Leave Montreal and My Company to Join Facebook as Prod Eng in Menlo Park? | Hacker News Reader

Leave Montreal and My Company to Join Facebook as Prod Eng in Menlo Park?

1 pointbmelca6 comments

I'm 34. I've been living in Montreal for 6 years now. I have my own IT company (small business where ownership is shared with 3 more owners). I have lots of good friends here as well, we all have babies, etc. I also play music and I'm now starting to get gigs in the city, which has always been a dream for me.

I was contacted by Facebook and they wanted me to join their team as Production Engineer in Menlo Park, California. I passed all the interviews and I have a job offer. I should start on Aug 5 if I say yes.

I'm just wondering if that's a wise decision. I see that moving down there could have a great impact in my professional career for sure. That's the main selling point. But I'm a bit afraid of:

- The costs of living

- Not being able to afford to buy a condo/house...

- My parents live overseas. Getting them a visa to Canada is really easy and has never been an issue. The US is a different story...

- Loosing all my friends here, of course, and feeling disconnected and lonely in California. I only know a friend down there.

- This one is also silly, but I feel that I'd loose the opportunity to have musical gigs, etc. Music is also my passion, so that's why it has a weight in this decision... as silly as it may sound.

What do guys think? Should I only consider the professional impact this move can have and figure the rest out later?

The PE organization has been especially desperate to hire over the last year. The burnout and churn is real. Be wary of what you'd be walking into.

TLDR: Stay where you are.

Cost of Living is extremely high. Look at walkscore.com to see apartment prices. Traffic sucks. LinkedIn has a feature to compute commute times. Select a Facebook job, at the bottoms is the feature. You enter the address of your dwelling, it tells you the compute time. Sounds like you are not in a relationship. Finding a Significant Other is very, very difficult.

The weather is really great. There are redwood forests, beaches and winter snow skiing within driving distance. Great stuff at Farmers' Markets.

Facebook is no longer cool. Apparently their CS graduate acceptance rate was much lower this past Spring.

Oh yeah, I have a wife and a baby

TLDR; Stay where you are.

Long Answer: I'd guess that you're looking for more factors to be able to evaluate the decision. Let me go one by one then add some other thoughts.

1) the cost of living is absurd but you adjust. You may even enjoy HCOL areas - I found that I generally prefer them since I don't really like big houses or having to drive everywhere. Plus the people that live in HCOL areas are usually more dynamic... they kind of have to be.

2) losing the ability to see your family would be a tragedy. I can promise you California isn't worth not getting to see your family.

3) Making friends is just something you figure out. Typically it takes 6-9 months, but only 3-5 months to start feeling lonely. If you battle with depression you might want to be careful.

4) Music should be a big factor. Art and culture matter a lot for where you should live, and you would be leaving a lot behind from what I know about Montreal. Some parts of California have great culture but other parts are terrible. Depending on where you live in the Bay area it could very well be terrible (SF is great though).

IMO... I think you are undervaluing ownership of your own company as well... if your company is stable you pose a better chance to grow it and hit every metric of success instead of just a few. BUT on the other side of the coin FB supposedly pays quite well, and your next job after FB (supposedly employee churn is 4 years or less on average) will also pay well because of the name value on your CV. Grabbing some $$$ quick shouldn't be undervalued.

Lastly, I would also add that Facebook's future is very much in limbo. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where they won't face some sort of regulation in the future AND the value to advertisers has been quickly diminishing. Said another way, in the not too distant future they'll have to start acting like a normal company and worrying where their money is coming from.

Wow, I thought that the professional growth potential from a career standpoint should be the biggest factor to consider, but your answer has left me wondering whether that's really a thing..

That is very much a thing to consider... it just kind of becomes a cost-benefit analysis thing.

FB has some problems that very few companies in the world have... but they've solved most of those problems at this point and given the size of the company and engineering talent it's hard to imagine assignment of some of those problems being given to someone with little time spent at the company. I.E. you'd probably have to wait till you're pretty deep in at FB to be doing the work that you would want to be doing.

How many cool problems could you dig up and solve in that amount of time though? You run the show in your current situation... there's no reason you can't grow the scope of your business to incorporate the professional growth you are looking for. My $0.02 at least

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