Facebook Badge Post - Motivations + Memories (2/2)

07 Jul 2023 | Tags: facebook ∗ facebook-badge-post ∗ life ∗ funemployment ∗ choices ∗

Note Jul 10, 2023: Made some minor edits to this after initial post; see this PR

The Motivational Things #

Why?

I’ve changed, the company has changed, and (while I have seen firsthand just how good the LLMs in GenAI are going to be, the crazy amount of GPUs/compute that the team is going to get, and how great folks are not just technically but organizationally and with empathy) it’s not the adventure I want to be having at this stage in life.

I’m lucky at the moment to not be tied down to much — relationships, location, recurring responsibility — but that (hopefully) won’t last forever.

And while I can afford the risk and enjoy that certain type of freedom, I would like to.

Frankly, it’s also just sort of time. I’ve changed teams every 1.5-2 years, done 3 major area switches, and walked the research-to-production pipeline backwards; as much as I still think FB has its things together in ways that many other corporations don’t, I’ve already seen a lot of how things are done here and what FB has to offer. Also while I have no intention of being a Retiree (despite whatever the Chuckr scale says¹). I also reached the “financial independent” part of FIRE a while ago and want to explore what that means for me.

Lower order bits:

• My birthday is Aug 8 (8/8). Getting to 8 years appeals to the numerical pattern matching part of my brain. 😛
• I already sorta know what increasing the mean (ie climbing the career ladder) looks like and I want to play the variance from feeling that much more of the end-to-end ownership. (Or, maybe I read too much r/FatFIRE lol)
• Because of all of the above, I’ve already had a quit-by date for a while now. (Among other things, I already made use of one of the rarer, but also best-optionality granting benefits² back in early 2022 so that I wouldn’t have to deal with those logistics now.)

What’s next?

I’m going to spend the next 1-3 years intentionally doing the higher-variance things (travelling, startups, projects). If something from that time works out, great. If not, I’ll have a lot of new experiences and understanding of how different environments are and how I am in those environments in kind, and that’s a sort of working out too.³

Contact #

I don’t know where I’ll be or when, but would love to stay in touch.

[More direct contact info redacted]

Feel free to reach out even if it’s been ages since we’ve last interacted! I have a tendency to materialize in random cities and would love to have more folks to ping while making the rounds. 🙂

Assorted memories #

Non-exhaustive; intentionally keeping them stream-of-consciousness cause they’re prolly tears-in-the-rain for anyone not-me anyway but feels somehow important to include; primarily chosen for absurdity and entertainment and spreading the links out so it doesn’t look too overwhelming to read 😛

[Note: Some of the links broken; replaced with footnotes instead]

Beautiful views from tall offices; getting destroyed in after-work Quake LAN parties; hearing the 15-min story about that time where a GK got fat fingered and took down a bunch of other sites on the internet almost every week for a year and a half; being a video-game-playing grunt in someone else’s Zuck demo; doing my own Zuck demo; “When you don’t get what you want you get experience”; offsite things: making fire, cooking challenges, bonding dinners; only sorta heat exhausting an intern on a hike; CV coordinate transform mishaps (soooooo many, and I knew I hated dealing with coordinate conventions before going on those teams too); reading through a bunch of assorted writings⁴ that give generally good work advice, lots of the early legends/stories, Great Debates, and posts that show how magical⁵ and open⁶ and vulnerable⁷ FB as a company was — even when it didn’t have to be — but maybe isn’t how things are today; corporate travel; trips to London/Paris/Zurich/MPK/Austin; landing production Haskell (ok not that cool of a memory, but I nerd chuckle at it a bit); chatting for an hour-and-a-half while massively sleep deprived and sitting 2 feet from Zuck with a dozen people mostly on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me; pulling all nighters to learn Unity to make stuff for the Quest; comradery and awesome shirts for the BB3 release; paper cramming; lots of interviewing + intern things; launching AR Birthdays after pivoting from another AR project cause we got feedback about how hard it is to build 2-sided markets from scratch; getting feedback from a VP that my Jedi write-ups were good; a TL making an offhand comment winter 2015 and inadvertently melting a gut-anxiety ball I’d been carrying for 5-and-change years; going on my first ever oncall and getting a beastiality porn spam attack (lol yup); F8 2017 - “From a (single) image” (when it definitely wasn’t); realizing how bad I was at organizing a lab notebook despite getting the importance in theory and slowly improving after a year or so; “We’ll look fondly on this short period of time in history when society was able to trust recorded media”; buying + expensing a pull-up bar after my first team switch despite being the small female on a team of fit dudes; finding places to nap; finding SO MANY people around to be SUPER COOL in amazing and subtle ways (but not having any idea how to be friends with them lol); the shenanigans that was the entirety of OPT-175B + aftermath; FBAnon⁸ (or, the better parts of it at least); FLiP ropes courses; happy hours; fbseabffs; etc; etc; etc; etc…

(But when it’s over, is it really over?)⁹

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Part 1 - Badge Post Context + Thanks | Part 2 - Motivations + Memories

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