I'll take "Dickensian Workplace Stories" for $370k, Alex:

My typical day started at 7 a.m. I worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Even after work hours, I couldn't turn work off — I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work.

For six months, from March to September 2020, I was at the lowest point in my life. Every day felt like a grind: I didn't know what I was doing or why I was still working. My performance started dropping — I couldn't focus on my code or keep up with the deadlines.

In my opinion, there's a constructive way to give feedback: "Hey, I like the attempt you made here, and there might be opportunities to improve in this way." But some engineers at Meta lacked tact and nuance: "This is really bad. You shouldn't have written it like this." This kind of feedback makes it sound like this is a black-and-white issue, and it often overlooks the emotional aspect of communication.

I remember one month, I was the only engineer on the Android team because people were either on vacation or taking mental-health leave. I didn't want my team to be held back because of me, so I felt pressured to perform. If I didn't stay up to speed and get those learnings quickly, then I'd be delaying future work streams, which would impact the whole team's progress.

It was frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. I believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything — skills like mentorship, project management, and navigating interpersonal dependencies should also be valued. But my manager held a different perspective, and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta.

What is...a job?