Joe Gregorio
So I just started working at Meta after working at Google for close to 17 years.
It’s still very early days, I’ve only been here one week, and all of that was onsite in the Menlo Park office doing New Hire Orientation, but even at this early stage there are several things that have really stood out to me, particularly coming from Google.
Non-insular
One of things you have to know about Google is how insular they are. When you work at Google, for almost all tasks, you must use Google tools. Luckily they have their own email service (GMail), their own docs suite (Google Docs), their own browser (Chrome), cloud (Google Cloud), video service (YouTube), self-driving car (Waymo), etc. The list goes on and on.
So going from Google to any other company would bring a similar change, and it was actually quite refreshing to start at Meta and find that email was Outlook, docs was Google Docs, and VPN was Cisco. You know, the same choices that many other large corporations would make.
Focus
Meta is incredibly focused, they have a very cohesive picture of how all their products fit together and where they are going. Every team and every product aligns with that guiding vision.
Walks the walk
Finally, while Meta talks-the-talk about social connection to the public, it very much walks-the-walk on social connection internally. There’s Workplace, which is a Facebook-for-your-company offering that they use internally and also sell to other companies. Also, a large portion of the first week of onboarding was activities meant to make and strengthen connections among the new hire class.
It was very difficult to wrap my head around leaving Google after working at the same company for 17 years, but the work I’m going to be doing at Meta intrigued me, all the folks I interviewed with were great, and the first week of orientation has reinforced for me that I made the right decision.