PSC culture

 PSC culture is a thing indeed in facebook. PSC is typically at the center stage of all engineering decisions unfortunately. Something I have not seen in other tech companies.

You have to deliver results inside the span of 6 months, which biases the engineering culture to short-term wins. The engineering culture here does not value long-term planning, if it does not result in immediate tangible results in production. I’ve seen lots of rework of poor quality new products in a month or two after hitting production, because they were rushed out in under 6 months (otherwise someone would have been PSC-axed).

You will find that most of the time when the team is debating priorities and engineering decisions, the central question at the back of everyone’s mind is how a decision will impact their PSC.

So yeah, call it “PSC culture”, “PSC cult”, or “PSC-driven engineering”, it is all true and real.

That also impacts WLB, as lots of people are constantly anxious about having significant impact in under 6 months.

But pay is competitive, and that is the reason many people are sticking around.

 People get stressed out because facebook pays (a lot) for performance and a difference in rating or getting an earlier promotion can be life changing for some.

Since this is known to begin with, why do people start stressing around psc time?

My explanation is that they suddenly start looking back at the half and they dont want to mess things up. They look at some peers that are naturally stressed and those that share tales of super long and detailed self reviews, unfair treatment, and other concerning stories that they would normally ignore, BUT because the stakes are high it affects their psychology.

Most confident explanations by people on what helps "succeed" in psc are false...

It's simply a technical phase of writing down what you accomplished over the half that will help make sure your manager didnt forget something major you did when they discuss your performance.

You can do a terrible job in writing the feedbacks and get a stellar rating or do a great job but receive a poor rating because the whole purpose behind the exercise is evaluating your accomplishments of the past half
Cash bonuses are immediate, but their effect is short-lived. Refreshers and promotions can have a huge effect on your comp going forward.

As an example, an E5 that could get a refresher of 120k with a meets all rating (it's actually more, but lets keep it simple). That means 30K per year for the next 4 years. If, instead, they had a greatly exceeds rating that could double and mean a pay bump of 60K per year for these 4 years. There is no after-the-fact correction of this of you later perform better.

Similarly, a promotion could easily double the baseline refresher amount which would mean the 60K per year would be roughly the baseline of the next level.

There is more stress around stock allocation than cash bonuses because these are only granted once per year (in the current cycle). That means that if someone is borderline for a promotion and they don't get it this half, they won't get a refresher matching the size of the next level for another year.

This becomes more extreme as people go up the levels because the stock grants size grow exponentially with level (versus a more linear growth in base salary) - a bigger share of someone's comp is made up of this equity.

Lastly, for top performers there is something called AE (Additional equity) which is separate from the rating and an additional amount of equity that can be the size of an additional annual refresher... This one is very rare, but people like to think they may get it