What can I contribute at a FAANG? Most of the app is already built out and learning the stack is already going to take a year

You don't need to have business impact to grow. You will grow as long as you have:

• Talented, supportive teammates around you who push you to be better through constructive feedback
• Challenging problems to solve
• Ambiguity amidst the space you're operating in
• A healthy engineering culture focused around making things better in all ways

Meta should have this in spades. You just have to tap into it.

The first team I was on at Meta was Portal, and that product is literally dead after having lackluster sales for years. But I learned a lot during my time there, and there were a ton of engineers who got promoted very quickly in that org.

It's true that a lot of work at Big Tech is incremental, especially among junior and mid-level engineers. But that doesn't mean the bigger fish doesn't exist - You have to go out there and find it. Meta as a company is (in)famously "sink or swim" and doesn't hand-hold engineers. Follow the advice here:

• [Taro Top 10] Effective Onboarding
• [Taro Top 10] How To Create Scope As An Engineer
• [Taro Top 10] Mid-Level Engineer To Senior Engineer (L4 To L5)

As an individual, you can:

• Write code faster
• Write code better (smaller diffs, more test coverage)
• Review more diffs
• Push out refactoring diffs to reduce or reorganize code
• Propose features
• Propose frameworks for all features (this one is a bit harder to do)
• Improve your ability to work with non-eng stakeholders by proactively reaching out to them more frequently

If you don't feel like you have much individual control over your work, talk to your manager about what projects you want to take on and what behaviors you want to build/improve. Your manager is responsible for supporting you & has the best view on the team's work, so they're always a good first person to start the conversation with.

Theres always issues at scale. Unique ones for sure. If all the technical challenges were solved, infrastructure, support, and all the dev productivity adjacents would have nothing to do.

I suggest you think harder about your own workflow. What inefficiencies do you encounter in your workflow? Your builds? Your tooling? Why do they exist? What could be done better? What could be easier to understand? How can scale not be so damn complex or difficult?

If you could save everyone in the company just 3% of time, that's already millions of dollars in developer hours you could save.

Just because app is built, doesn't mean there are holes to patch or make new improvements. I think every engineer is expected to keep their eyes open for opportunities and having the initiative to find and analyze bugs/enhancements will definitely go a long way to help you get promoted/grow.

Also growing can mean many different things - professionally or within your field or within the company.

I think you should determine what you'd like to do in 5 years and work towards that instead of feeling the need to beg for larger/visible projects so you will "feel" like growing instead of actually growing.