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

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.

To be 100% honest, what you're asking for is definitely bordering on the realm of hand-holding, and if I got this request as a tech lead at Meta from an E4, I would be very worried about them. I interpret "concrete steps to go to actual code" as a very large amount of disambiguation. This is something I would happily do for an E3 but less so for an E4 (I would do it to save them of course, but I would make it very clear that I expect them to stop needing it very soon).

Getting links is a pretty good start, and that is the level of help I would give an E4, even a new one. Of course, this is assuming the links point to good resources, and unfortunately, many resources at Meta are poorly written/outdated. The main resource you should ask for are sample diffs that you can model off of.

If you want more hands-on support, you should ask for pair programming sessions: "How often do you pair program and what do you make of them?"

However, pair programming sessions are a massive resource investment for the person helping you, so it's best you have a good relationship with them beforehand or have a supportive manager who can create that support bridge for you.

There's a lot to process here, so I'll split my response into multiple parts. However, I want to start off with a personal anecdote first and a breakdown of Meta's overall culture.

I was actually in a similar situation to you. I joined Meta as an E4, and it was my first Big Tech company. My project wasn't really scoped out at all. Even my manager didn't really know what was going on as Portal leadership was extremely poor. I felt like I was drowning. The project was minimum an E5 project, probably closer to E6 if you were to deliver it with quality. I know this as the engineer who ended up taking the lead on this project from me joined Meta as an E5 and got promoted to E6 in just 2 halves.

The harsh truth is that Meta has always had more of a "sink or swim" culture, and it's a price you likely have to pay given how high the compensation and prestige of Meta is. Sure, some people go to teams where there's a well-defined onboarding and growth roadmap. After I moved from Portal to Instagram, I did my absolute best to be a TL who made that happen (and got mentees promoted lightning fast for it). However, what happened to me and what's happening to you is more common than not unfortunately, especially in the current day Meta where everyone is stressed out and fighting for themselves.

After my first 2 months at Meta, I was 100% on track for a PIP. I didn't really do much, just meandering around doing non-impactful tasks. I was blaming the environment too: Isn't a company like Meta supposed to have its shit together and provide a ton of guidance to their engineers?

I was able to right the ship and get an "Exceeds Expectations" in my first PSC with a 2-prong approach:

1. Make everyone like me - I'm not that smart. I've said that many times both on Taro and on LinkedIn, and I 100% believe that. This means it's hard for me to stand out based on raw technical ability alone, which means I have to stand out another way. Most engineers have pretty poor social skills, so I decided to add value by just being nice to people, forging deep relationships that allowed me to be a "connector" later on. I enjoy making friends, so this is something I had fun doing anyways. One of those people I was extra nice to (even though it wouldn't help me at all in the short term) was Rahul as I talk about in my story here: "How do you network effectively within a company?"
2. Take the initiative - If incompetent executives weren't going to tell me what to do (Portal's leadership team was 70% full of these people), I was going to figure it out myself and build a product I thought would be good. I went to all the people on the ground who were collaborating with me on this project. Product managers, designers, marketing people, even QA. I gathered whatever requirements I could, compiled them into a doc, and worked off of that. I still went through a lot of thrash (many execs realized that my cobbled together vision didn't match theirs only after I put something out there) but doing something janky is far better than doing nothing, the latter of which is an instant PIP at Meta.

A lot of this is admittedly E5 (senior) behavior as I talk about in my mid-level to senior course, which is why I got rewarded with a good rating in my first official performance review (first PSC was TNTE luckily). It's unfair that your manager and team is demanding E5 behavior from you as a new E4, but you will have to do it to make it on your team. It sucks, but try to see it as a silver lining where if you can figure it out, you will grow faster than you ever have before.