I definitely think this could be the perfect agent for Smart Glasses like the Meta Ray-bans. Having both audio and video input and getting real-time data for any situation, whether that is pleasure, i.e. travelling, doing something professionally, writing docs or working with tools.

So many opportunities!

Senior Leadership @ Meta | Mentor | Coach | Tech Advisor

Alexander Rashkov

Congratulations on securing an L4 role at Google. Compared to Meta, where IC4 / L4 is at the transient level, i.e. we expect people to get promoted within a certain period, in Google, L4 is a terminal/long-term level where you can stay without needing to progress to the next level, i.e. no clock.

### **Engineering Levels Overview**

- **L4** - 1-5 years of industry experience, sometimes awarded to high-potential new grads and PhDs.
- **L5** - Senior Software Engineer: 6-9 years of industry experience. This is the level most engineers are at internally within Google. You're expected to be able to operate with little direction and handle complex tasks on your own.
- **L6** - Staff Software Engineer: 9+ years of experience and an expectation that you have solid interpersonal skills. Many engineers will start managing more extensive projects and teams at this point. A promotion from L5 to L6 is more exponential in nature, and candidates rarely get hired for this role externally.

### Growth Strategies

Focusing on several key areas will be crucial to accelerate your promotion from L4 to L5 at Google within the next 1-1.5 years. Here are some strategies tailored to your situation:

**1\. Get a Mentor**

- **Find a Suitable Mentor**: Look for a mentor who has successfully navigated the path from L4 to L5 or beyond. A mentor can provide insights, advice, and guidance specific to Google's culture and expectations.
- **Leverage Google's Culture**: Google's culture is conducive to mentoring. Take advantage of this by seeking mentors within and outside your immediate team.

**2\. Treat Your Manager as a Mentor**

- **Build a Strong Relationship**: Develop a positive, collaborative relationship with your manager. View them as a partner in your career growth.
- **Regular Feedback**: Actively seek and be open to feedback from your manager. Demonstrating that you can accept and act on feedback positively is crucial for your growth.
- **Set Expectations**: Communicate your career aspirations to your manager and work together to create a plan for achieving them.
- **Set Clear Goals**: Work with your manager to set clear and achievable goals that align with the L5 expectations. Use these goals to guide your development and track your progress.

**3\. Demonstrate Leadership**

- **Active Participation**: Speak up in meetings, contribute ideas, and participate in decision-making processes. Show confidence and back your suggestions with data and logical reasoning.
- **Lead Projects**: Take ownership of complex projects that involve cross-team collaboration. Show that you can manage and drive these projects to successful completion.
- **Influence and Persuasion**: Develop your skills in influencing and persuading others. This can involve presenting compelling arguments, negotiating, and building consensus.

**4\. Enhance Technical Skills**

- **Deepen Expertise**: Continue to develop deep expertise in your core technologies and stay updated with the latest advancements.
- **Innovate**: Propose and implement solutions that address complex problems or improve existing systems. Contribute to the technical vision of your team.

**5\. Deliver High-Impact Results**

- **Strategic Projects**: Focus on projects that have a significant impact and align with organizational goals. Choose visible projects and demonstrate your ability to handle complexity.
- **Quantify Impact**: Measure and effectively communicate the impact of your work. Use metrics and data to highlight your contributions and successes.

**6\. Mentor and Guide Others**

- **Mentorship**: Actively mentor junior engineers, providing guidance on their projects, conducting code reviews, and helping them navigate challenges.
- **Knowledge Sharing**: Share your expertise through tech talks, documentation, and informal training sessions. Foster a culture of continuous learning within your team.

**7\. Build a Strong Network**

- **Internal Networking**: Develop strong relationships within your team and across the organization. Networking can provide support, opportunities, and visibility for your work.
- **Seek Sponsorship**: Identify a senior leader/engineer who can advocate for your promotion. A sponsor can provide valuable guidance and support during the promotion process.

**8\. Seek Continuous Feedback and Improve**

- **Regular Feedback**: Consistently seek feedback from your manager, peers, and mentor. Use this feedback to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.
- **Self-Assessment**: Regularly assess your performance against the L5 expectations. Identify gaps and work proactively to address them.

Best of luck in your journey to next level!

Generally you will need about a year after you join a team to be eligible for an internal move. In the first role / team you have the opportunity to ramp up and build good context of the tooling, languages, libraries and develop strengths in speicific areas. 

**Transferable Skills**

While the actual technical work might not look so interesting, developing indepth domain knowledge withing your org, establishing strong relations with other engineers and XFNs, getting good grasp on how to navigate embiguous situations and structure your projects, all of these beahviours and skills are transferable.

At this point your clock is already running, i.e. you have about 24 months to progress from IC3 to IC4 and if you switch a team and you are in the same position that could cause just more headaches and make things tougher.

**Seek Mentorship**

One strong advise here, find mentors both inside and outside of the team. Use the person inside to help you with ramping up faster, grow your scope and deliver results that will support your promotion. 

With the external mentor try to focus more on the soft skills. This could be structuring and organising your projects, defining success criteria, communication, etc. That's a person that may not have much context on your current technical and problem space, but they can help with all other general groweth areas. Look for someone that has grown from IC3 to IC4+ internally this is great way to learm from the experience of another person.

Finding a mentor with the right experience aligned to your long term goals is also important. If you'd like to move to AI/ML space, speak to someone that has done similar transition. It's highly likely that the skills you can develop in your current role both soft skills and technical will be required in the new AI space.

This all depends on the current level and stage of your career. I am reading this as early position and somewhat as a Junior level role (correct me if that's wrong)

In such case if you have done 3+ months you can use that and frame it either as a contract job on your resume or Internship. Both of these could work well as you can call out relevant experience in your next role.

When you apply for new roles you may or may not use your current manager for references. Based on your explanation I can't see anything wrong from your side, I would expect the manager to stay close during your onbaording process and provide constructive feedback and also find mentor/coach within the company to help you ramping up. Asking questions is never wrong or bad idea, better ask than being wrong.

Your approach to this situation seems solid, you are looking for learnings and ways to improve your skills based on the feedback that you have received. This is crucial behaviour for any engineer from Junior to Staff. We all want people that have self-awareness and growth mindset. 

Finding ways to improve your coding skills is a must, this is the core skill you do your job through. As you have said best way to do it rhtough practice: side projects, opensource contributions and also working in a company with senior engineers that can provide you with continuous feedback. These are just some way to do that. Read other people's code and try to adopt patterns and structures they are using in their code too.

Finally, stay positive! When you are early in your career, being rejected could be quite difficult thing to deal with. That said keeping a positive mindset, charging forward, improving and achieving your next goal is the only way to grow and improve. So keep going!

Internal transfers (same role/level) have not changed but with signifficantly fewer open positions it is becoming really hard for people to move as there are more internal candidates than open positions.

General steps are, find a team that has an open role, reach to manager to discuss domain, projects and growth oportunities (common topics). You might need to share your previous half/year rating with the new manager. If both sides are alligned from there you inform your Current Manager you would like to move to another team, prepare a transition plan, Hiring Manager will reach out to the Current Manager, probably will ask for timeliens and potential growth areas for the individual so HM can continue with focused growth in those areas.

Next is just move things in the internal tool, and done.

Trasnitioning from Good to Great TL at Meta, requires a multifaceted approach that balances deep technical skills with leadership capabilities. Here are several strategies to consider:

### 1\. Strategic Vision and Planning

- **Broaden Your Technical Vision**: Great tech leads have a strong understanding of how their work fits into the bigger picture. Start by expanding your knowledge of industry trends, emerging technologies, and how they can be applied to solve larger business problems.
- **Strategic Alignment**: Ensure that your technical decisions and project directions are aligned with the company’s strategic goals. This means understanding the company's vision deeply and how your team's work contributes to that.

### 2\. **Leadership and Influence**

- **Mentorship and Coaching**: Great tech leads don't just manage; they mentor. Invest time in coaching your teammates, helping them grow their skills and careers. This could be through formal mentorship or informal coaching sessions.
- **Stakeholder Management**: Enhance your ability to manage expectations and communicate effectively with stakeholders, including non-technical ones. This involves improving your negotiation, persuasion, and conflict resolution skills.

### 3\. **Technical Excellence and Innovation**

- **Continuous Learning**: Stay abreast of new technologies and methodologies. This doesn’t mean jumping on every new tech but having a well-reasoned perspective on what is worth adopting.
- **Foster Innovation**: Encourage a culture of experimentation and learning within your team. This can involve organizing hackathons, dedicating time for exploring new technologies, or encouraging participation in tech conferences.

### 4\. **Execution and Delivery**

- **Process Improvement**: Continuously seek ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of engineering processes. This could involve adopting new tools, refining existing workflows, or implementing best practices in software development.
- **Quality Focus**: Ensure your team delivers high-quality code. Establish and enforce coding standards, conduct thorough code reviews, and maintain a high bar for testing and debugging.

### 5\. **Communication and Collaboration**

- **Enhance Your Communication Skills**: As you move up, your ability to communicate clearly and persuasively becomes even more critical. Work on tailoring your message for your audience, whether it's writing technical specs, presenting to senior leadership, or providing updates to your team.
- **Cross-functional Collaboration**: Great tech leads work effectively across teams and departments. Look for opportunities to collaborate on projects or initiatives outside your immediate team to build bridges and gain new perspectives.

### Personal Development Plan

- **Set Specific Goals**: Define what greatness looks like for you in your role. This could include technical mastery in certain areas, leadership qualities, or contributions to strategic projects.
- **Seek Feedback**: Regularly seek feedback from your peers, managers, and mentees. This will help you identify areas for improvement and measure your progress.
- **Find a Mentor or Coach**: Consider finding a mentor who has successfully navigated this transition. They can provide valuable insights, guidance, and feedback.

Switching domains in tech, especially for a senior engineer aiming for rapid impact and advancement, involves strategic learning and networking, adapting to new cultural norms, and leveraging your existing skills in new ways.

There are few areas that you should focus and if you have 30-60-90 day plan that will help you to stay focused and have a tangible progress towards your goals. One more thing to add here, have you thought **how are you going to measure your success**? This is very crucial step so you can have a start and end point of your ramping up and onboarding.

Here are few tips to consider:

- **Focused Learning:** Prioritize learning the most relevant concepts, tools, and frameworks that are critical for your role at Meta. Online courses, bootcamps, and internal knowledge sharing groups could be quite effective. Read code, then wrote code, experiment.
- **Project-based Learning:** Engage in hands-on projects that are similar to your work at Meta. This will help you apply theoretical knowledge to practical scenarios, enhancing your learning.
- **Mentorship:** Seek out mentors within Meta who are experienced in ML. They can provide guidance, feedback, and insider knowledge that can accelerate your learning curve. Find two mentors, one internal in team and one external outside of the team. First will focus mostly on the onboarding, tech and projects and the other one will focus on career growth.
- **Identify Transferable Skills:** Lean in your soft skills. Skills like problem-solving, project management, and effective communication are highly transferable. Reflect on how your past experiences can benefit your current role.
- **Apply Your Domain Knowledge:** Even if the domain is different, your experience in networking could provide unique insights into how ML algorithms can be optimized for better performance or innovative uses within Meta’s infrastructure.
- **Build a Network:** Connect with other teams and individuals within Meta who work on or are interested in ML. This can provide opportunities to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects, further enriching your experience and exposure.
- **Feedback Loops:** Establish regular feedback sessions with your peers and manager. This will help you understand how well you're adapting and where you can improve, both technically and culturally.

Having unlimited PTO sounds like a dream, but it often leaves employees unsure about how much time off is reasonable to take. Here are some tips to consider when deciding on the amount of PTO to take:

1. **Understand Company Culture**: The first step is to understand the culture around taking time off in your company. Look at what others do, especially those at your level or in your team. If there's a general trend or an unwritten rule about the average days people take, aim for that as a baseline.

2. **Performance and Workload**: Consider your workload and performance. If you're meeting or exceeding expectations and you manage your workload effectively, taking time off when needed shouldn't be an issue. Ensure your projects are in a good state or covered during your absence.

3. **Communication and Planning**: Communicate with your manager or team about your PTO plans well in advance. Discussing your plans helps ensure that your time off doesn't disrupt the team's workflow and shows that you're proactive about maintaining productivity.

4. **Use It Strategically**: Use PTO not just for vacations but also for personal development, rest, and mental health. Spreading your days off throughout the year can help prevent burnout.

5. **Look at Industry Standards**: While "unlimited" suggests there's no upper limit, the average PTO in the U.S. (including sick and personal days) ranges from 2 to 4 weeks per year. Use this as a rough benchmark if you're unsure.

Remember, the goal of unlimited PTO policies is to offer flexibility and promote a healthy work-life balance. It's important to use it in a way that benefits your health and well-being.

The most important part here is to have a chat with your manager and ensure that you have a full alignment with them on their expectations. If your manager is clear what the expectations for you are as an engineer, how much and when is it reasonable to answer, what are the projects and impact you should deliver at your role. All of that should be your guiding principles.

Now it's very important for your manager to set the tone for the team and explain what a Healthy Culture looks like, and if they are encouraging this behavior across the team that might be the core of the issue. 

You can be very clear and upfront with your manager and colleagues that they cannot and should not expect from you to respond during out of office hours. Set that expectations very clearly and even post about it something like personal "Readme" and if anyone is pushing on that this means you might be in the wrong company altogether.