[Case Study] Building A Meta Internal Tool To Empower An Entire Org: Staff Promotion Story

• Debugging was a huge pain point for the Facebook Portal org.
• To fix this, Rahul built a tool that made it far easier to debug tricky Android issues (Portal runs a fork of Android). It took all the crazy dump files from Android bugs and extracted the insights.
• Rahul started off the tool with an extremely simple interface: Upload the massive dump file and it would extract insights. He would improve it later by making it so the user only needed the bug ID.
• The tool started off with around 100 engineers using it and then grew to 250+! This massive scope was enough to get Rahul AE (additional equity) and a promotion to E6 (Staff at Meta).
• How you can incorporate these learnings into your work:
  • Look internally for opportunity. There are ways to have impact besides shipping flashy products, and in Big Tech in particular, improving engineering efficiency can be a huge win given how many engineers there are!
  • Understand the pain of your peers. Not only is this just a kind, empathetic thing to do that builds relationships, pain often comes with opportunity.
  • Think outside your stack. Instead of working forward from your stack of choice and what you can do with that, zoom out and holistically look at problems across your org in general. It's cheap to learn other stacks to build solutions - The main thing to do is identify problems.
• Here's a link to the slides.

Related resources:

• [Case Study] Effective Communication: Leading A Multi-Org Re-architecture At Meta
• What's the Difference Between A Senior And Staff Engineer?
• "I would like to get more clarity on what a Staff-level project and execution look like."