Hi all. I am in a 6 month contract role at Meta. I have been there about a month. I am definitely not relying on converting to FTE or even my contract getting extended, but it's worth a shot to try. I am WFH right now, but I am planning to move to MPK for a few months. I amdoing that to increase chances to convert and also to change environment.
I am confused about how and when I should reach out to HMs inside Meta.
Any other advice is appreciated :).
Thanks
I'm pretty sure you have to re-interview to get converted to full-time & it's the same process as any outside applicant for Meta (I've heard it's the same at Google too). Moving to MPK likely won't increase your chance of getting hired full time unfortunately. The increase of visibility of being in MPK might help skew perception a bit more favorably to extend your contract, but that's fairly dependent on your social skills.
Also MPK is kind of boring: there's really not much in the area besides the Meta office, Stanford, and rich people homes all surrounded by tons of suburban sprawl. If you're only moving because you're contracting at Meta, you're going to be highly dissappointed.
If your goal is to just get in Meta full -time, you should start just prepping for the interview & use your inside look at Meta to get a better understanding of interview expectations. If your goal more broad where you're trying to find any fulltime opportunity in the Bay Area, SF is better for networking with a broader net.
I have actually converted a Meta contractor to full-time (E4). She was amazing to work with (by far the best engineer at the contracting firm she was a part of), and she's still at Meta at this time (should be at least E5 by now, maybe even E6). Here was my experience:
Building off of #2, it's important for you to create allies, like it is for any job or promotion. Speaking of promotion, converting from contractor -> FTE is effectively a promotion. Follow the advice from my promotion course to establish yourself as a solid performer and then have that honest dialogue with your manager.
Because of this, I do think there's a lot of value moving to the Bay Area to build up those relationships, especially if your team is able to gracefully coordinate the in-person days. From there, follow Taro's advice on networking to quickly win people over.
However, as Jonathan mentioned, Menlo Park is mostly nothing and the Bay Area as a whole is 90% suburban sprawl outside of San Francisco. If you want to live in a vibrant city, live in San Francisco and take the shuttle down to Menlo Park.