Career Advice About Meta

Before I was at Meta, I worked at a networking company for 10+ years. It was very different from Meta as a massive consumer web company. On top of the domain differences, the culture is also very different between these 2 companies.

I'm working on ML at Meta, which is something I'm pretty new to. As a senior engineer who wants to make an impact quickly and make a push for staff, how can I effectively make this domain switch to hit the ground running fast?

Is sprint planning and agile not a thing at meta? I’m doing a lot of research since I’m trying to see how it’s like as I’m spending time leetcoding and if the vibes there are it’s on you to plan your projects and set a timeline then sprint planning would actually make the engineers not excel in independent planning?

And it seems like it’s against good e4 performance to be prompted to set your deliverables at the end of the sprint? Just not sure how agile is used cuz if it’s on everyone to figure out how to project manage on their own then what’s the point of agile?

Hi everyone, I have about 0 experience with machine learning and I'm thinking of ways to significantly increase my value in the future. My ideal plan is to get promoted to E5 in < 1 year and then change domains to ML (or ML Infra and work closely with ML engineers). I have almost 0 experience with ML directly, but I think they make much more money in the long run? I'm currently a backend software engineer.

Basically I want to know if it's worth investing my time & effort this or if it would be better to just eventually go for engineering management in the domain that I am already familiar with.

In particular, I'm having trouble figuring out really complex bugs. For example, on my current project, we're auditing a lot of the existing feature set to see what issues they have so we can fix them as we revamp them. I'm happy to find lots of issues, but I have no idea how to fix them, even after finding a code pointer.

I talked with a senior engineer on my team for help, and they were able to get more color on the situation. However, they mainly were able to do this as they have been in the org for a while and knew who to go to for what: I can't replicate that deep knowledge they have as I'm fairly new to the company. How can I create a systemic process I can follow to figure out these situations?

Meta is my first large tech company, so I don't know much about the other big players (Amazon, Google, etc). I was curious as to what makes Meta unique compared to other giant tech companies, so I could get a better understanding of the industry overall.

I've had 5+ friends leave Meta or quit software engineering altogether after E6. Either the responsibilities and stress were too much or what they were being asked to work on wasn't really aligned with their core interests. Business needs are always changing, so it can be a common occurrence to take a lot of ownership over a project you don't have personal interest in.

It's important to be adaptable, but I think intrinsic motivation can be hard to sustain if the people, project, or priorities are in flux.

For the older crowd, what really typifies career longevity in a software engineering?

I work overtime a lot, and it's pretty stressful. I'm also worried that amidst all this effort working for Meta, I'll lose track of who I am overall and what I can do for other companies. What can I do to strike a better balance here?

I have a recruiter screening with Meta next week for a full-stack software engineer role. What can I expect in the recruiter screening?

This is my first interview after a very long time, I need to brush up my skills. what is latest acceptable time frame to schedule the technical interviews without being considered late?

An XFN stakeholder came up with a last minute requirement for a big project I'm working on, which will probably slow down the launch by at least a couple days. I already made promises to other XFN about the launch date.

What's the best way to mitigate the heat on failing to launch on time and zooming out, how do I deal with last minute launch blockers in general?

I've received a verbal offer from Meta for the Android role and I'm in a team matching phase right now. I've a couple questions:

• My recruiter mentioned that team matching is taking a lot of time these days and suggested me to take a team that's available and later could think of changing the team. What should I do here wait for the right team or take a team that's hiring right now?
• Does anyone have any recommendations for teams at Meta which are layoff proof, has interesting and promising projects coming up and a good mobile engineering foundation?