Meta engineer quits Rs 3-cr job after having panic attacks: 'Pressure made it incredibly hard'
Eric Yu, 28, experienced his first panic attack while he was working from home. His fingers went completely numb
- Oct 11, 2023,
- Updated Oct 11, 2023 10:57 AM IST
A software engineer with Meta had to leave Rs 3-crore job due to 'pressure' and 'environment of working' that affected his mental health. Eric Yu, 28, experienced his first panic attack while he was working from home. His fingers went completely numb. At first, he ignored it, but it got worse. "An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast," Yu told Business Insider. He got the offer from Meta in 2016 but quit the firm last year.
Also Read: Meta employee fired after 3 years joins Google, says Meta wasn't her dream company, Google was
The former engineer said that his typical day started at 7 am. He worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 pm to 5 pm. Even after work hours, he said he couldn't turn work off — "I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work."
Also Read: ‘This shall be fun’: Fired Meta employee gets overseas 'dream job' with Google
Yu said that he was zoning out and felt intense thoughts. "The more I tried to block my feelings away, the more it felt like bursting out all at once," he said, adding that fortunately, his girlfriend Wanda (now his fiancée) was there and recognised it as a panic attack.
The engineer also touched upon issues he faced at Meta. He said Meta had a pretty high bar when it came to code quality, and the code reviews were tough. Yu said there was some tension at times, and he received tough feedback on how to fix the code after numerous reviews. "It sometimes left me feeling bad."
The techie further said that he also had to work harder because people were either on vacation or taking mental health leave. He said he didn't want his team to be held back because of him, so he felt pressured to perform. The engineer said that he also spent about four hours a day on the weekends just to make sure he was keeping up with the pace. "My workload at that time was potentially unhealthy."
Describing what triggered him to move on, Yu said the last straw was when his manager questioned his 'commit count'. He said the process in which engineers write code to the codebase is called "commits" and there was an internal dashboard where employees could see how much code each teammate had done.
Yu said it was not the healthiest thing to make it public, and "it was definitely stressful". It was, he said, frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. The techie believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything but his manager held a different perspective, "and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta".
The engineer said he knew it sounded crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of his life would have ensured financial security, "but I knew it wasn't right for me."
A software engineer with Meta had to leave Rs 3-crore job due to 'pressure' and 'environment of working' that affected his mental health. Eric Yu, 28, experienced his first panic attack while he was working from home. His fingers went completely numb. At first, he ignored it, but it got worse. "An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast," Yu told Business Insider. He got the offer from Meta in 2016 but quit the firm last year.
Also Read: Meta employee fired after 3 years joins Google, says Meta wasn't her dream company, Google was
The former engineer said that his typical day started at 7 am. He worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 pm to 5 pm. Even after work hours, he said he couldn't turn work off — "I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work."
Also Read: ‘This shall be fun’: Fired Meta employee gets overseas 'dream job' with Google
Yu said that he was zoning out and felt intense thoughts. "The more I tried to block my feelings away, the more it felt like bursting out all at once," he said, adding that fortunately, his girlfriend Wanda (now his fiancée) was there and recognised it as a panic attack.
The engineer also touched upon issues he faced at Meta. He said Meta had a pretty high bar when it came to code quality, and the code reviews were tough. Yu said there was some tension at times, and he received tough feedback on how to fix the code after numerous reviews. "It sometimes left me feeling bad."
The techie further said that he also had to work harder because people were either on vacation or taking mental health leave. He said he didn't want his team to be held back because of him, so he felt pressured to perform. The engineer said that he also spent about four hours a day on the weekends just to make sure he was keeping up with the pace. "My workload at that time was potentially unhealthy."
Describing what triggered him to move on, Yu said the last straw was when his manager questioned his 'commit count'. He said the process in which engineers write code to the codebase is called "commits" and there was an internal dashboard where employees could see how much code each teammate had done.
Yu said it was not the healthiest thing to make it public, and "it was definitely stressful". It was, he said, frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. The techie believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything but his manager held a different perspective, "and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta".
The engineer said he knew it sounded crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of his life would have ensured financial security, "but I knew it wasn't right for me."