Career Advice About Meta

I would first like to thank Taro for helping me land internship offers at two amazing tech companies. I could not have done it without Taro's amazing courses.

I am trying to decide between the two offers for my last internship. The offers are as follows (both are for software engineering position):

• Meta (Menlo Park)
• Microsoft (Redmond)

I am currently leaning towards Meta due to resume value and opportunity to work on interesting projects. It is also a lot closer to where I live. The pay for Meta internship is also higher by around $10,000.

However, based on initial research, it appears Microsoft's return offer rate is slightly higher. According to what I have heard, Microsoft's FTE conversion rate is generally around 75-80 percent.

Would it still be wise to choose Meta in my case, or would Microsoft be a better choice? I would greatly appreciate any insights.

I just started at Meta in the business engineering org (formerly solutions eng). We have a lot of XFN work with sales and SWE teams, so lots of opportunity to coordinate projects and be customer-focused. I was a SWE at my past company but I'm hoping to eventually transition to PM as I believe it is better for upward mobility within a company?

Joined Meta 2 months ago as an E4 in a completely different tech stack and domain. Recently my manager informed me in a 1:1 and subsequent email with my skip and ERBP that I’m trending BE. It has areas I’m missing the bar on and ways to improve so I’m planning to work on those but is there anything else I can do to turn this around and be successful? Is it impossible to get a CME for H1 if this signal has been documented?

What is the Rotational Software Engineer Program?

How is it different from a regular SWE role?

Is it like being a contractor hired through a staffing company?

Are there levels to it (E4/E5, etc) or is it just one level?

Is there a good chance to become a fulltime employee afterwards and is this a good way to join Meta?

Is it a decent career move to join such a program if you are already a senior in another company or will you be considered a noob if you join a role like this?

If you refer someone and they get the role but they do not perform well: Are there any negative consequences on the person who refers them?

At a small startup where you refer someone directly to the Team Lead maybe that will cause them to lose trust in you for future referrals. Is that the same case at Meta or FAANG? Do they keep track of people you refer and how they perform?

What if manager is asking more things that you could accomplish?

What if most of the people accomplish only P1 priorities and do not have time for anything else in the org?

What if there are kids that need more attention and work life balance is not great, how to set strict boundaries and if you are not caring as much about level and total compensation?

I recently joined Meta, with over a decade of experience in software product development from various companies.

Currently, I'm working as a system generalist, but I have a growing interest in transitioning into a machine learning engineer role by next year.

This interest stems from both a desire to explore that sector and the recognition of the high demand for ML skills. I'm eager to invest the necessary effort to learn and adapt.

Could anyone share insights on the feasibility of this transition within Meta? Additionally, what specific skill set should I focus on developing to align with the expectations for a machine learning engineer role here at Meta?

Your guidance and advice would be greatly appreciated.

I've found other resources in Taro about and , 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 , but my perception is that the pain points in my org would be solved by alignment with leadership, not engineering.

Always been on the fence here whether an MBA helps me boost my visibility, help me learn more business skills and builds a well rounded profile than "you're just another average software engineer" which could help me get into management track and above faster than my peers?

In other industries, having an MBA is a requirement, but not so much in tech yet, apparently.

Happy to hear back thoughts form folks about this with some recommendations

This quarter, my skip requested/ gave me an opportunity to lead an org wide efficiency initiative as we are at risk of hitting quotas for some internal services (he mentioned potential IC6 scope) and it’s quite urgent to act on it. My role is to start and lead a large team of engineers on this initiative which involves tons of direction to ensure our org isn’t over quota. I would look my role as a hybrid of TL+ TPM with following responsibilities: analyzing data to find opportunities, creating roadmaps for the program, supporting engineers for execution to reduce usage, project management, understanding and enforcing processes, building knowledge on internal services, coaching engineers, setting Eng excellence culture within the org. All that to say, given limited time and a need for someone to lead, I will be focusing on direction and delegate all of the execution work to the squad.

1. How risky is it to have low code output as an IC5? Given the year is just starting, does it make sense to explicitly discuss this with my manager and skip that my code output will be close to zero in Q1?

I did read some accounts (anon post on WP) where EM and skip aligning on low code out out but the IC5 still got MM at the end because they had only 10 diffs for a half. I don’t want to be in that position.

1. Should I deprioritize some direction work and allocate some time for coding on my timeline through P2 projects? This will increase diff count but that just seems not a great usage of my time. TIA!

I have a follow-up coding interview with Meta after the Onsite rounds. Under what circumstances is a follow-up round requested? Is it because there were some strong hire rounds and some weak hire rounds? I am looking to gather inputs/tips on how I should be preparing for this interview. Would this interview be different from the other coding interviews that have already been completed?

I've just accepted an offer from a crypto startup, before my Meta interview loop is completed. Even if I got an offer from Meta, I would choose the crypto startup over Meta, so I'm debating whether or not to terminate the loop. If I continue the loop there are of course two potential scenarios:

1. If I pass the loop and get an offer and decline, I have read that if I apply again within a year the process would be easier to get through -- maybe I could go directly to hiring committee/team matching? Is that true?
2. If I fail the loop, then I would not be able to interview again for 6-12 months?

I feel like scenario 2 isn't such a big risk, while there are significant benefits in case scenario 1 happens to offset the risk of 2. I'm not sure though about how true the assumptions above are.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

My ideal plan was to reach E5 (Senior Engineer) on my current team and then leave. But I am nowhere near promo currently. I’ve been on my current team for about 1.5 years now. I have to get promoted in about a year from now, or else I’ll be fired.

I need help deciding whether I should roll the dice and switch to another team. I’ve built some strong relationships on my current team, worked with my manager for over a year now and am fully ramped up to my current team’s stack. I’m not sure how to make the decision of whether to leave or to stay.

I have been working at Meta for around 5 months now. I’m not very excited about the product and the tech stack (its an internal tool). I have an offer from AWS where I get to work on a T1 GenAI service. I have always wanted to be an ML Engineer and my past work has also revolved around it. I know its not ideal to switch teams until I get promoted to E4 given the tight deadline we have so I’m not sure how long it takes before I switch to a team I would prefer. Also I’m not sure how the growth would look like for an internal tool team. Should I make the move to AWS given that it would be a better career start in ML? Or should I hang in, get promoted and switch? Meta is also aggressively doing performance reviews and I’m worried being new to the tech stack and lesser interest will bite me in the back and I might have nowhere to go.

I’m early in career so TC is not a huge concern, I want to optimize for learning and eventually working towards being an MLE.