateful for people (especially those who have made me laugh over the past couple of weeks!), and looking forward to having some time to make pumpkin muffins and maybe start writing more about people analytics again. Well, and looking for a new place to make an impact, especially on the people around me.