How different is going from E5 to E6 at Infra teams?

I don't have personal experience with promos within infra teams at Meta, but here's what I meant in terms of the difference between product and infrastructure promotions:

• Infra teams, by nature, have more multiplicative work. Infrastructure used by many product teams means that you get to claim some impact from all their impact. So more senior promos are easier in infra.
  • However, this does mean you need to understand what teams need to use your infrastructure, and have proper instrumentation in place to see the usage.
  • Stability is also more important in infra compared to product teams
• In an infra team, most of the users or customers are other engineering teams. There's not as much XFN interaction, e.g. with designers or PMs. This will dictate your target list of peer reviewers and who you want to foster collaboration with.

Off the top of my head:

1. You need more technical complexity - Infra usually has harder technical problems compared to product due to how the product -> infra funnel should work (if built optimally). I talk about this in-depth here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/nail-your-promotion-as-a-software-engineer/technical-complexity/
2. You need to get really good at talking to engineers - Many infra engineers need to effectively act as technical salespeople, convincing other teams to use their infra. They often times need to talk to product engineers. On top of that, infra engineers need to talk to the other infra engineers within their organization to get buy-in. This can be tricky as infra engineers tend to be more senior (E5/E6/E7). On the other hand, winning over an E3/E4 is generally pretty easy - They'll just assume your approach is good if you're senior as they don't have those deep system design skills yet.
3. You don't need as much product sense - If you get a goal like "Increase Facebook feed reactions by 5%", it's very ambiguous on how to get there. There are an infinite number of ways you can rearrange pixels on screen, making the problem space unbounded. But if you work on an infra team like Instagram video reliability or something, it's clear what you should do. You can make videos drop less frames, load faster, and not get corrupted. Going deeper, there are often common culprits behind video infra issues like slow loading with a core problem being inefficient compression (smaller video file size means it will load faster). In other words, product engineers are up against the user, while infra engineers are up against the code.

I think you'll appreciate this thread as well: "How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"