Ex-Facebook Engineer Dishes on the Company’s Work Culture on YouTube

When Patrick Shyu was fired from his job at Facebook, he took to his thriving YouTube channel to express his feelings about the situation.

Shyu, who was a software engineer on the social media giant, poked fun at his former employer in a video called “Day in the Life of a Facebook Software Engineer.” The particular day he was referring to in the title was actually the day he was fired, which was about less than a month ago.

In the clip, Shyu acted out a scene in which he pretends to get fired by a human resources representative. The HR rep allegedly fired him, in part, because she didn’t like his YouTube channel.

Shyu also ridiculed Facebook’s work culture, accusing it of being a “popularity contest.” He alleged that ideas and projects are green-lit mostly based on the likes and comments they get.

“Imagine receiving multiple notifications every day where people are just telling me what they’ve accomplished, how great they are,” he noted.

Shyu’s YouTube channel “TechLead,” which currently has more than 500,000 subscribers, mainly sheds light into his life as a software developer. The videos are quite popular, fetching between a few hundred thousand and over 1 million views each.

He uploaded a video over a week ago titled, “How much I make on 1,000,000 YouTube views (after getting fired from Facebook).”

In it, Shyu claimed that he’s making well over $500,000 on the site.

“It’s funny that I’m generating more on YouTube than what I made as a tech lead at Google or as a staff software engineer at Facebook,” he said.

Since he was fired on August 26, Shyu has so far published six videos that poked fun at Facebook, reports CNBC.

The very first video he uploaded since he got booted out was a video titled “I got fired from Facebook (for having a YouTube channel).” The video appears to have been shot from his car, just after leaving the office.

“I know that everybody is shocked,” he said. “And at a dire time like this, I feel like what we really need to do is just take a pause, and thank our sponsors.”

Based on his LinkedIn account, Shyu worked as a software developer for almost four years at Google before joining Facebook in May 2018.

In Shyu’s latest video, he accused Facebook employees of constantly boasting about accomplishments on Workplace, the company’s internal social network, no matter how mundane they were.

“It’s kind of this game for people to get as many likes and comments on their posts,” he said. “If you’re into popularity contests, if you thrive in that type of environment then you’ll probably do really well.”

Featured Image via YouTube / TechLead

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