Staff Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I'm a new staff engineer at Meta, and I know that the bar is high for E6. In particular, an E6 needs to be able to have a large influence on the roadmap and team charter, leading and creating very substantial projects.

All that being said, I want to start crafting and executing that vision as soon as I can to hit the ground running, but I'm unsure on exactly how to do that with Meta's more bottoms-up culture. At my previous job, things were more top-down (i.e. leading with authority, where software engineers work on things because their manager/leadership tells them to). How do I lead the team with this almost opposite engineering culture?

I’m about to start interviewing and will be borderline between senior and staff eng. What does the interviewer look for to distinguish between the two? Is it mainly in the behavioral portion?

I am a seasoned Mobile engineer(Staff+) and have been looking for a new job since this January.

After failing at several job interviews with big tech companies like Meta, Square, Airbnb, Uber, etc I finally received offers from Okx, Doordash and Reddit.

To be honest, I feel like the biggest gap was DS&A. Over time, I improved a lot in this area and through the help of mentors and referrals, I was able to land the above offers. I'm very grateful for Taro (especially Rahul) for his constant words of encouragement and his guidance when I needed his help.

To everyone out there, I know the market may seem crazy but if you weather the storm, you will find success. If I can do it, you can too! Good luck!

Like a lot of E5s, I'm working on a piece of my team's overall project roadmap, which is set by an E6 TL. The piece I own is less technically complex than other parts, but it is quite XFN heavy (great for people/direction contribution). I was wondering if this is still enough to get to E6 or do I need the higher technical complexity as well?

Hi! I got a call from a Meta recruiter a few weeks ago, and I scheduled my phone screen for this coming week. However, my Practice Screening Interview did not go very well and uncovered certain gaps in my preparation.

Should I tell my Meta recruiter that I am not prepared enough for my actual screening interview next week and ask for a postponement? Or should I just go ahead with my interview and potentially squander a good opportunity?

In hindsight, I think I should have only scheduled the interview after (a) having done a decent amount of preparation, and (b) having assessed myself through some mock interviews. That's certainly a learning for the future, but I am not sure how I should navigate the current situation I am in.

Any advice, suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!

A lot of examples of growing to Staff are more oriented around less technical fundamental/soft skills, including the examples in Taro. However, I'm unsure how to find this scope in my team, and I don't think that kind of behavior works to get to Staff at Apple overall. I spend ~90% of my time coding, and the culture is more top-down at Apple compared to a company like Meta.

Given all that, how can it be possible for me to grow to Staff? Are there paths to Staff that are heavily technical?

Hi all,

I am a newly hired Senior Software Engineer. I worked at FAANG before but have never been in a senior role. I am currently in week 3 of my new role. My manager gave me expectation to ramp up in 3 months but with very little further guidance. The codebase is huge with very little and mostly outdated documentation.

What do I need to do to ramp up as fast as possible and position myself for promotion to Staff within next 1-2 years? I read that there are people ramped up within 1 month into their jobs on Taro. Hope you can share your tips and tricks.

I’m married with two kids. It’s important that I spend time with my family, while also doing well in my career. Do you have thoughts on growing my career without burning the midnight oil?

I'm looking to get promoted as fast as possible, so I really want to understand how very senior engineers think. Here's some additional questions to add more depth:

1. If you were to backtrack and retrospectively analyze the careers of the engineers who reach staff level at Big Tech, what's the common thread with all the projects they've worked on?
2. How were they able to land themselves on those projects?
3. What allowed them to put themselves in a position to contribute to such high impact projects?

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to a promotion at this level—it requires significant, consistent contributions that demonstrate your readiness to operate at a higher level of responsibility and impact. And I understand that it might not be easy on those levels, but most of the things described in the official documentation are pretty intense. Is there an easier path to get to the top by doing things smarter and not harder? For instance, there are things that people could do in other companies for bonus points like organizing hike for the team, building Movember type of volunteering event or soccer tournament for the org?

How about the following examples?

Mentorship and Team Development:

Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to team development. This can include leading internal workshops, contributing to onboarding processes, or providing regular, constructive feedback to peers.

Community and Culture Contribution:

Contribute to the company's engineering culture and community. This can involve contributing to open-source projects, improving internal tools, writing engineering blogs, or participating in company-sponsored volunteer events.

For purely technical projects/platform work, how do you convey the impact to leadership/performance review committee? During performance review, do managers care about the impact of technical projects?

One thing we try to do is treat platform teams as enablers of delivery teams, i.e any platform work should impact product work directly. Sometimes we can quantify direct impact, but most of the time the impact is indirect which is hard to back by data and quantify.

Another angle is that delivery team engineers are the customers of platform team - If we enable them to deliver valuable feature faster and cheaper, we succeed. Again, this is hard to quantify with concrete data.

So my overall question is: How do you link and quantify technical projects like app optimization and performance improvements to direct product and business impact?

Thanks a lot for the wonderful promotion courses, Rahul and Alex.

Getting promoted to an L6 role seems like it requires us to build a lot of skills and behaviors. What are some of the skills or behaviors that you observed that take a very long time to master in the journey of getting promoted to L6 and beyond? It would help to be deliberate and focus on mastering these skills/behaviors early in the career to get the promotions faster.

Hey,

I have 10 years work experience, and I have previously worked at a FAANG that had no levels (big clue here!). So regardless of the scope of work, we were Senior. That kinda played at a disadvantage to me when I found my self looking for a job due to a layoff and visa issues.

I believe I am working at staff capacity, leading 5 folks, driving initiative. But I feel like I am unable to "show" Impact. We have metrics at each level. I have addressed the same with my manager, went over the metrics and identified gaps and took action.

I got lukewarm response, at best from other staff engineers and management. No idea if at all I will be considered for promo, and I get no response besides stating, it is a lagging promo.

Right now, I have no visa issues, so I can hop around other companies, I want to move back to a FAANG+ company because of higher pay.

Question is :

How do I ascertain my promotion?

and which of the following is a good bet:

1. Move to staff at Intuit -> Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L6
2. Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L5 -> work towards L6
3. Move to staff at Intuit -> Move to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L5 (as they down-level, at this point might as well move now)
4. Move directly to (Meta / Google/ Netflix) as L6 ( Highly optimistic, almost delusional )