Alien Chess
Image by ChatGPTI 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 colour. 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: frequently changing priorities, re-orgs, key stakeholders on my project affected by layoffs, people come and leave, etc.
So, that post is from one of the VPs who has been at Meta for 18 years, and he says that no matter how great a grandmaster you are — you won’t outplay Meta. The company changes to fast. 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.