If this is the first time you are able to read one of the entries in this blog, welcome!! I apologize for the past 60+ that you haven't been able to read, so this one is for you English speaker ;)

When people leave Facebook, they write a final post sharing their experiences and thanking the people they have worked with, we call it the "badge post", as you include a photo of your badge (duhh). I have decided to leave Facebook, therefore, I made my badge post in which I wanted to thank the amazing people I met and worked with for the past three years. As the post became too long due to large number of people, I had to reduce what I wanted to say, but then again as I'm not a person of few words I decided to share more of my thoughts and feelings of this adventure here.

Facebook is everything you can imagine and so much more, it's definitely far from perfect but in many senses it does deserve the status of one of the best companies to work for. My NDA prevents me from talking about our work in detail, but it does not from talking about my own experience. These are the things I highlight from the past three years

Needless to say, people are and will always be the main thing that make or break someone's experience in a job (or at least for me). Leaving Mexico felt extremely bitter, for many reasons but specially because my coworkers had become my family too, and part of me wanted the adventure of joining a big tech company but the other part knew that it would hardly feel like working with your family. Three years and hundreds of stakeholders later, I was proven wrong.

Life at facebook can easily be compared to a rollercoaster, scary and fun. Every six months, new projects start, you share the rollercoaster with many people (tons of stakeholders), it starts going up slowly for a month, and the following five months are pure ups, downs and turns in many different directions that leave you dizzy and confused, and wondering if you've been in that for a minute or for a lifetime. Only to start all over again. That's why we make a distinction between years and Facebook years, because every Faceversary (the anniversary of the day you joined FB) feels as it's been both a week and lifetime, I know it's hard to explain so let me share our favourite meme for this occasion.

As I said, Facebook is everything you would expect, it's full of smart (really really smart) people, therefore the generalized impostor syndrome we all face, you learn in every single one of the 30 mins meeting, because we also move fast. But dealing with ambiguity is one of our values, because at times we also move slow. Most people are friendly and always willing to help, there's a culture of thanking and acknowledging others, people are solution oriented. The reality is that Facebook is too *much to handle (pun intended), you learn very early that you will not know it all, that working with ambiguity and thriving on the unknown is required.

Facebook has been my home for the past three years, it's been my school and my playground, I've met incredible people from all over the world, from countries I hadn't heard of; I laughed, danced, cried, complained, but overall I learned and I changed. The constant conversations and acknowledgment of diversity, inclusion, feedback, mental health, personal development, and so much more have taught me life lessons, I am smarter, more critical and kinder thanks to the past three years, so I would be lying if I didn't say I feel sad to leave, but it's time for me to prioritize other things that matter in life and continue building myself with these learnings in mind.