Meta's ex-Morgan Stanley CFO was one of its least efficient SQL users

Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, has spent 17 years with the tech giant, but once upon a time she was an analyst at Morgan Stanley. In a recent podcast with Stripe founder John Collison, Li revealed how life in banking differs from life in Big Tech, and how it was similar.

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Both industries have grandiose personalities at the helm. In banking, Li worked under Michael Grimes, Morgan Stanley's famously personable technology investment banking head. She described Grimes (who recently left to join the Trump administration) as an "endlessly curious" person who will "outwork you and outlearn you," whatever the subject. Li said that it was a "spectacular thing as a young person starting in your career to see what excellence at this [level] looks like." 

At Meta, Li has been working under the similarly distinct character that is Mark Zuckerberg. Li said Meta's founder "walks that line between being direct but kind in an extremely good way," and said he has a clear vision on what he wants the world to be.

Li said that banking is "super organized [and] super structured," but Facebook had a complete lack thereof when she joined. She said engineers would often make changes to Facebook's code without notifying anyone, and she would "of course" have to chase them down for discussions when they did. A banking engineer that left for big tech last year told us that the situation is the inverse in finance, where engineers are waylaid by the constant need to ask for permission when making changes to code. 

At Meta, Li was also prone to acts of benevolence from colleagues when she was underperforming. Within her first few months, she was invited to a meeting by a data analyst who said she was one of the "five users of SQL who consumed too much power." The analyst, who was acting entirely unprovoked according to Li, "then taught us to write better queries," rather than asking her to 'pls fix.' In contrast, her training in banking was much less personal, revolving around "find[ing] the backup to everything so that two years later someone else can do this." She said that, in banking, senior staff "don't even need to know your name" to train you. 

Meta can be callous too, however. It laid off thousands of workers earlier this year as it aimed for the "non-regrettable attrition" of low-performers. Morgan Stanley has been cutting staff this year as well, but is targeting low-performers in much less brazen fashion.

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