Meta Software Engineer on Growth Team - Success Advice

You're right that the type of work that is most valuable will depend on the team you're on.

Different parts of the company, especially a place as large and varied as Meta, will have very different problems and working styles. For example:

• Infra teams usually have clear customer requirements (other engineers and product teams), and reliability is paramount. So the working style is here much more methodical and test-driven.
• Growth teams usually don't know what will work -- there are millions or billions of "customers" (users) who have different needs and expectations. So the working style is to test many hypotheses and juggle many projects simultaneously.

My advice is to understand the traits of high-performing people in the growth team. You can do this with the Talk & Observe framework that I cover in the onboarding course.

I'm getting the feeling that we, as software engineers, are evaluated more on experimentation and user impact rather than amount of code written.

This rings true to me when I was working on a growth team (not at Meta). At the end of the day, you need to show impact, and impact isn't necessarily aligned with the quantity of code written. But, the more code that you write, the more experiments you can run, so there is a slight correlation.

Does anyone have any advice on how to succeed in a role like this and what are some key qualities to work on to work my way from E4 to E5?

The experiments are usually either broader in scope or have a tremendous amount of impact. You can take your work to the next level by planning and leading multiple growth projects and delegating out the work to others to show leadership qualities.