Indian-origin engineer walks away from Rs 6.5 crore Meta job
Indian-origin engineer Rahul Pandey left everyone surprised in 2022 when he decided to quit a job in which he was earning an annual salary of over Rs 6.5 crore. Rahul Pandey was working as a lead engineer and manager in Meta/Facebook. Talking to Business Insider, Rahul Pandey revealed the main reason behind his decision to quit the high-paying job.
Talking about his experience of working with Facebook in California, US, Rahul said, “While working, I was struggling with anxiety.” In a LinkedIn post, he said, “My journey to count USD 100 bills was not so easy. In fact, for the first six months after joining Facebook, I was extremely worried. As a senior engineer, I felt like I had impostor syndrome, I had to struggle to adapt to the company culture and tooling.”
“There was hesitation in asking for help from someone in work. It seemed that the company would “kick out” a person who was not capable of becoming a senior engineer. He said that after joining the company, Facebook also started struggling, its shares also started falling. I had only been at the company for a year, so I felt it was too early to jump off such a big ship (Facebook). Instead I started focusing on my performance,” Rahul told Business Insider.
In just two years, Rahul Pandey started showing his talent and succeeded in creating a tool which was adopted by everyone in Facebook. The tool developed by Rahul saved a lot of time for the engineers. Rahul Pandey was promoted after this and apart from his basic salary, he got equity of about Rs 2 crore. However due to Covid-19, Pandey started looking for alternative options.
“For my last year, I transitioned into a manager role and switched teams after three years in the same organisation. As 2021 wrapped up, I began exploring the world beyond Meta. After almost a decade in tech, I had achieved some degree of financial freedom, and realised how much more I could learn beyond engineering,” he said.
