Career Advice About Meta

Right now I have 25 min per week in our 1:1 and after quick top of mind exchange it is usually 15 min left. So I am getting only one hour per month of quality time to discuss what is important. I feel it is not enough, and my manager has 11 reports.

For those who've done tech interviews around holiday season - is it generally preferable to do onsites in November or January? Trying to schedule for Meta onsite targeting E5 and weighing the timing options.

I can schedule either:

1. Late November/Early December (3-4 weeks prep time)
2. January (post holiday break)

Current situation:

• Have other interviews in pipeline (I didn't apply exhaustively, wanted to focus on meta, and see how it goes, comfortable extending the search to early next year)
• Currently not working, so can dedicate full-time prep for next few weeks
• I feel 60% ready at System design , 60% ready at DSA, 60% ready at Behaviorial
• Meta is top choice

Before Holidays

Pros:

• Results before year-end - can enjoy holidays knowing it's done or shifting priorities to focus on other companies.
• More time for team matching if successful
• Potentially less competition?

Cons:

• Tighter prep schedule

After Holidays

Pros:

• Ample prep time
• Potentially easier team matching with new headcount?

Cons:

• Risk of tight timelines with other offers
• January competition surge? Headcount change?
• Longer uncertainty

Would love to hear experiences/suggestions from those who've been through either timing! Or if you've been on the hiring side during holiday seasons, would really appreciate your insights on process timelines and any advice

Thanks!

The project I worked in for the year is getting deprioritized and I am looking for new teams to work in for the next half. Since PSC is coming next month and I am expecting relatively better ratings.

Q1- should I look out for new teams now. have chats with them and switch by next year once ratings are locked? Would managers wait?

Q2 - when is the good time to let my manager know that I will be looking for new teams?

Q3- If I let my manager know now, will it impact my psc results negatively?

Q4 - how to make the best use of time till psc results are locked?

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?

I'm an Android engineer working on an infra team, and like every other Meta E4, I am working towards the E5 promotion. Because of this, I'm spending a good amount of time building up the non-coding skills needed for the people/direction axis, doing things like XFN alignment and project management.

My question is how "all-in" should I go developing these behaviors: How much of an engineering excellence commitment do I still need to maintain? How often should I still be landing diffs?

Based on Rahul's answer here, he mentions that you should move to a location where your team is based :

I am interested in moving to Seattle if I get an offer from one of the FAANG companies. I would like to know what are the teams in those companies that have a center of focus in the greater Seattle area?

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.

How do you choose a team at Google or Meta? There might be a ton of internal teams that you would have no idea about if you are not working there. Most people only know about Instagram, YouTube and other user facing products. How did the folks working at those companies select which team they want to join? I was asked which team I would like to join in my first conversation with a Google Recruiter.

Hi, I have a question about answering these prompts for Meta referral

1. How well do you know this person's professional skills within their area of expertise? (Never worked together, just by reputation, worked occasionally, very well)
2. Why do you think your referral should be hired?

How important are they? What are they looking for?

I recently started a side project that could have an org level impact soon within this year. The feedback for the prototype is pretty good and I got a green-light to put more bandwidth in it.

I used to think once I get the good work done, promotion should come naturally. But both my manager and skip manager are telling me to leave proper documentation and communication as evidence for promotion - docs like PRD, roadmap planning, status update etc.

I usually do communications pretty well, so their feedback make me wonder if I missing something for a staff level promotion.

• What kind of evidence is being valued in a staff promo packet? Any differences between senior and staff promo packet?
• What do I need to highlight and keep track of if I'm creating scope outside of daily work?
• What kind of data I should keep track of to quantify the impact? How do you usually learn about finding the matrix to track?

Thanks!

I've been on ~5 teams during my ~4 years at Meta, and I'm wondering if I need a mindset shift when it comes to choosing a team and staying there. Is it more on Meta that teams don't fit or should I make a bigger effort to stay on teams longer and establish myself there? I'm also looking to get to E6 someday, so the team switching makes things tricky.

I've been on my current team for around a half, working primarily on the back-end. Unfortunately, I discovered after I joined the team that Android work is very interesting to me, so in order to pursue this, I would need to switch teams. There is actually a team fairly close to mine in my org where there's compelling Android work.

Right now, I'm heads down on a big project, so my immediate instinct is to wait until that's done to bring up this conversation with my manager, who I have a very good relationship with. Is this the right thing to do or should I have this conversation sooner rather than later?

Can someone be able to give me specific feedback on how i should improve? the recruiter wasn't able to do so.

here's the design i came up with, he specifically didn't want to discuss uploading of movies only streaming, recommendations, user management

many thanks in advance!

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 was curious if anyone had tips on writing a decent one page resume - especially in how to pick apart what's most "important" from my previous work experiences and fit it into one page.

Hi Taro community,

Seeking your help in evaluating two offers that I received from two start-up companies.

• (1) In general, in such situations how do you suggest researching about the companies and determining which company and offer is better.
• (2) I am also concerned how my future job potential will be affected and so I want to take the decision accordingly.
  (3) In this particular case, my offers are as follows,
• company A
  • Unicorn (post money valuation: $1B-$10B), Industry: Ad Tech (ML and cloud infra based), Last funding type: Series C, Total funding amount: $190M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2013 by ex-googler,
  • I have seen several folks joined from FAANG companies (eg, Google)
  • Offer: base $160K, bonus: 24K, Equity: $88K (not sellable now, but the company is expecting to go for IPO in one year)
• company B
  • Emerging Unicorn (post money valuation: $500M-$1B), Industry: Healthcare/AI, Last funding type: Series B, Total funding amount: $120M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2017
  • Among big techs, I have found just one person from AWS who joined this company
  • offer: base $190K, no bonus, Equity: 114K (not sellable now, the company is expecting to go for IPO in 2-4 years). I may be able to negotiate this offer.

Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions/comments.

I was laid off on November 15 2022 and since then, I have been tinkering in different stacks building small projects in C#/.NET and Java / SpringBoot based on job demand from postings. Professionally, I used JavaScript / TypeScript and React as well as Python, Ruby on Rails, some Docker and AWS for 1.5 years.

However, somehow, because of anxiety over getting a job, I have strayed from getting good at any stack and revising Django to build a MVP of a URL link sharing app and building just because I don't know if I'll ever get users or scale as I never did something really impressive hitherto in my career. Because I wasn't really targeting big companies, I have been casually leetcoding etc. this past year and a half and am decent enough to do easies and some mediums in Python.

However, recently, I haven't been really applying as much, but got reached out by Google and Meta based on yolo applying mainly; I failed my Google early career phone technical and have my Meta screening 45 minute round for an IC4 role I applied to in 2 weeks. I am preparing as the recruiter sent me some resources after our call, but I don't know what my priorities should be. As I don't have high hopes, I assume I should still try to go deep in a stack, use more of Taro's resources such as its jobsearch tool etc. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

I'm a new E3, and I know that there's the up-or-out promotion timeline to E4. I was wondering how much of a challenge this level-up generally is and what are the main things to keep in mind with this promo?

I’m currently working on a 0 to 1 project that’s outside of the team’s scope, so I have no senior engineer on the team to support me and tell me what to do. I have to spend a lot of time piecing things together and it's been rough - I've missed on the team's ship goals as it's hard to move fast enough on this project. How can I make this situation better?

Hi, I've brought up promotion in a 1:1 with my manager, who did not give any specific timelines, saying "I want to set you up for long-term career success."

I have onboarded quickly, as a former intern. My document tracking accomplishments (thanks Alex for the recommendation) has grown substantially in the 2 months since starting at the company. I have been delivering on writing code, experimentation, and design docs, and I recently helped unblock a mid+ level engineer.

However, in our 1:1's, my manager seems unimpressed. On my end, my presentation of accomplishments could be better. At the same time, most people on my team, including my manager, seem to have a lot on their plates.

Work is the top priority for me for the foreseeable future, and I want to make sure I'm not getting passed on for promotion in favor of a junior who has less accomplishments but whose manager is more easily impressed (like my previous internship team's EM).

So I have two questions:

1. How should I approach the promotion conversation? Give it some time? Bring it up consistently in 1:1's?
2. What should I do to impress my manager?

Here's a recent example: I took 2 months to finish bootcamp, and I was very indecisive throughout that time, talking with various managers and tech leads. I initially talked to real time ads infra, then streaming areas, and many others. Even after picking a team I feel FOMO that there’s a better team I could have joined instead. How can I feel better about my decisions?