It is common to hear that employees at Facebook get more burnouts compared to those at Google. Facebook does not necessarily have more projects per person – and I agree with what TechLead has said – it’s more about how the systems are set up, particularly when it comes to the criteria of how the companies evaluate their employees.

The performance metrics at Google are Complexity, Impact, and Leadership, while Facebook’s are Impact, Better Engineering, People, and Direction.

I’ll skip Google. But in Facebook, the Impact and Better Engineering sound a bit of a paradox. Because one wants to “break things” to ship as many features as possible in order to make product impact quickly, but could possibly sacrifice the engineering quality.

The People and Direction is more or less a paradox too – employees can be trampling on each others’ works to lead with a new direction of their owns for the same project. But being too aggressive like this could make them lose on the People metrics. So they learn to be passive aggressive.

It’s the constant battle with the paradoxical performance system that can make Facebookers feel more stressful.