Alien Chess
Image by Mark Rabkin
I recently came across a great post titled “The Resilience of Alien Chess”.
The author compares working in a fast-changing environment, like Meta, to playing chess where at any moment a little alien might appear and replace your board with a new one, where everything is different — either the pieces are arranged differently, or you have to play the opposite color. You play on this board for a while and improve the situation, but then the alien appears again and gives you a new board.
This perfectly describes my experience at Meta so far: priorities change, people come and leave, re-orgs, layoffs.
So, this post is from one of the VPs who has been at Meta for 18 years, who says no matter how great a grandmaster you are and can plan several moves ahead — you won’t outplay Meta.
In this game, you can’t predict or prevent changes; instead, you need to:
- Accept that changes are irreversible. The alien that changes the board is part of the game.
- Develop “peripheral vision” to timely detect the “board” changes.
- Learn to quickly adapt to the new environment.
Such alien visits give us the opportunity to grow professionally. And this is what makes working at Meta so interesting.