TL;DR: I'm leaving Facebook and joining Plaid! I'll be working on the Developer Experience team, alongside some awesome folks, and backing a mission I support dearly.
In January of 2021, I decided that it was time to move on from
Facebook. The culture wasn't the same as it was during my internship,
and I felt myself being constrained by the process of a large company.
So I went job hunting!
My primary requirements, inspired by Facebook's shortcomings, were:
- A remote role: Facebook refuses to allow employees
to continue working remotely unless they are IC5+ (Senior+). Because
I've been working remote since well before I joined Facebook, I had more remote-work experience than my team, but was denied from transitioning
to a remote role because of my level. We had all been working remotely
since the start of the pandemic, so why would we split remote work by
level?
- A smaller company... much smaller: Large companies, and FAANG in particular, have processes in place to help safeguard
their systems from technical accidents. But at Facebook's scale, this
leads to constant reviews by different XFN teams, an exponential amount
of weekly "alignment" meetings, and a culture of fear around
shipping even well-tested features. At a smaller company, I hoped to
have more ownership over my projects, where I could be the one deciding
when a project was ready for production and be trusted to deliver it
reliably.
- A mission I can back: It's no surprise that working at Facebook has it's ethical challenges. However, it's incredibly difficult to say no to $300k for your first year out of college.
(Especially when it's your only offer.) As time went on, I realized just how vehemently I disagreed with Facebook's ethics and just how little
influence I and other ICs had on the decisions the company made. This
was a huge, huge, motivator for me to look externally versus just
switching to a more silo'd team.
While I interviewed at several companies (from 50B+ to <10M market
caps), I can't go into details for all of them without making this post
suuuuper long.
Picking Plaid
After all my interviews, and examining my offers, I decided on Plaid. Let's dive into that list from earlier to see why!
- A remote role: The role was fully remote, Plaid
didn't even have an office in Seattle! What I particularly liked about
Plaid's approach to remote work was that entire teams were
remote. I've worked in an environment where teams can be partially
remote, and there is always a disconnect between the team members in the office vs. those that are remote. Water-cooler talk is a real
phenomenon, and is a strong force against remote employees.
- A smaller company: Plaid has ~500 employees. That's a couple of magnitudes down from Facebook's 50,000 employees. Plaid's
size is at that tipping point where we can still act like a startup with high ownership, and I can contribute the lessons I've learned working
at a large company as we grow over time.
- A mission-based goal: Plaid's goal is to
democratize access to financial infrastructure for the next generation
of fintech companies. By building a "discrete tool" to interface with
the technical behemoth of the financial system, Plaid is opening up the
industry to more innovation, ultimately giving people the power to shape their own financial future.
- A time of growth: Visa recently made a bid to
acquire Plaid for ~5B. Unfortunately, anti-monopoly laws foresaw a long
legal battle ahead of that acquisition. I'll be transparent: I saw the
opportunity to join before Plaid's next raise and potential IPO. I could end up in some fortunate "golden handcuffs" at a company that I loved
working at.
The amazing-to-haves
I don't want this to be a "sell" for Plaid, but I can't not mention some pretty cool perks:
- A Workstation Set-Up Bonus: It's critical for remote teams to feel confident with their workstations at home, and this helped a lot towards that!
- Unlimited PTO (that people actually take!): Nearly
everyone I talked to made sure that they didn't let "unlimited" PTO
intimidate them into not taking PTO. Some people I chatted with
comfortably took ~8-10 weeks a year! Pair this with our 21 company-paid holidays, and I could tell that Plaid wanted us to be well-rested and invested in our work-life balance.
- A Learning Stipend: The first time I've had a
learning stipend, I'm excited to use this to up-level my skills and
support the community of course creators I follow on Twitter.
- A Generous Wellness Stipend: I have this ambitious goal to live to 2100. Investing in my health is going to be the #1 contributor to getting there.
Overall, I'm incredibly excited to start working at Plaid, and can't
wait to start enabling next 🌊 of fintech companies! I'll be blogging
throughout my time here, as I continue to learn more. Follow me on Twitter for updates!