Context

I have been working at Meta fka Facebook for last 1.5 years. During my time there, I have had a chance to work across two teams and interact with quite a few senior, and junior engineers along the way. In this post, I try to summarize my experience in terms of promotions and technical growth at Meta.

Experience

As soon as I started working at Facebook, my manager told me to think about the impact of my work, especially how the impact can be measured. When I started as an IC3, the expectations for me were to execute and land code as much as possible. Nothing more, nothing less. In doing so I was to build connections and networks for people to want me to work on their project.

Promotions

Soon, I was on the path to promotion given my execution speed. However, pretty soon I was to be re-orged. Re-org made me feel that my promotion might get delayed as I would have to spend time ramping up on the space, and I would not be able to execute a lot of code changes. Looking back, it was true that the diffs I was landing had reduced a bit, however, the other work I did in terms of SEVs, debugging to figure out why a particular metric was down helped me to deliver more impact than the code I would have landed would have made. When I did get promoted, I asked my manager to compare the two halves I had, and he believed I did more as an IC4 in the second half, where I was landing less code, but the impact and the behaviour I was showing was more like an IC4.

Technical Growth

Technical growth at Meta in a product team is quite difficult. Meta moves fast and there are a lot of changes to the requirements with time. The technologies you use on a day-to-day basis are built in-house and the skills themselves are not transferrable. However, you do become a better problem solver and even better in communication. You will be writing a bunch of workplace posts to update the people on the work you are doing. Every decision and outcome is to be written in a post and tagged to relevant people. I feel this to be a lot of process overhead; however, I also believe it helps to keep track of the work you do for the performance cycles.