The FAANG Burnout Part 1 – Background
They were supposed to be the dream jobs. After five rigorous years of high tech consulting and seven years of climbing the ladder in the competitive world of product management at the heart of Silicon Valley, I had finally made a successful career at not only one, but TWO of the most prestigious companies in the tech industry.
Meta, with it’s forward-thinking innovation at Reality Labs and (at the time) known for it’s mantra of “move fast and break sh#t” and Netflix, the market leader in the streaming industry, with it’s reputation of relentless, cutthroat intensity. Seven years, I thrived as a product manager. I loved the fast-paced environment, the challenges, and the impact I was able to make. But little did I know, the speed and intensity that I loved and thrived in would unravel me from inside out.
What started off so well quickly turned into a nightmare of burnout, toxic leadership, and health issues. This is the story of how I reached my breaking point—and how I found the courage to walk away.
The Allure of FAANG Product Management
At first, the work was exhilarating. The projects, the teams, and the ambitious possibilities—it all felt so right working at these FAANG companies. They were some of the most prestigious companies in the world, known for its innovative culture and high-performing teams. I successfully took on the challenge and was able to prove myself at Meta, Roku, and Netflix. But my experience with one manager took me down a dark and toxic path.
My counterpart, who was another product manager on the team, had just returned from yet another medical leave when I had joined. To my surprise, a couple of weeks later, he resigned. I should have seen it as a red flag, but I was too focused on proving myself to notice.
The Unrealistic Expectations
From day one, the expectations were overwhelming. With no time for any sort of onboarding, I was handed the largest initiative in the organization, with aggressive timelines and little context. The exhilarating pace turned into a never-ending sprint, one that left me breathless and gasping for air. Days bled into nights, and nights bled into weekends.
I found myself working 14 to 16-hour days, just to keep up with the endless stream of meetings and deadlines. In a typical day, I could expect to lead at least 11 to 15 meetings, many of which were packed with cross-functional discussions, prioritization and roadmap strategies, and urgent firefighting. By the time one meeting ended, another would start, and in between those brief intervals, I had to check my Slack messages, emails, and prepare for the next meeting. My REAL work—the kind that required focus, heavy documentation, and deep thinking—was squeezed into margins of the day. There was always more to do, more discussions to catch up on, and no time to think about strategic, scalable solutions.
The Toxic Manager
It wasn’t just the workload that weighed me down—it was the quality of support and guidance, or rather, the lack of it from my direct manager. The one who was supposed to lead and inspire us to do our best work, seemed more interested in setting overly aggressive, unrealistic timelines with a massive scope of work without considering implementation complexities or engineering bandwidth.
She often said, “This company moves fast, but it’s still not as fast as how I had worked in previous companies.” It felt like a strange flex—a way to assert dominance rather than provide any sort of support that the team desperately needed.
Instead of guiding the team, she pushed. Instead of supporting, she criticized. I often felt like a scapegoat, carrying the weight of responsibility for failures that weren’t mine to bear. It became more and more evident by the day that she was not fit to be in a leadership position, and did not know how to properly manage a team, even with an all-star roster.
She was a master at gaslighting in large, cross-functional meetings, making us question our own abilities and judgements. When we were met with challenges or unforeseen complexities, she was quick to point the blame at her PM’s, the team, or the process, often dogpiling on criticism, instead of shielding her team, leaving us to fend for ourselves. It was never her fault. It didn’t help that her inability to make critical, time-sensitive decisions in a fast paced environment often left us stranded, creating critical risks to the seemingly impossible timelines.
Colleagues from other teams would meet with me on the side to see if I’m doing okay, and mentioned how uncomfortable and toxic it was to watch her berate me and the team in such public meetings, and applauded me for keeping my composure and taking it in stride (although I was not okay on the inside).
I worked with countless teams to descope and reprioritize features, create alternative mitigation paths, and communicate all of these changes just to meet the deadlines. But there was no room for compromise in her world.
The Red Flags
The warning signs had been there from the beginning. My counterpart—a fellow PM who had been on the team before me—had already experienced multiple medical leaves. After a brief return to work, he resigned, worn down by the same pressures that were slowly draining me.
Yet, despite these red flags, I pressed on and worked tirelessly. I forged incredibly strong relationships with cross-functional partners, many of whom often empathized and marveled at how we managed to sustain and operate at such an intense pace through all the adversity for so long everyday. Hearing feedback like this was such good affirmation to know that I wasn’t crazy. I was doing the right things. I was doing GREAT work.
And then, finally, despite it all, I was able to accomplish the impossible. I, along with my team successfully led our organization, overcoming obstacle after obstacle through all of the chaos, delivered our first iteration of the product on time. The launch was a huge success, and we miraculously did not encounter any critical bugs or issues, which was unheard of in the world of tech product launches.
The feedback from everyone I worked with was incredible and I received endless praise from colleagues and other leaders who saw the blood, sweat, and tears that had gone into this success—except from my manager. Instead, she was quick to take all the credit for herself during a global cross-functional meeting, and called it “the most successful launch of her career.” Not a single acknowledgement or appreciation for all the hard work from myself and the team that had poured our heart and soul into this product launch. Her response to me just a few hours after our successful launch? “Where are we at with the next wave? We need to get on it as soon as possible.”