Indian-origin techie quit Rs 6.5 crore Meta job after working for 5 years. Here's why

Former tech lead and Manager at Meta, Rahul Pandey went on to build his own startup Taro. (Image credit: LinkedIn)

Rahul Pandey was a tech lead and manager at Meta. He worked at the tech giant for five years, earning a salary of more than Rs 6.5 crore a year, before he quit in 2022. Speaking about his experience of working with Facebook in California, the Indian-origin engineer said that he struggled with anxiety.

"My journey was not a straight shot to counting $100 bills," he wrote in a LinkedIn post. "In fact, for the first six months after I joined Facebook, I was extremely anxious. I felt imposter syndrome as a senior engineer, I struggled to adapt to the company's culture and tooling."

Pandey was also hesitant about asking for help at work because he thought it would "out" him as someone who didn't deserve to be a senior engineer. His morale received another blow just a year after joining as Facebook began to struggle as a company and its stocks tanked. Several of Pandey's colleagues quit and joined other companies and the product he worked on was mired with delays. "I had only been at the company for a year, though, so I felt it was too soon to jump ship. Instead, I made a concerted effort to improve my performance," he told Business Insider.

Two years after joining Facebook, Pandey finally hit peak productivity. He built an internal tool that was adopted throughout the organisation which ended up saving a lot of time for the engineers. "I not only had the technical knowledge to complete my work, but I also had enough context to lead projects. This is a critical part of being a senior engineer and beyond (staff or principal engineer)," Pandey said.

Soon, he was promoted and granted a large equity valued at Rs 2 crore in addition to his basic salary of about Rs 2 crore. But as Covid hit, Pandey began to explore options outside Facebook's parent company.

"For my last year at Facebook, I transitioned into a manager role and switched teams after three years in the same organisation. As 2021 wrapped up, I began exploring the world beyond Meta," he told Business Insider. After almost ten years in tech, I had achieved some degree of financial freedom, and I realised how much more I could learn beyond engineering."

He then quit the tech giant in 2022 to build his own startup, Taro, to help other software engineers grow their careers.

Speaking about the over-Rs 6 crore compensation that he received from Meta, Pandey told the publication, "My total compensation in 2021 exceeded $800,000 due to sustained strong performance and a run-up in the Meta stock price. I was in the top 1 percent of income earners in the country! At that level, the money doesn't actually feel deserved: luck plays a huge role."

Read more: Techie quits Rs 3 crore pa Meta job after having panic attacks: 'I ignored it, but it got worse'