I've been at E5 for a while now and am having trouble finding scope and working through others to get to E6.

Question

I've found other resources in Taro about creating scope and working through others, but I was hoping I could get a more nuanced and clearer response for my situation.

Context:

My team hasn’t identified a goal metric that it’s able to move or a way to get there.
There are plenty of different projects, but only one that has a clear launch path from leadership. The rest of the projects are stuck in approval loops, in some cases for more than 1 year. I work on a Big Blue team with lots of external dependencies like legal, compliance, and many more.
The project with the clear launch path has Android work built on top of one of the company’s top priorities. I'm trying to find an Android mentor, but it's hard to get one close to me on the org chart. I plan to discuss this with my manager to determine the path forward.
There’s a great example of an E6 promo through improving engineering efficiency, but my perception is that the pain points in my org would be solved by alignment with leadership, not engineering.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

Lack of a concrete goal metric makes it really hard to make a case for E6 as Impact is such a huge axis. I hope this is an org P0, and I would actually consider this an E6+ problem. Can you play a major part in helping define this metric? If alignment is a huge problem, can you play a part in making this alignment go faster? I would see this behavior a lot from E6+ PM/engineer hybrid archetypes - These engineers would do whatever it takes to fill in the gaps and ship, even talking to legal/compliance. If you don't have the relationships for this, start building them. This social capital takes a long time to establish, but that's just how being E6 is: You are expected to work on these long pole efforts that take 2 halves+.   To me, this seems like the highest leverage thing to do, but if you're a more technical E5, this can be a very painful mentality and behavior shift as you effectively need to become a different person. My org at Instagram ended up becoming more alignment heavy, and I saw a lot of technical E4s and E5s burn out of the org due to this. Even if your org writes 0 code, I imagine there's existing code that it's maintaining. And if that's the case, especially at Meta, there's bound to be bugs. Is there room to become an E6 fixer? You can work on projects like tightening the oncall process and SEV culture.

I've been at E5 for a while now and am having trouble finding scope and working through others to get to E6.

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