How can I strengthen my people axis to push for E5?

Hi,

Firstly promotion happens on behaviors and not rating per-se. So while you are focusing on people axis, also consider the E5 behaviors related to people axis around giving positive and constructive feedback about team members to your manager and helping make team better. For making team better, you can partner with your manager and focus on team health and work on things from last retro plan after Pulse.

You can do things such as bootcamp mentorship, intern management or you can yourself find or ask your manager to find people you can mentor. If people get actionable take-aways from your mentorship that is quite a good sign.

Although before doing any of this, you can check back with you manager how your people axis is going and if they think you should focus on it more to get promoted. Essentially, figure out if it is even a gap. If not, focus on other things.

First, I strongly recommend checking out my Meta E4 -> E5 growth plan. It has the expectations for E5 broken down by axes.

From my experience, E4 is the sweet spot for taking on an intern. At E3, people axis isn't important at all yet, and at E5, raising a successful intern isn't too impressive. Summer is over, so it will be tough, but I would keep an eye out for intern manager applications - There are always some interns running around due to co-op programs.

When it comes to tech talks, they're not great for PSC contribution IMHO as their impact is hard to track and often limited (most people don't retain much from tech talks from my experience). They're a nice communal experience, but I wouldn't spend too much time on them.

Mentoring rotational engineers also has limited impact as the company generally considers them between E3 and E4, and of course, they rotate between teams. It is much more impactful mentoring full-time employees, and you can check out my in-depth advice on how to do that in my case study about how I mentored several Meta E3s to E5s in ~2.5 years. For you, I would try:

• Finding a strong E3 to raise to E4
• Finding an earlier E4 and getting them to E4 EE

Lastly, a huge part of your people axis is your ability to bring together, well, people. E5 generally means tech lead at Meta, so on your projects, take charge of big project decisions and own the alignment of all relevant parties to get them through. To help with that, I recommend my course on Effective Communication.

First thing to call out, before you go too deep on "fixing" your People axis rating, is to ask "Is this really a problem?" (similar to what Ankit said.) There's a good chance you don't need to get a superb rating on People in order to get promoted.