There probably cannot be a better answer than what Alex has written and I 100% agree on whatever he has shared. 

I recently joined Meta from a non big tech background and here are my thoughts...

**Move fast mentality is still alive and well**

Meta doesn't just preach, they abide by the culture they tell you upfront about. Especially the **move fast mentality.** The biggest difference with meta and other places has to be this. There is a huge bias for action that everyone tries to embed in you the moment you set foot in the office. You will be juggling 3-5 projects at the very minimum, probably no matter your level. You do not need to be fully prepped to jump in to a project, neither will you need to write a detailed tech proposal, you jump in and get your hands wet and produce tangible artifacts no matter how large or small. This is probably the only way to survive at meta, unlike at other companies...

**Bottoms up is still followed but depends on your team**

There is a lot of autonomy to ICs to bring to front new product iterations. Product managers won't be the ones to handhold and control the direction of what you're building, you as an IC will be the one driving it. There is a separate axis for it too btw that is highly important during PSC discussions, **Direction.** If you see a problem in your product/codebase/the way your team works/code reviews etc, grab the opportunity with both hands and raise awareness about it and propose solutions. You'll be credited for such improvements. You do not need to wait on someone to come and give you projects to work on. 

**Metrics**

You have to get a firm grasp of what is important for the team, what they currently track, they should track, or suggest corrections to the way they're tracking certain things. As soon as you build this skill of being able to quantify anything and everything you touch/work on, you'll be in great shape for your performance discussions. The emphasis on numbers is nothing like I've ever encountered previously, which is both a good and a bad thing. In either case, it will be one of the most high leverage skills you can have for your survival at meta.

**XFN partnerships**

You will benefit a lot if you're great at working with other people. You **WILL** need to have excellent professional communication skills, negotiation skills (at times) and just learn how to be fun and easy and approachable to talk to. Meta is the most **extroverted** job I've worked on since in order to do 1 project done, you will almost certainly talk to 2-10 different people with different job profiles (other developers, PM, UX, DS, DE, customers, stakeholders etc). It isn't everyone's cup of tea but will definitely teach you a lot if you embrace it with open arms.

**PSC, PSC, PSC**

No matter what you do at meta and what time of year it is, performance reviews will ALWAYS be on your mind. You will need the ability to foresee what sort of a portfolio you are putting together in the next 6 things so that you're on track on all the 4 performance axis, **people, direction, engineering excellence and impact**. You will have regular discussions every single month with your manager about this. It will seem incessant and annoying but you can never loose sight of how your self review is shaping out and if you're on track to meet expectations/exceed them. Putting together a good self review summary is like a big project in itself on top of all projects you will be working on. Salesmanship comes in handy quite a bit here. 

Meta is a demanding place to work at with a unique culture. But on the positive side, you will be compensated well, the vesting schedule is the best, the food will be awesome and there will never ever be a dull day in your professional life!

 

Senior Engineer @ Meta

Ninad Mundalik

With the infinite amount of tutorials and infrastructure services out there, writing code is easier than ever before. If you want to stand out as a software engineer, you need to write much better code than almost everyone else. You need high code quality.