As the year comes to an end, so too does Facebook’s PSC (Performance Summary Cycle), a biannual review process where you evaluate yourself and others at the company for their impact on the company. Unfortunately for me, all signs point to my project being a resounding failure. While the formal self-review I will submit will discuss the details, I just wanted to dwell for a moment on my failure a bit more abstractly-a bit more emotionally.
For the last couple of months, I worked on an implementation of coroutines for Hacklang that would serve as an alternative to the existing but unpolished version. Unfortunately, despite promising initial results, my poor original design had problems. Upon discovering and fixing those problems much later in the process, the alternative method proved to be a tremendous performance regression from the original—a complete failure and waste of time.
To my frustration, despite the engineering time and effort I spent, I feel like I achieved no progress. At least on the treadmill, you can feel yourself improving over time. But my failure to achieve progress especially stings because, for better or worse, I compare it to those around me. At Facebook, this comes in the form of PSC, posters on the wall proclaiming “Focus on impact” and “Don’t mistake motion for progress”, and peers discussing promotions. All of which is especially emphasized because I have no long-term plans beyond Facebook. Having friends plan for grad school or promotions or company switches just underscores how much progress one could be making by comparison. I have no doubt that this sense is universal. There are truisms and adages galore about comparison and happiness and life and progress printed on motivational posters hung about offices worldwide.
Certainly, in the grand scheme of things, wasting a couple months of a project that ultimately would have been a small milestone towards a larger goal is not a huge travesty. In fact, going into the project and even the team, I knew that failure was always a possibility. And I think I’ll feel better when I am working on the next thing and begin to feel like I’m making progress again. But at the moment, it is the overwhelming sense of failure that colors my daily perspective and it does not seem to be easily thwarted by such proverbs. As is tradition, I want to make a New Years’ Resolution about making progress or self-improvement. And as is tradition, I am likely to fail it. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe this year, when it comes to 2018’s performance review, I’ll be able to say that I learned to cope with failure better.