With tech and social media companies including Twitter, Meta, Google and Microsoft laying off thousands of employees across the world, a 28-year-old former software engineer with Meta said in an interview that he quit his $370,000 job at Meta due to rising panic attacks as he hit the lowest point of his life.
Eric Yu, speaking to Business Insider, said, “I know it sounds crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of my life would have ensured financial security, but I knew it wasn't right for me.”
In 2016, Eric received job offers from Google and Facebook, however he chose Facebook because he loved its campus and it “seemed more like a startup and less "corporate" than Google”.
He said that the first year and a half at the company were “pretty great” but about over two years later, Eric began experiencing anxiety.
Explaining his schedule, he told Business Insider that he started his day at 7am and worked till noon. After taking a break for lunch and a few meetings, Eric used to dive back into intense coding blocks from about 2:30 pm to 5 pm.
“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.”
{{/usCountry}}“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.”
{{/usCountry}}Recalling his first panic attack during work, Eric said that once when he was working from home in 2019, around 4pm his left pinky finger went numb and within an hour his ears were ringing along with his heart beating extremely fast.
“I was zoning out and felt intense thoughts. It felt like a water dam — like if too much water pushed against it, it might break, and all the water would pour out. The more I tried to block my feelings away, the more it felt like bursting out all at once. Fortunately, my girlfriend Wanda (now my fiancée) was there and recognized it as a panic attack,” said Eric.
While Eric thought it was a one-time incident, in the following months, these attacks kept recurring and got “progressively worse”.
He said, “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.”
Eric emphasised on Meta's expectations when it came to code quality. He said that while several places were lenient with code reviews, that wasn't the case with Meta. “At Meta, there's a strong emphasis on writing code the right way, and you have to follow specific design patterns and architecture styles.”
Adding that code reviews were difficult, Eric said that several times he was left feeling bad.
“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.”
Eric highlighted that there were times when he worked more than his teammates. He said, “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…So I went the extra mile to get things done: I worked until 8 p.m. (much later than most employees), and I also spent about four hours a day on the weekends just to make sure I was keeping up with the pace.”
He added, “My workload at that time was potentially unhealthy. I should have just told my manager that I couldn't handle it and that I needed more people to help me out.”
During his last days at Meta, Eric was triggered because when he switched teams his manager told him that his commit count — the process of writing code and adding it to codebase — was low. He explained that during his onboarding to the new team, things weren't made clear to him.
“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.”
During the pandemic, Eric decided to quit Meta and after intense planning invested in house hacking. Once he and his fiance began making $10,000, he decided to quit Meta.
“The experience was underwhelming. I was at home and didn't see my coworkers in person; there was no farewell party or formal goodbye. After my last meeting, I closed my laptop and felt relieved: 'Wow, I'm done.'”