A 28-year-old Chinese Meta software engineer quit his $370,000 job on the grounds of a panic attack
New Zhiyuan reports
Edited by Aeneas
As soon as he graduated from university, he joined Meta, and the Chinese software engineer's career started very successfully. I didn't expect to do it, but the idea of resigning became stronger and stronger...
The protagonist of the story is Eric Yu, a Chinese software engineer.
In 2016, after some interviews with Google, Meta, and Palantir, Yu received an offer to hire a software engineer at Facebook.
He was on his flight home at the time, and at that moment, the joy of success made him feel like he had reached the top.
A few days later, Google's offer also came.
Yu worked very hard when he was a student, and two offers were the best reward.
Subsequently, he began to torn between Facebook and Google.
Back then, Facebook was more of a startup, while Google was more of a business.
Yu also liked Facebook on campus very much, so he chose Facebook.
For the first year and a half after joining the company, Yu had a good experience. As a recent college graduate, he is full of anticipation and excitement about his work every day.
Two and a half years later, however, he began to feel anxious.
Eric Yu and fiancée Wanda
My first panic attack
Yu's day is like this: she wakes up at 7 a.m. and works until noon, during which she eats lunch and has a few meetings. From 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., continue the intense work of writing code.
Even after work, Yu can't stop working – he's always thinking about the problems that arise at work and how he can solve them.
For him, the stress and environment of technical work makes it difficult for him to disconnect, even after work.
In November 2019, Yu experienced her first panic attack while working from home.
It was around 4 o'clock and his left little finger was completely numb. He tried to ignore it, and it got worse. An hour later, his ears were ringing and his heart was beating very fast.
He was groggy and full of thoughts. It felt like a dam – if there was too much water on it, it could burst and let all the water pour out.
The more Yu tries to suppress his emotions, the more they explode.
Luckily, his girlfriend, Wanda, was on the side and recognized his symptoms as panic attacks.
At that time, Yu knew nothing about the condition, thinking it was just a one-off thing.
Unexpectedly, in the following months, this situation kept happening, and it gradually worsened.
For six months, from March to September 2020, he was at the lowest point in his life.
Every day, he felt miserable, not knowing what he was doing or why he was still working.
His performance also started to decline - he couldn't focus on writing code and couldn't meet deadlines.
Severely criticized by superior engineers
Meta has quite high standards for code quality, and code reviews are rigorous.
At other companies where Yu has interned, code reviews are very lenient, and someone will soon look at your work and approve it.
But at Meta, there's a lot of emphasis on writing code the right way, and you have to follow specific design patterns and architectural styles.
In a code review, Yu needs to work with different teams to determine the best way to write code.
After several reviews, he received harsh feedback on how he should fix the code. It made him feel terrible.
He would like to get more constructive feedback, such as "I like what you're trying to do here, but I can try to improve it this way."
But some of Meta's engineers will be blunt: "This is too bad you shouldn't write that."
This feedback ignores the emotional need for communication and makes the problem black and white.
Eric Yu quit his $370,000 tech job after finding other ways to make money
Others won't work so late
Whenever a team wants to build a new feature, everyone needs to test it. If the feature works well, it will be rolled out to users all over the world.
For a month, Yu was the only engineer on the Android team. Others are either on vacation or on mental health leave.
He didn't want to slow down the team, so he was under a lot of pressure. If you don't absorb the knowledge quickly, future workflows will be delayed and the progress of the entire team will be affected.
So, Yu would work even harder and not leave work until 8 p.m., much later than most Facebook employees. On weekends, Yu also spends four hours a day.
Looking back now, Yu feels that her workload was extremely unhealthy. He should tell his manager that he can't do this much work on his own and needs more help.
The Last Straw: Managers Question "Number of Submissions"
Inside Facebook there is a table where everyone can see how much code each team member has submitted over a period of time.
In Yu's view, making this kind of information public is not healthy and can cause stress for everyone. He looks at the watch every few weeks to see where he fits in the team, in the company.
When he first moved to a new team, his manager would tell him, "I'm worried about the number of submissions you make," because he's slightly below the average for most members of the team.
But there's a reason for that.
During Yu's onboarding, the roadmap and vision that the team wanted to build weren't very clear, so Yu wasn't given too many projects.
Yu disagrees that leadership is paying close attention to the number of code commits as a measure of employee success.
He believes that the amount of code doesn't prove anything, and that skills such as leadership, project management, and interpersonal relationships should also be valued. But his manager apparently disagreed.
This conversation became the last straw that made Yu decide to leave Meta.
Yu and Wanda write about the life of their dreams
Set a goal and leave Meta
At the end of 2020, Yu and Wanda thought about what they wanted their lives to look like in the next 10 years.
They decided to change their current career trajectory because none of them wanted to work in the tech industry that long.
One night, the two brainstormed and tried to write out all the ways they could make money on the whiteboard — shipping, brand affiliate marketing, real estate.
After assessing the risks and rewards, they narrowed it down to real estate and Airbnb.
But it was the middle of the pandemic, and they weren't sure if they should fully commit to it.
So, they started with house hacking, which is a low-cost way to get into real estate.
They plan to buy a house, live in some of the rooms, and rent the others to others. They want to buy a property with a low down payment of 5% and pay off the loan less than the rent they paid in San Francisco.
They bought a five-bedroom house in Reading, California, a four-hour drive from San Francisco.
The two live in a 252-square-foot detached cottage in the backyard, while the main house brings in about $8,000 a month on Airbnb.
The cottage where Yu and Wanda lived
Two people do not have to spend money on the residence every month, and they are paid. This gives them more and more confidence in the potential of real estate.
Yu set the goal of quitting Meta as soon as he made $10,000 a month from real estate.
In 2021, the two bought two more properties, and by the end of the year, Yu had reached an income of $10,000 a month. In 2022, they bought two more properties and continued to buy one in 23 years.
During the pandemic, when everyone was working from home, Yu chose to quit her job.
At the time, he did not see his colleagues and did not say any formal goodbye.
After the last meeting, he closed his notebook and breathed a sigh of relief: I finally left.
Quitting a job that pays $370,000 a year sounds irrational. If you stay at Meta for the rest of your life, you can keep your belongings safe, but Yu says it's not for you.
Earning passive income from real estate isn't Yu's ultimate goal, though, it just gives him the time and space to explore more – what he really wants to do if he's financially sound.
He hopes to build a community that helps others change the way they live and live more meaningfully, just like himself.
Now, Yu is still exploring.
Resources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/quit-meta-tech-job-after-panic-attacks-anxiety-low-point-2023-10