At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs.

One of my favorite things about Meta has always been the honest and raw workplace posts people have left throughout the years. There were so many times reading about other people’s experiences in the company really helped me, and I decided that I would leave my own artifact if I was ever laid off to help all future Meta employees who may be struggling with one thing or another. Here’s the saga of my time at Meta:

I joined Meta April 28th 2025. The year before, I was working as a software engineer at Scale AI, and was laid off around September 2025. Layoffs were super rampant during my time there. Scale AI had gone through maybe 6 rounds of layoffs and restructures in the one year I was there, so I had been looking for a new job for a while. During the year 2024, I applied to literally a thousand companies, and the only company that called me for an interview was Meta.

I knew this was a chance I could not let go. So I busted my butt off to make sure I got in. I grinded LeetCode 8 hours a day for a month, passed my screening at the end of December 2024, then proceeded to teach myself system design all of January, and went through my behavioral stories with the finest tooth comb you can imagine. I could not afford to fail the interview. I’d been out of work for a few months, and there was absolutely no way I was going to let go of the one chance I got in 2024.

I did my onsite February 2025, and passed it. I was in team matching for about 2 months, and my recruiter finally called saying there was a team interested in me. Honestly, I was not a fan of the team’s work or the manager, but for me I had no idea if I would get a second chance if said no, so I accepted.

I officially started working in Meta Tel Aviv April 28th. Meta Tel Aviv is one of those offices that comes with a unique challenge. Despite the official language of the company and communications being English, all the meetings and day-to-day convos are in Hebrew. The engineers there are not used to explaining themselves in English, so as someone who is an E4 working their first big tech role, I knew this was going to be tough. I tried my best to keep up and ask for the meetings to be in English, but it came with a lot of resistance from the team, and my manager made a lot of comments saying the other engineers on the team kept complaining about it, so I felt immensely pressured to just continue meetings in Hebrew despite me not being at a level where I could understand or speak about myself in Hebrew. At the time, I felt that since everything else was in English and my 1-1s were in English, I thought I could just carve out my own space and just stay in my lane.

I worked on a few different tasks during the first two months, and in general received a lot of good feedback from my team and manager. Things were OK for a while. Everyone was busy doing their mid-cycle PSC, and since I was TNTE, I was just cruising and trying to learn everything I could from workplace posts and other engineers at the company. Since my teammates didn’t like speaking English, I leaned a lot on other groups and communities in the company, mostly in other offices. Arab@, Muslim@, Palestine@, Women@, any tiny community of things I was interested in, and this is where I found friends and mentorship, and they were the ones who helped me the most in my time here.

Come H2, this is where I am in the middle of my ramp up and need to take on my first bigger project. I had a lot of trouble here. My manager wanted me to find a project and work on it. I really didn’t know how to do this. All the companies where I worked previously just told me what to do and I did it. I talked to a lot of different senior engineers and they suggested some projects, but it seemed everyone was already working on everything, and I couldn’t really find anything. My manager kept pushing me to find something on my own, and wasn’t really giving me any suggestions. Eventually, I got really overwhelmed, so my manager finally suggested a project, and I took it.

I work in a team called Risk Interfaces, one of the things we do in our team is figure out how to reduce financial leakage caused by fraud across Meta’s various products. There was a product called WhatsApp Paid Messaging that had a high failed payment rate, and we needed some way to reduce that leakage happening there. No one on the team had ever worked with a WhatsApp product, so it seemed like a good area for me to make my own space.

However, this is where things start to get rough. WhatsApp, unlike other Meta products, has very strict privacy rules. Only WhatsApp engineers can access WhatsApp data. WhatsApp data cannot be stored in Meta’s servers. It can only be stored in WhatsApp servers. WhatsApp data cannot be used in other Meta products. If you need to use WhatsApp data, you need to decode the data, depersonalize it, and then encode it again afterwards. Even when you get onboarded to WhatsApp, you still are not allowed to access most of the data. It was a nightmare. I had to somehow figure out how to figure out if a WhatsApp transaction was fraud, without using any WhatsApp data, or being able to rely on any other Meta product. No one on the team had ever worked on WhatsApp. The one engineer who did have some experience with WhatsApp was an E5 engineer who was not free to babysit the new girl. I felt alone and isolated and didn’t know how to move forward. Every time I would ask the E5 for any type of help, she would complain to my manager that I wasn’t independent enough, and my manager would just parrot her complaint to me. I was in this state for about a month, until finally my manager asked me if I would like to switch projects, and I readily agreed. I never wanted to work on WhatsApp again.

I completed the new project end to end quickly, and I took on a second project. I’m nearing my 6 month mark at Meta and finally feel I’ve found my stride and that I’m a real Meta engineer. I still don’t have any friends in the office. Again, no one wants to speak English, but I find a lot of camaraderie and allies in other offices. I take some PTO in October. I really needed a break. I’d been working nonstop for almost 6 months.

I mention the 6 month mark for a reason. At Meta Tel Aviv and Meta London, you do not get accepted as an FTE immediately. You need to complete a 6 month probation period, pass it, and only then do you become a full time employee. I was supposed to finish my probation October 28th 2025. I come back from PTO, and continue work as usual. My manager was also on PTO and different business trips all of October and it had been some time since we had a 1-1. We finally have a 1-1 on October 17th, and this is where I get the shock of a lifetime.

10 days before my probation is supposed to end, my manager tells me he does not have enough signals that I am performing on my level, and wants to extend my probation two more months. I was speechless. I had no idea he was unhappy with my performance. He kept saying ‘he had no bad signals, just not enough good signals’, and kept assuring me it was nothing bad that I did, and he just needed more time to make a decision. He said I’d never worked on an E4 level project, and hadn’t yet seen me take on something complex. I asked some of my friends and mentors if this was normal, and most of them were shocked and had never heard of a probation extension, and were confused what an ‘E4’ level project was. I found some stories on workplace about the probation extension, and eventually calmed down. A probation extension is not a PIP. It just happens when the manager does not have enough information to make a call on whether or not they should keep an engineer. It still obviously isn’t great, because it shows your manager still isn’t sure about you even 6 months in, but it’s salvageable.

I worked my butt off in November. I take on a much more ambitious project, building a whole new system E2E for another team that touches a few different systems. I hold a design review. I hold a weekly. I lead multiple meetings with all the stakeholders. I treated the project like a startup where I was the CEO. Everyone was impressed and complimenting me, my seniors, my manager, other engineers from other teams, my friends. I felt confident that I had finally shown the E4 signals I needed, and my manager continued to give me really good feedback.

On November 28th, I have another 1-1 with my manager. I had been asking him throughout November how I was doing with my probation, and he always gave me good feedback. Now I’m one month before my probation is supposed to end. I’m about to deliver my project 2 weeks before the deadline. There are code freezes happening all of December, and I am feeling good and was planning to use the extra time to explore other areas where I could help the team.

My manager tells me in the 1-1 on November 28th, “if the probation ended today, you would not pass. The team thinks you have no idea what you are doing, and that you are writing AI code without reviewing it, and that they have to write the code for you. You’re also posting too much on workplace, this isn’t instagram.”

Honestly, I don’t know how I kept my emotions in check when he said all that. I was just so shocked. I think I left the 1-1, commandeered a meeting room, and just stared at the wall for an hour. I had no idea what to do. I could not reconcile what he said with reality. My metrics were good, everyone gave me good feedback, I had the fastest time to close on the team, I had completed multiple projects beforehand and was about to finish this one early. My director had literally just celebrated that I was the top AI user in the entire org beforehand, and that everyone should learn from me. The company had just announced we needed to have 55% of our code be AI-generated. What on earth was I supposed to do to show that I knew what I was doing without using AI with one month left with all the code freezes?

I talk to my mentor, and he is just as shocked as me. He tells me, “Listen, we’ve assumed good intentions long enough. This just doesn’t seem normal. Talk to your M2. But you should assume your manager has already made the decision to let you go. You should start looking for another job.”

I go talk to my director. He says something like, “yeah we want you to use AI, but we really care about code quality.” I respond back, “I’ve never caused a bug, a SEV, or broken production, and I have the fastest time to close in the team. I’m not sure what the problem with my code quality is.” My director doesn’t have a good answer to that, he says something like “there’s too many comments on my diffs”, but he’ll talk to my manager, and “no, my manager for sure hasn’t made his decision yet. You still have a chance.”

My manager comes back, and he thinks it’s funny I talked to the director. He does not tell me any new information or any feedback on how to actually pass probation. All he says is I need to work on being ‘more independent’, and code quality, which to him is ‘less comments on diffs’. I have literally 5 meetings with him that week, and every meeting I push him to give me something actionable to actually work on. In the fifth meeting, he gets frustrated and says that I’m just pushing back on the feedback and not accepting it.

When you have 5 meetings with your manager, and you still are not able to get anything tangible or actionable to work on, and your probation is supposed to end in a few weeks, and you literally have no idea what you’re supposed to do, and your manager keeps giving you conflicting, last-minute feedback about your performance, the problem is not you. The problem is the subjectivity of your manager.

It was so hard to accept the fact that he’d made his decision, and nothing I did would change it. I had no idea what to do in this one month. I obviously did not want to be let go, but it was obvious he was just biding his time to get rid of me. I remember watching Ethan Evans interview for the first time, and he explained how a manager could fire anyone they wanted. They could take the same exact metrics, and paint them in either a good light or a bad light, depending on their objective. My manager could say, “her metrics are the highest in the team, and she’s able to build things so fast and has really increased the output of the team by 20%. The team is amazed at the care she puts into each diff” or he could say “well, her metrics are the highest in the team, which shows she values speed over quality, and her code velocity is making it hard for the team to maintain the quality of our codebase, and it’s only a matter of time before it causes a SEV or breaks production.” The same exact information. Two completely different narratives.

I knew nothing I did would change the outcome. He’d already spun whatever story he wanted in the background, and it was ‘too late’ to say my side. But at the same time, I refused to go down without a fight. I worked so hard to get into Meta, and all I’d wanted was a fair chance to work here. I knew I would have been a superstar engineer on literally any other team, and I wanted to at least leave in a way that I would not regret.

I complain about my manager to HR. My manager takes it as a joke and still doesn’t change anything. I then proceed to ask the entirety of Meta for help. Some of the communities I’m in raise my case to the people above my director. It gets nowhere. I complain to communities in other offices. They try to raise my case further. It gets nowhere. I complain to the DE&I director, again, nothing. I complain to every single person under the sun in the hopes something will change. The whole time I’m doing this, I’m still working my butt off to finish my project. I would work from 8am to 9pm every single day including weekends. If any diff had more than 5 comments, I would abandon it and redo the diff from scratch. Anytime I used AI to write a diff, I would rewrite the entire diff by hand, just to make it could not be said the diff was AI-generated. I refused to let my manager have one single bad thing to say about me that month. I was still pragmatic. I started applying elsewhere, but the job market is absolutely brutal and I get nothing. Remember, the only interview I got in 2024 was Meta. I did not want to go back to that. I did not want to interview again. I knew finding another job was going to be even harder than what I was going through, so I continue to do absolutely anything to stay in Meta.

I end up sending an email to an HR director in the US saying my manager had violated the code of conduct, and was evaluating me based on race and not my actual performance. I cited a lot of different evidence why I thought that was the case. The HR director gets back to me and sends someone to talk to me. Here’s the timeline:

Monday morning: I have another 1-1 with my manager. There’s 10 days left for my probation. I ask him how I’m doing. He refuses to say anything and says he still hasn’t made up his mind.

Monday afternoon: I have a meeting with an HR manager about my situation. She seemed to be taking it seriously. But I had already lost hope that HR was going to do anything.

Wednesday morning: I get a message from my manager saying he had ‘good news’. He panic calls me and says that I passed probation. He was incredibly rattled, and talked for like 30 minutes how we needed to have ‘trust’ so that we would be able to work together going forward. I knew there was no way I could ever trust him, so I just let him talk.

I finally pass probation, 8 months in. I’m exhausted. I don’t want to be on this team anymore. I never want to see or talk to my manager ever again. The problem is, PSC is just around the corner, and I know he’s going to make me look bad on purpose. I tell HR and the HR manager that I don’t feel comfortable with him representing me in PSC, and feel he is going to retaliate. They respond with very HR-like messages saying the PSC system is ‘really robust’, it will be fine, they will have a HR representative to sit in to make sure there is no bias and discrimination. I know its BS, but there is really nothing I can do. I could have the best self-review in the world, but he could delete or change whatever he wanted in his version. I ask HR for an exemption to change teams. They refuse because I still don’t have one year tenure, and I don’t have a rating yet. I ask them, “how can I stay on a team where I’ve filed a discrimination complaint about my manager?” or something like that. They still don’t allow me to change teams.

I let a million people read my self-review and give me feedback, but again, I know he’s going to screw me over on purpose. He only really had two options, to either give me a Meets Most or Meets All. I had just passed probation one week before PSC, so I thought maybe with that, and with the HR complaint, he would push to give me a Meets All so I could change teams. But again it was 50/50.

I go on PTO and travel with my family to Georgia (the country) at the beginning of January, and do my best to decompress. I was still fighting with HR to give me an exemption to change team during PTO, because I could not imagine going back to that team. My manager sends me an email with the worst congratulations ever for becoming a full time employee. In it, he says yes I passed probation, but I still haven’t proven that I am ‘independant’ enough, and my code quality is still a problem for the team. Again, I’ve never caused a SEV, a bug, or broken production. I just feel so frustrated. He can’t let go of me as easily now that I’m a full time employee, but I know he’s going to make my life a living hell and try to get rid of me during PSC. I continue to try to interview elsewhere, but again, the job market is absolutely terrible at this time.

On January 9th, in the middle of my PTO, my father gets unexpectedly arrested in Georgia.

I completely forget about work. I immediately take emergency admin leave for a month and half, and focus everything on my father’s case. I’m stuck in Georgia for 3 weeks, going to court, talking to lawyers, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I go to like 4 different hearings, and have to watch my father age 10 years in the span of a few days. I fight with the police and lawyers and the jail employees and everyone under the sun there to try to get my father just normal conditions and try to get him out. It was one of the hardest months of my life. Eventually, my father is extradited to the US. The context here is 15 years ago, when he was living in America, he didn’t show up for some trial, and they had an arrest warrant out for him that was sent to Interpol. It was the craziest month of my life. I felt I was in a movie or a nightmare or just on a different planet. I didn’t feel like my life was real in that month. I can’t explain what it feels like to see your father being treated like a criminal, for a crime he didn’t do, when he was just a free man literally yesterday. I could not comprehend why they were treating my father like that. When I eventually left Georgia, I just came back home and stared at the wall for a few days. It was so hard to wrap my head around how our life had just turned upside down within a few hours, and everything at work seemed so dumb and faraway.

I spent the month just trying to remedy the gap my father left in our lives with his abrupt leave. I find an old phone and was able to move all his data to it. I access my father’s bank account for the first time in my life, and just feel so weird seeing how low the number is. At this point, I’ve been working in Meta for about 9 months. Seeing that my father had less money than me even though he had been working for over 30 years was so hard to grasp. I know I need to keep my job, but how can I go back to work with that manager, knowing he is going to try everything to get rid of me?

I keep taking emergency leave and PTO while waiting for my PSC results to come out. I just want to know what to do. Could I potentially get a Meets All and move to Meta US to be closer to my father? I really didn’t know what would happen. But I just needed to know what my rating was.

My rating comes out. My manager, of course, doesn’t release it. I message him for the first time in 2 months. Mind you, he has not asked about me at all during this time, not even to ask about my father’s wellbeing despite knowing he was arrested. My manager wants to have a meeting to discuss the rating. I tell him I’m really not in the right headspace for it, and just want to know what it is. He keeps pushing for a meeting despite me saying I am fasting (it was Ramadan), and sick, and not in the right headspace. Eventually, I just agree to have a meeting just so I can see what my rating is despite me feeling absolutely terrible.

He starts to talk really really fast in the meeting. The only thing I hear is Meets Most.

He goes on for 30 minutes talking about everything I did wrong during the half and why they gave me a Meets Most. I could not care less. I just needed to know what my rating was so I could know what to do. He talks, by himself, for 30 minutes straight. I do not say a word. Eventually, I think he notices I am not talking, and asks if I ‘agree’ with the feedback. I say, “I need to think about it. Oh, I need to go,” and then I just leave the call.

Despite everything, I still tried to keep remembering my manager was human. He had 4 small children, it was probably tough to have such a large team, there was probably a lot of pressure from leadership to mark people as low performers. But he just never gave me the same courtesy. He dismissed my humanity, saw nothing in front of him except a process to be done, a number to be reduced, purposely made me look bad in PSC in his review, and just made me feel sub-human. I never wanted to see him or talk to him again in my life. Any leader can make tough calls, but a good leader is the one who chooses to do them with humanity. He did not need to do or say half the things he did, but he still chose to do them anyway, and see me as nothing.

I try again to get an exemption to change teams. HR refuses again, this time citing my ‘Meets Most’ rating. I’m still trying to get interviews for other companies at this point. I use every single paid leave under the sun. I get no interviews for months, I then get some but then get rejected. I have to somehow regrind leetcode, and system design, and relearn how to code with AND without AI, all while managing this huge hole and legal battle in my personal life. It’s incredibly hard, but there’s no path forward but through him.

I’m a religious Muslim, so one verse from the Quran that kept me going was:

أم حسبتم أن تدخلوا الجنة ولما يأتكم مثل الذين خلوا من قبلكم مستهم البأساء والضراء وزلزلوا حتى يقول الرسول والذين آمنوا معه متى نصر الله ألا إن نصر الله قريب

“Or do you expect to enter Paradise before the example of those who came before you had reached you? Adversity and hardship had afflicted them, and they were so shaken up, that the Messenger and those who believed with him said, ‘When is God’s victory?’ Indeed, God’s victory is near.”

I knew God would help me. When I joined Meta, I swore I would help every single person who ever reached out to me that had issues with any Meta product, and alhamdullah I kept that promise. I knew God would not let this go. When God makes a promise, He always follows through on it. He promised his victory was near, and I knew I just had to have faith in him and keep going. Keep trying, despite everything. God told us in the Quran, “do not despair of the mercy of Allah.” So even if it was so hard, I kept having faith and hope things would eventually get better. This was just a tough season of life, I would get through it.

Both me and my manager get the layoff email on May 20th, 2026.

I felt relief and victory. I felt a sense of freedom I had not felt in a long time. It was sad to lose my job, but I was happy and content that I’d done everything in my power. I was content with how I was leaving Meta. I had made absolutely amazing friends, and learned so much through all the hardships that I faced here. I got to see the amazing work that goes on behind the scenes to make this amazing social media engine work. It was a privilege to be able to pull back the curtains, and be a part of something greater than myself. I know Meta gets a lot of bad rep, but there’s also so much good being done on these platforms. People building businesses, connecting with others, sharing stories and voices we would never hear otherwise. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that when your job is far away from all of that. But I always tried to remember there’s a person on the other end of the code that I am writing, that is using Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook to connect with the humanity of others. This is not a simple thing. This is a beautiful glorious purpose to be a part of.

I was able to stay one year at Meta. I’m grateful for every single person who has ever helped me along the way, and know that I’ve been paying it forward every single day. There were so many amazing people I met at Meta, and though I felt a sense of freedom and relief to finally be laid off and free, I will miss all the friends and wonderful people that I met on this journey.

I still don’t know where I’m going next. I don’t have an offer or another job lined up. I have some interviews, but I also want to take some time to myself to just breathe and explore. I have no idea what’s going to happen with my dad nor when I will ever get to see him again. Despite everything, I would like to come back to Meta one day. So many people I’ve talked to here talk about how awesome Meta was in the old days, and even though a lot has changed, I’m hoping one day the company goes back to that and I can actually experience what it was like.

Thank you to every single person who’s read and come this far. I would love to stay connected with any Meta folks who are interested. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a connection request there! https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruba-sbeih

I wanted to leave this saga off with a quote from Facebook’s very own little red book: “Remember, people don’t use Facebook because they like us. They use it because they like their friends.”