Struggling to ramp up at Meta after coming from a startup, dealing with unclear expectations, tool overload, and weird self-driven culture

Hi all. I’m a mid-level engineer ramping up at Meta after coming from a startup, and I’m honestly struggling to adjust. I’m hoping to get insight or advice from anyone who’s been through a similar transition, especially folks who didn’t come from a Google-like or big-tech background.

Here’s where I’m stuck:

• I’ve been told Meta expects engineers to know what to work on, even during onboarding. My manager asked me what I wanted to work on within the first week of me joining, before I even understood the team or codebase. It feels like I’m supposed to have opinions and direction before I have context.

• I’ve been told to “scope out” a project, but no references or examples were provided. It took asking around across multiple people before I even got to see what a scoping doc looks like. In the meantime, I spent two weeks building one with very little guidance, and then found out my mentor had already done a full version of that work but didn’t share it.

• People say “we don’t want to spoon-feed you” and I agree with the principle but at the same time, I’m not asking for answers. I’m asking for context. Like, if you give me a tool, don’t just tell me what it does — show me how you actually used it to solve a real problem. Without that, I can’t even tell what “doing it right” looks like. I don’t think I need to be spoon-fed, but I do think I need one solid walkthrough before I can do things independently.

• When I try to bring this up, the answer I keep getting is “this is just imposter syndrome.” But it’s not. I’m not doubting my ability. I just don’t have the exposure or mental models that other people here seem to expect me to have.

What I’m trying to figure out:

• How do you operate in an environment where you’re expected to define your own work before you understand the system? I feel like my manager keeps asking me questions like, "what do you want to work? What do you want to for engineering excellence? What are your goals?" And I legit have no idea how to answer or how to get to the answer?

• How do you ask for help in a way that gets you actionable guidance, not just links, tools, or vague high-level info? I keep getting resources or internal docs, but no one is helping me bridge that into concrete steps or showing me how to go from “scoping doc” to actual code. I’m not asking for someone to do the work for me. I just want someone to show me one real example of how to apply it so I can move forward.