First week at Meta complete. Yes, really. This old dog, born long before the iPhone and social media, has joined the Kool Kids and will be “building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”

Read on for why I made the jump from Docusign and for my first impressions of Meta.

The first factor is scale of impact. As an engineer you want to get your product into as many hands as possible, to have a positive influence on as many people as possible. Meta has well over 3 billion monthly active users and Meta apps represent a significant percentage of all mobile data traffic. People use the apps to run businesses, connect with family and friends, organise life-saving care, or to coordinate a vast variety of social events. It’s hard to find a company that is having such a profound impact on peoples’ lives.

Sitting on the Tube this evening I glanced at my neighbours. Most were on their phones and many were checking Instagram or Facebook, or sending messages on WhatsApp. These Apps really have become the fabric of our modern world.

Meta Apps might not all be to my taste, but I’m clearly in the minority, and the vast majority of you are using them on a daily basis.

  1. Facebook has 3.07 billion monthly active users (see more Facebook stats here)
  2. WhatsApp has at least 2 billion monthly active users
  3. Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users (see more Instagram stats here)
  4. Messenger’s potential advertising reach is 947 million (see more Messenger stats here)

The second factor is proximity to cutting edge Artificial Intelligence. Meta is one of a very small set of companies that can claim to be leading the charge in AI; from a fundamental research, development and deployment perspective. I want to get a front-row seat at this pivotal moment in the evolution of software development and automation. My team as Meta will be testing and deploying the latest AI models.

The third factor is scale of challenge. Everything at Meta is an order of magnitude bigger: monthly active users, number of hacked accounts, volume of content posted, number of data centres, Graphical Processing Units deployed, speed of code deployment… As an engineer I’m excited to confront these challenges, where even a small difference (in performance, latency etc) gets amplified to very, very large numbers once deployed at Meta scale.

The fourth factor is risk taking and innovation. Meta makes big bets and is investing massively in what it believes to be the computing and social network platforms of the future. It will be refreshing to work for a company that has such a strong appetite for innovation and risk.

Now, I shan’t claim that this was an easy decision. As anyone who has watched the Social Dilemma knows, social networking and the surveillance capitalist economy is not without its significant issues, and that is probably an understatement. We really don’t know what the large scale societal impacts will be, but we are starting to see many (predictable?) harms. It’s clearly not just about providing free technology to help people organise a birthday party, or to connect with long-lost friends. Now I’m on the inside I look forward to understanding a lot of the complexity and nuance of these difficult issues around safety, monetisation, harm, privacy, content moderation, manipulation etc. I was impressed this week that executives and leaders did not shy away from these hard topics, but addressed them head on.

I’m excited to start this new chapter, and spent the week “drinking from the firehose” — learning about the Meta specific culture, tools and processes used to deploy thousands of code changes a month to billions of people. I was very impressed by the quality of the Meta onboarding, as well as my new “metamates”…

It’s time to go Build Awesome Things!