Career Advice About Meta

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.

I watched the masterclass on finding a new team and understanding my own priorities to lead a fulfilling career and find a new team within Meta.

Currently, I'm being put up for promotion for IC4 (hopefully, I'll know in late Feb about the outcome) and I would like to switch teams.

My priorities in order:

• Work-life balance
• Supportiveness of team + (most of team in NYC)T
• Technical space
• Growth opportunities
• Product space

My technical space interest is mostly in ML infrastructure (partially what my current team works on) and eventually would like to work towards getting to IC5, but more importantly I'm exploring another potential career (i.e. comedy and stand-up!).

I would like to prioritize my WLB, so does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about my search (considering Meta is known more for grind culture)? And what orgs/teams to look at within the company?

In one of Rahul's videos [1], he mentions his interview journey when he had ~3 YOE and how he interviewed for a Meta E5 SWE position.

I interviewed for Meta this year w/ 3 YOE similarly and they would not consider me for E5. This is also similar to most other people I know with 3 YOE.

Was it because he had a previous internship at Meta as well as his many other internships? I know Alex also interviewed at Meta with 3 YOE and was down-leveled.

Rahul also mentioned he received an L3 offer at Google (which makes no sense btw!). I'm curious to know how there was such a large variability in the offer levels. Thanks!

[1]

I have 15 years of experience in the tech industry. I joined meta as an E6 engineer in July, following 7 years at Amazon and over 6 years at Microsoft. Afte joining, I quickly initiated and led small projects, progressing to a major project. I utilized my experience to guide and support other engineers, contributing to their professional growth. Our team has another E6 tech lead with deep domain knowledge and currently, he is the face of the team. We maintain a positive and respectful relationship, trusting each other.

However, I observed that our engineering manager (EM) was not effectively providing direction, hindering team productivity. Recognizing this gap, I collaborated with other tech lead to create a project tracking sheet, enabling us to monitor initiatives with timelines and ownership. This significantly improved our team's efficiency and motivation, leading to the successful completion of a major project.

Now, here's the exciting part – my skip reached out and surprised me with an offer for the EM role! While I'm honored, I'm grappling with doubts about whether I have the necessary skills for success. Despite enjoying mentoring others in technical discussions, I'm concerned about potentially losing touch with the hands-on tech work that I love.

On the bright side, my tech lead partner is supportive and believes I should take on the EM role, offering full support. However, I'm contemplating whether I should explore the possibility of a Tech Lead Manager role to strike a balance between leadership and hands-on technical involvement.

I'm at a crossroads and would love to hear your thoughts and advice based on your experiences.  One side me want to try EM path but one side says why take this hassle and stick with what you know better i.e tech. Also, I treat myself as avg communicator. I feel, I am good at empathy, task breakdown and mentoring skills.

Hi, I am at the team match stage at meta for E4 (MLE) role at the bay area loc. What could be a decent TC range (checked levels, I know avg is around 300k?)?

Also, how could I maximize it considering I don’t have a competing FAANG level offer at the moment, but I do have an offer from a tier 2 company of ML in terms of comp? note, I believe I did pretty well in all the interview rounds, the team I am hoping to join has a member who was my labmate in my Phd group and recommended me to the hiring manager, who is quite interested to hire me (as mentioned by the hm himself). Furthermore, I already have my green card, so the company doesn’t need to spend for my immigration. How (if at all) can I leverage these to negotiate?

I have looked at Taro's course on , but looking for more case-specific suggestions, thanks in advance.

I joined Meta but Im wondering if I really will be growing if I am just working on small features for the first year or two

For this upcoming half, I'm working in four different areas: reliability, sourcing, delivery, and datastore table. It just seems like it's too much and I'm not building any depth? Feels like I won't be able to build expertise in anything and be unable to contribute as a good team member if I'm working on everything?

My TL has also informed me they are struggling to scope out work due to a lack of senior engineers. This has resulted in me getting menial tasks such as better engineering work and refactoring in some of these projects (i.e. delivery, sourcing, and reliability). It's great for my diff stats, but I want larger scope and less narrow work to be considered for E4. I'm discussing with EM, but the EM and TL seem like they are on different pages. I'm most interested in sourcing, but seniors are struggling to scope out work.

Any suggestions on what to do here? I feel a bit lost overall and I'm struggling to understand how to get scoped and larger non-menial project work. Should I involve my skip manager here? A couple of questions in this one question but appreciate all the help in advance.

I currently have about 5 years of experience.

I plan to stay in my current role for about 2 more years before I think about a change.

The way I see it there are 2 components:

1. Interviewing Skills
2. Real Skills (I'm most curious about these - what does this look like?)

Additional Context / Questions

At what point in my role should I begin looking to focus on interviewing skills? I was thinking the 18 month mark.

I have never been at a company much longer than 2 years. Should I prioritize staying for longer before the move? The next level is Staff here, but there's no guarantee of promotion.

I don't have a 100% clear vision I want in terms of the technical domain I'd like to build focus in. My current role is giving me good experience in developing technical leadership/stewardship but the domain is not of huge interest. Would it make more sense to target E5 and join the technical domain/team of my choice and then shift into a Staff position? e.g I have always been interested in VR, but never worked in a VR role.

So what are the things I should be focusing on in order to be effective in an E6 role in the future? Accounting for culture, PSC, etc.

What real skills should I prioritize building?

I joined Meta as an E4. I'm coming from a company which doesn’t have as much structure around performance review.

I feel good about my coding ability and project impact, but I’m not entirely sure what are the ways to think about the people dimension as someone relatively new.

The setup on my team is pretty standard: There's an E6 tech lead that has broken up a big project into multiple pieces, and I own one of those pieces (and the rest of the pieces are owned by other E5s). I'm leading a couple engineers (<5), and I think they're E3/E4.

Zooming out, this seems like decent E5 scope, but I'm sure there's some gaps to turn it into E6 scope. The tricky part is that my org is pretty XFN heavy, so it's hard to get things added to the roadmap, and with the hiring freeze, it's hard to get more engineers onto my team to lead.

All that being said, what are some ways I can find staff scope in this situation?

1. When to start this conversation with my manager knowing org transfer is frozen till March? It might affect psc ratings.

2. Should I start talking to new managers or inform my current manager first?

3. Not sure if I will have enough impact created for mid year signal/ratings if I start looking out for new teams in March and may be join by April?

4. Will there be more jobs posted in March?

5. Please suggest some general guidance for switching teams.

I am in the very fortunate position to be choosing among some great offers. My question is how to properly choose between

1. A company with an industry-leading reputation (eg Citadel, Two Sigma, DeepMind)
2. A “lower tier” company with less brand recognition/lower quality bar but is able and willing to outbid company (1) on comp.

If comp were equal going to company (1) would be a no-brainer, but how much of a premium should I place on the brand of a company? Put another way, how can I place a number on things like exit option value, social/engineering prestige and so on.

I will be joining Meta this summer as an intern. Would it ever be acceptable to ask someone other than my intern manager for help? If so, how should I approach this?

I understand that sometimes, my intern manager may be too busy to answer my questions? In order to unblock myself faster, I am thinking of asking someone else in my team. My concern is that I do not wish for my intern manager to feel sidelined, as the intern manager is my primary point of contact.

Hi,

I just completed Meta interview last week, no results yet.

I got a request from my recruiter now asking if anyone at Meta would give feedback on working with me. What are the expectations here? Also, why post interviews?

I joined meta just a few months ago and didn’t get even one entire half.

I missed the TNTE date by 3 weeks so had to go through PSC which was excruciating.

My manager said I got a borderline Below Expectation (BE) due to the Eng Excellence axis. All other axes were either exceeds or meets.

It’s mainly because while I started some projects I didn’t finish all parts of it and the impact wasn’t materialized. But he said there isn’t anything to freak out about and rather he’s not quite worried about the eng excellence axis. He said my trajectory is good and that if we had psc in August I wouldn’t get the BE. He asked to rather focus on people axis as he doesn’t see a clear path towards meeting expectations there and it has fewer opportunities.

I asked what the implications are for this soft BE guidance, he said there’s none pretty much. No financial implications or any other changes. He’ll just be focused on brining up Eng excellence conversations in 1:1s every month.

How concerned should I be about this? Should I take his words and not worry too much or is there some reading between the lines that I need to be doing? Will he be talking to HR already about me?

A meta recruiter reached out to me and I asked for study materials and he sent back materials for IC6. What level is this and is there anything special I should study for this role besides DSA?

I'm in my early 20s and started a startup with my friend from college shortly after we graduated. We got into Y Combinator and worked on the company for about 2 years in total before shutting it down recently. I didn't go to a name-brand school, and didn't work full-time anywhere after graduating, but I did a few prestigious internships, one of which being in Deep Learning.

I've heard larger companies and recruiters in general don't like former founders, and I mostly did sales/product for our startup. We built a few web-based products and a few AI infra/AI apps, but nothing crazy and nothing with massive traction. We spent most of our time pivoting and doing user interviews/sales.

I want to get an engineering job rather than PM, because I have internalized the value of being technical when being a founder and don't want to give entrepreneurship up yet. There aren't too many entry-level positions open, and I was hoping to not have to go into an entry-level role, but simultaneously I'm not sure I have enough experience to feel confident in being self-sufficient as an engineer.

Before starting the company, I had a return offer at one FAANG company, and a New Grad SWE offer at Facebook that I let expire. I emailed my recruiter to try to reinstate it, and she implied that I would not be eligible for New Grad since I was too far from my graduation date.

Ideally, I'd like to work in AI at a larger company since that's where all my experiences in college were and where I see the most opportunity (ideally OpenAI or FB). Otherwise, probably back-end/infra at a post-IPO startup/FAANG or worst-case post-PMF startup. I have a few questions:

1. Should I only apply to entry-level engineering jobs, and am I even eligible for them? If not, what level of experience should I apply to and how do I convince them I'm qualified?
2. How should I write my resume/describe my experience+title (especially for larger, more bureaucratic companies which are less open to former entrepreneurs)? Should I even include that I was a co-founder?
3. How custom should I make my resume for each different kind of job I'm applying to (new grad swe, new grad mle, ai eng, at faang+ vs. growth stage startup)?

What is the company looking for or expecting when they ask "Why do you want to work at Meta?"

Is saying something like "I have used Instagram/Facebook for a long time so it would be great to work on a product that I use daily" a good answer?

What is a good answer for this question for Meta and other companies in general?

I'm a new engineer at Meta, and my goal is to find a team with a real product future. Because of that, I'm wondering if there's ways to evaluate if a certain project is going to pick up traction. How can I figure out during the team selection process if a team is doing its due diligence on gathering context and proving out business value before building features or if its just building them for the sake of building them?