Meta / Facebook Team Matching - How to find the best team? (E4)
I'm moving forward to team matching at Meta for E4 and wanted to ask the community if they had any suggestions for teams with the strongest potential for growth, especially for the New York office.
The recruiter gave me the following survey. I stated I'd be more of a "Product - Generalist" role. Would also be curious to learn more about "Systems - Generalist" as I did the System Design interview as well.
In general from what I've seen, there's a decent amount of opportunity in Instagram, Whatsapp, and Reality Labs (from product announcements and earnings calls). I've also been told to avoid monetization as it's difficult to make an impact there.
Would appreciate any advice or suggestions! Also would appreciate tips on what questions to ask Hiring Managers to assess how they grow E4s.
What is your role? (select the one that applies)
- Systems - Generalist
- Product - Generalist
What type of work motivates you the most? (select all that apply)
- Infra: Scaling challenges
- UX: Building user experiences
- Growth: Top of line impact
- Integrity: Ensuring platform safety
- Social Impact: Progressing positive change on key social issues
Who do you want to build products for? (select all that apply)
- Consumers: External, individual users of the Meta family of apps
- Businesses: External business account users of Meta family of products
- Meta Employees: Users of internal tools
- Developers: Internal and external engineers using Meta developer products and APIs
Please select which Meta Pillar(s) you’d be interested in joining? (select all that apply)
- Family of Apps: Enable optimized enforcement and support of account integrity to foster safe and meaningful communities.
- Monetization: Empower people and businesses to succeed in the global economy
- Gen AI: bring the transformative potential of generative AI to people and businesses
- Reality Labs: build tools that help people feel connected anytime, anywhere
How would you rank your preference in terms of products? (feel free to use numbers)
- Facebook App
- Monetization
- Privacy
- Messenger
- Reality Labs (AR/VR)
Discussion
(2 comments)- 56 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
A few thoughts:
- Meta is generally biased toward product and shipping things to the end user. Infra and internal tools are still important, but product engineers get more attention.
- Up until E5, product eng is slightly better for promotions, since there are more experiments and features to ship. Infra has more multiplicative impact since the tools are used by many others, but it usually takes longer to develop.
- I think you can't go wrong working on Gen AI since there's so much investment there. If I had to do a rough ordering: Reality Labs, Instagram, WhatsApp, Monetization.
- Finally, the other thing to consider is where the org leadership lives. If only your direct manager is in NYC, but the rest of the reporting chain is in MPK, I'd avoid that team. We talk more about this here: How important is location for software engineers? and Does not being in the Bay Area hurt your career as a SWE?
This is for after you join :) [Masterclass] How To Succeed At A New Team Or Company As A Software Engineer
- 35 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
I actually think working on monetization, specifically ads, is good for growth as the impact is very clear and easy to measure (you're literally counting dollars). Of course, there are trade-offs of working on ads at a company where 97%+ of the revenue is ad revenue, which I cover here: "What is it like working on ads teams?"
I'm personally bullish on Instagram and WhatsApp as I think those apps have a lot of untapped potential (especially WhatsApp as it's severely under-monetized). WhatsApp may be tricky though as they notoriously don't like hiring E3s/E4s and horde a lot of E5+ engineers.
At the end of the day though, focus on the quality of the team. Let's say you're deciding between these 2 teams:
- Great manager, supportive team, okay scope
- Mediocre manager, bad team, great scope
Team #1 wins every single time. This is especially true for E4 where you're more focused on very solid execution and not on scope until you start making serious progress towards E5 (which is around 1 year away).
Check these out as well:
- [Masterclass] How To Choose A Good Company And Team As A Software Engineer
- "What's the best way to think about a team switch?" - This is from a Meta engineer with answers from all ex-Meta folks, so I highly recommend reading this
