**Maintaining a heartbeat on alignment between your contributions and level expectations are essential**. At Meta, we have touchpoint conversations, mid cycle feedback, and recurring 1-1s with manager which are all opportunities to share this information. While managers can't and shouldn't guarantee a particular rating, a stark difference between expectations and given ratings indicates a misstep in communication between you and your manager. The same project can be built differently for a given level; exceeding expectations means that some contribution(s) delivered beyond your level's expectations, enough to pull up your overall rating.

### Mitigations

1. Establish expectations early on. Your level (E5 at Meta based on your profile) has published expectations in different axes (project impact, people, direction, engineering excellence). In your situation, project complexity should be assessed when roadmaps and project plans are being created. If your team has adequate scope, then you will have ownership that aligns with your level expectations. To exceed expectations, **the project must have room to grow**, so you can demonstrate behaviors beyond your level.
2. Have regular check ins with your manager, team leads, and mentors. Time should be intentionally used to get a sense of where things are trending. What's areas are meeting, exceeding, or falling behind expectations? This can help you refocus efforts, or get more mentorship in a specific area. Lean into your strengths to pull up your performance, and mitigate your growth areas to reduce performance drag. Your peer reviews and manager's feedback would ideally outline some growth areas for you this year. If not, work with them to define actionable steps.
3. Make sure that the people representing you understand the hurdles needed to bring it to completion. Did you experience unexpected challenges during the project? How did you apply behavior expectations of your level and beyond to make this project successful? Were you onboading? Roadmap reviews and incremental updates may be a good way to broadcast this tactfully.

Meets all is still a good rating at your level, but I understand that surprise ratings are demoralizing. Year long PSC, and current tech industry headwinds introduce new challenges to managers and engineers alike. Good luck!

Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta

Richard Chen

I know of two layoff scenarios:

1. Stop the bleeding from a failing arm of the business
2. Cutting expenses to create a leaner company

**Failing Arm**: For example, Uber [cut their self driving arm](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/technology/uber-layoffs.html) in 2019. This layoff targeted an experimental and not profitable project within the company. While I'm not familiar with how Uber judged this project's success, it likely was not trending to meet those metrics or criteria. Rahul has a [video](https://youtu.be/VEMhb6GiKxs?t=376) that discusses evaluating wether or not you're working on a core piece of the business. Successful money generating orgs like ads will likely be last to go.

**Going Leaner**: A company may look to cut costs to become more profitable. A publicly traded company will have quarterly and annual financial reports (10Q, 10K) that are filed with the SEC. Analyzing these reports is multifaceted and vary greatly between companies because of differing business structures. At a high level, a company's financial heartbeat will consider:

1. Net income, which is revenue minus expenses. Earnings announcements cause market movements because a company will be more/less profitable than expected.
2. Forward guidance by CEO--do they expect growth or contractions?
3. How much debt a company has taken on, and their likelihood of paying off the debt which can be assessed by a [moodys credit rating](https://www.moodys.com/)