Pod Insights The Peterman Pod 26 Year Old Meta Staff Eng (IC6) On Promotions, Redefining Expectations, Secret Equity Bonuses About this episode Simon Kindström is a Staff Software Eng (IC6) at Instagram who joined the company as a new grad and got promoted every year. He also achieved the highest ratings ("Redefines Expectations") twice which is almost unheard of. He shared stories about his high performance including what it's like to receive secret equity bonuses.
In this episode, we discuss:
• His promotions to Staff in 3 years
• The story behind his "Redefines Expectations" ratings
• What it's like to receive performance-based equity bonuses
• His transition to management
• Why he switched from management
• Advice for his younger self
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:34) Staff promotions in 3 years
(10:32) “Redefines” expectations ratings
(20:01) Redefining expectations without promotion?
(29:55) Staff promotion story
(41:00) Transitioning to and from management
(54:50) Secret equity bonuses
(58:14) The best interns
(1:07:50) Where most of his growth came from
(1:12:04) What keeps him at Meta
(1:15:20) Advice to his younger self
(1:17:05) Outro
Where to find Simon:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonkindstrom/
Where to find Ryan:
• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
Transcript 14,179 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 If I switch to management now, will I just become a middle manager? Then like, I've stopped providing value.
0:06 Ryan Peterman? This is Simon. He grew from a new grad to a staff engineer at Meta in three years, earning the highest ratings twice. And RE stands for redefines expectations, which there's meets all, there's exceeds, there's greatly exceeding expectations, and then there's redefines. You didn't just exceed the expectations, you redefined them. He also had some stories to share about the secret bonuses that only the highest performers receive.
0:29 Speaker 00 Additional equity is when a director chooses to give you more RSUs, right? More stock options.
0:36 Ryan Peterman? Later, he struggled with his transition to management and eventually switched back.
0:39 Speaker 00 I had some really bad luck, actually, in my manager transition. I remember my director, she asked me like, "Simon, you wanna go back to IC?" And it hit me like, "Yes, yes, I do."
0:49 Ryan Peterman? The absolute highest rating that almost no one gets, that you don't get promoted. Why is that?
0:55 Speaker 00 I actually believe that a lot of people are held back in their career because...
0:59 Ryan Peterman? Here's the full episode.
1:04 Ryan Peterman? Okay, before we get into your promos to staff in three years, I kind of want to go over a little bit of the high level. Like, what was the thing you were working on? The space? Was it all on one team? Can you tell me about that?
1:17 Speaker 00 My experience at Meta has been pretty unique because I actually stuck with the same team and the same manager for about five and a half years. And at a company like Meta, there's usually a lot of reorganizations happening and you end up switching either teams or managers as a result. And it's true that our team ended up switching a lot in terms of our responsibilities, but we're able to keep all the people and the manager together.
1:41 Ryan Peterman? So the scope changed?
1:42 Speaker 00 Scope changed a lot, but I can talk through it a little bit because it was always within the payment space, ads payments, specifically improving that experience. It was like a payments growth team. So the primary metric we were looking at is just revenue, right? Which was great because it's very easy to prove impact there. We were doing a big migration in the ads payment space. We kind of became a bit more of a ads payments infra team for a little bit to support the migration. People across the world use our apps very differently. For example, in Thailand... And a lot of people purchase things on Messenger, right? They they send bank slips back and forth to prove that the purchases happened. So that was a big focus for for our team for a while as well.
2:20 Ryan Peterman? I see. So this is within monetization, went to like product infrastructure a little bit. And then maybe it went back to product at some point.
2:30 Speaker 00 That's right.
2:30 Ryan Peterman? All the same manager.
2:32 Speaker 00 Correct, yeah.
2:33 Ryan Peterman? Sounds good. Let's talk about the the promos. So three promos in three years, and this is including the promo block with COVID that we can talk about in a bit. You know, let's be super transparent about all the ratings and everything, if you're willing. The first promo from three to four, that was in one half, and that was a GE rating, right?
2:53 Speaker 00 Correct, yeah.
2:54 Ryan Peterman? I see. I mean, for that to happen, you basically needed to start immediately as an IC4. Because you need at least six months of trailing performance before you can get promoted. How did you start as an IC4 on that team?
3:09 Speaker 00 I do think there are a couple important factors to it, right? One is, I was a previous intern at Meta, which meant that I didn't have to go through the ramp up of learning the tools, right? And I often see that that is one of the biggest hurdles as people join a big company like Meta, where everything's custom. I'd kind of like already learned how to use Fabricator, the internal task tool, etc. So I probably shaved off at least four to eight weeks of of ramp up. And then the other thing is that I had spent some time before I joined Meta, learning so many technologies, right? And I had built a little bit of side projects, right? But it's primarily like exploring, right? Like, what is React? Like, can I build some basic stuff in it?
3:53 Speaker 00 How does the type system work, right? So that when I arrived at Meta and I started doing the bootcamp tasks to, you know, learn how we actually land code at Meta, I was able to move quite quickly. And also even help some of the other new joiners together with me, which immediately increased my, I guess, scope and impact right there.
4:14 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, I think a lot of really eager, ambitious, it's either interns or. They will reach out saying, what do I need to read before I come here? What do I need to do? And there's not a lot of great resources out there. I kind of wonder how effective that preparation would even be until they got here. And they're working on the internal tools. It sounds like for you, it actually was pretty effective. How'd you find those those early resources?
4:40 Speaker 00 The resources primarily was just trying to build stuff in React, to be honest. Right? And also, I spent a lot of time on Hacker News and Reddit at that point. Not so much Reddit at this point, actually. Being aware that technologies exist and kind of like knowing what they mean and just the basics of how to use them really makes everything easier. Because I strongly believe that we're, as humans or engineers, just like pattern matching machines. The more patterns we've seen in the past, the easier it is to to apply them. So for example, maybe you've never used Meta's internal JavaScript type checker like Flow, right? But maybe you use TypeScript, right? They're not one-to-one mapping, but they're pretty close. So if you're good with TypeScript, you would do very well with Flow and vice versa.
5:23 Speaker 00 Just exploring and being aware of different technologies gets you very far.
5:29 Ryan Peterman? You kind of ramped up a little bit before you even started at Meta with that, with the internship. Was the internship on a different team then?
5:37 Speaker 00 Yes.
5:37 Ryan Peterman? Okay, so even though it was a different team still, all the internal knowledge of the tools and everything applied. When you came in, you were just immediately able to land code quickly. What was the thing that kind of drove that that GE promo in one half?
5:53 Speaker 00 One thing that really set me up for success is that I actually ended up joining a very new team, right? So I was the second engineer, which did mean that I did get a lot of one-on-one time with our manager, right? So he helped me a lot throughout that, right? To ensure that, you know, I got that early momentum and had impact for projects, et cetera. I would say the the rating was actually primarily due to my impact, right? So we were an ads payments team that was focusing primarily on revenue, right? As our goal, I was just a second engineer. We didn't have a lot of engineers, right? And the projects that I worked on, right? These were the ones that brought. More than three times of our half goal. And one important thing to note about promos at Meta is that they're lagging.
6:36 Speaker 00 So you really do need to show that the behaviors of the next level. One big difference between IC3 and IC4 is taking ownership of kind of the completion of a project rather than like smaller tasks. When I was given a task, I made sure to bring that to conclusion and then figure out what's the next similar thing that we can keep working on. Right. So it was a continuous motion of let's get more impact out of this one thing. Right. And then maybe we, you know, got to the the maximum impact that we could have there. And then I was pointed towards a new area and I was able to drive that forward. And if something didn't go right and like the results weren't there, then, you know,
7:20 Speaker 00 taking ownership of figuring out why it didn't go well. And, you know, obviously I'm new, I'm seeking a lot of assistance from others. But the willingness and the kind of pushing that forward is the behavior that likely got me to IC4.
7:34 Ryan Peterman? You mentioned that going to a new team was an asset. But the other side is there's probably less mentorship available if you're one of two engineers, you're a new grad. Did you seek that out, that that team and, you know, how'd that play out? Where'd you get the mentorship from? How'd you grow in that sense?
7:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. So when I joined Meta, I was planning on going into an infra team. Right. So I said I had done some researching to react and stuff and I thought that was that was good. But my actual passion was in like C++ infra stuff, which is what I did during my internship. Back in the day, the way that it worked when you joined Meta is that you did went through bootcamp and you spoke to many different managers to see which team would you like to join. I set up one meeting with Bala, the manager of the team I ended up joining. Bala was the first manager I spoke to and he told me that, you know, Simon, we care about impact at Meta. And what's more impactful than revenue? So I ended up there, right? So he, he kind of like lured me into it. It was more so, there was a really good feeling within the team with the manager.
8:36 Speaker 00 We didn't have a PM yet, but she was kind of helping out on the side. But because my manager, he was a somewhat recently converted IC6 to manager as well. So he had that deep technical knowledge though. So he was the one that actually guided me a lot through that, those technical decisions.
8:53 Ryan Peterman? Right.
8:54 Speaker 00 And I think really grew me in other things that are important at Meta, such as like running experiments. So my first half at Meta, I ran 20 experiments. And we were a pretty small org within payments and not really like used to run experiments. Right? So the entire org ran 50 and I ran 20 of those. Right? So kind of I was able to have a high velocity at the start. And I think that was a lot thanks to the direct mentorship from my manager. It was very technical.
9:22 Ryan Peterman? I see. You mentioned that he lured you in with impact. As a new grad, why did you care about impact at that time? Was that for career growth aspect or some other?
9:32 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I don't know why I had this goal, but when I joined Meta, I had decided for myself, I want to be IC5 within three years. So I guess I overachieved there.
9:40 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
9:40 Speaker 00 But that was kind of my goal.
9:41 Ryan Peterman? Okay.
9:42 Speaker 00 So as I chatted with the different managers, I told him this. I was like, hey, I would like to get to IC5 in three years. Right? I know it's ambitious.
9:51 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
9:52 Speaker 00 But like, how could you help me? And Bala, you know, he brought me to the whiteboard when he drew up a plan of like, this is what it might look like.
9:59 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
9:59 Speaker 00 So I think he actually did that exact same path, similar to, to me in terms of like how quickly he grew to six. He knew that it was possible to grow this fast and in some ways how to do it.
10:10 Ryan Peterman? I mean, he delivered and he's a common thread through your experience of your, your growth. So.
10:15 Speaker 00 Hundred percent. I, I credit a lot of my success and growth to, to Bala. So definitely a shout out to him.
10:22 Ryan Peterman? When it comes to IC4 to IC5, this was interesting because this took three halves. But there was the COVID half, which may or may not have blocked the promo. And you had two RE ratings, which most people would never achieve that rating in their career even once. It's a very rare rating. And RE stands for redefines expectations, which. For reference, there's Meets All, which is great. There's Exceeds, even better. There's greatly exceeding expectations, which is pretty much the upper bound of doing well. And then there's redefines. I remember when I first heard redefines, I was thinking, that is the coolest one. You didn't just exceed the expectations, you redefined them.
11:07 Ryan Peterman? It was so insane. So, yeah, I do want to go into the RE ratings. So the first half, you got a RE rating as IC4. Not only is that impressive because it's a RE rating, but you had just gotten promoted. So it's almost like you leapfrogged IC4 almost. You were, you know, doing like IC5, IC6 stuff maybe immediately. What drove that RE rating, that first one?
11:31 Speaker 00 There's one primary thing that drove it, which is impact, right?
11:37 Ryan Peterman? Of course.
11:37 Speaker 00 Ratings overall, especially at early levels, is primarily about how much impact you can achieve.
11:42 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
11:42 Speaker 00 Right? So our second half in the team, we've actually recruited a few people, which was a big part of recruiting them and onboarding them, which is part of the rating. But our second half, we had a goal of, let's just say, many, many dozens of millions of dollars that we had to increase the revenue amount for, right? The project I drove and worked on overachieved even that half goal. That had a very heavy lean as to why the redefines.
12:12 Ryan Peterman? Right, right. Makes sense.
12:14 Speaker 00 Where, yeah, we just care a lot about impact at Meta. And I guess my manager was right when he lured me to the team, saying that, you know, we didn't care about revenue.
12:21 Ryan Peterman? Right. Did you know that that project was going to exceed the team goal by multiple? Like at the beginning when it was?
12:28 Speaker 00 So we did not know, right? We did have a great data scientist, who I also really enjoyed working with. And he had, you know, a hunch that it might be impactful.
12:39 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 00 Right? But I think it's, it was partly also how I went about it, right? Where many of these projects initially? Didn't pan out, right? They were neutral. But then by showing grit and once again, taking ownership and really like ensuring that when something didn't have the expected outcome, digging in to understand why didn't it? Right? Like, why didn't this work? So I can take two different examples here.
13:06 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
13:07 Speaker 00 Where we had one project where when an advertiser fails a payment, right? We obviously let them know. We asked them, hey, you failed a payment. If you want to keep running ads, please pay us, right? But that experience was not very obvious to advertisers, right? So we worked on improving that to make it more obvious so that the advertisers that want to pay us actually can. When we first rolled out this improvement, completely neutral, right? And we just couldn't understand why. But we went in, we dug into it, worked together with data scientists to figure out why. And we were able to update the targeting, work with the designer, improve it.
13:48 Speaker 00 And it became, you know, about 20% of my impact that have. Same thing with another project, together with this really great DS that we had. This was the majority of my impact that have. But we were running a script once a day to update some settings for advertisers, right? And for whatever reason, the experimentation logging just didn't work as expected. I made sure to fully understand why it didn't work. I reached out to the experimentation team, I reached out to the DS. I looked deeply in the code to, you know, come up with a hypothesis of like, what's happening? It's that behavior of full end-to-end ownership of the success of a project that had another big impact here.
14:30 Speaker 00 And as a result, actually, this DS, which I think at the time he might have been five, maybe six, and I think now is either a seven or an eight. He left a peer feedback saying that Simon's one of the favorite engineers I've worked with.
14:43 Ryan Peterman? Right.
14:44 Speaker 00 And that to me is still a feedback that I hold dear. Just because like that to me showed that my behaviors of truly taking that end-to-end ownership is important, not just to my success, but also to others' enjoyment of working with me.
15:00 Ryan Peterman? When I was just entering the industry and you're in experiment review, there's a very big difference between the people who are Really exceptional and the people who are still growing, which I found it interesting that the, the, some of the most exceptional engineers, or maybe even my manager at the time, they were so curious about the counterintuitive results in Experiment Review. Whereas a lot of engineers who were just kind of like, oh, this is my future. I'm just, you know, bringing it because someone told me to bring it. It looks okay. They would stop there, but the, the really great ICs would continue to dig and say, why is this neutral? And at least have an explanation.
15:42 Ryan Peterman? I think, you know, it's, it's okay if, oh, it's neutral because we expected it to be neutral. There was some, you know, something here that's just not going to do the effect we want. But if there's some counterintuitive results and really digging deep and understanding, that's often where there's either an interesting learning for Eng Excellence, something where it's like, oh, this is a class of problems that's going to hurt the team, something like that. Or it's, it's impact because there's a fix there, like in your case, and it leads to, you know, really outsized wins. So that, that makes a lot of sense.
16:20 Speaker 00 We had recruited, I think, another five people at this point, right? I think the team had grown from like the two, three we were at the very start to, to eight, right? And that took a big part in the recruitment of these people, but then also the onboarding, right? And one challenge we had as a team is that now we actually had one Android and one iOS engineer. That's all we had. So, and within the, the Payments org, we didn't really have that expertise either. I actually stretched myself and started reviewing code on all these other platforms, right? So I was reviewing code on, on Android, on iOS, on the main meta backend, which is hack, you know, PHP, as well as JavaScript, right?
17:00 Speaker 00 So I was really stretching myself in the Eng Excellence and the people. And I got a lot of positive feedback in how I do diff reviews, that they actually help people grow. Probably not much on the Android and iOS side, but specifically in like the JavaScript side, I ensure that. As I leave diff review comments, I not only uplevel the codebase, but also the people. And it took me a few halves to like find the right balance there where I I got feedback that hey, Simon, you're you're being a little overbearing in your diff reviews, right? But primarily, I got a lot of feedback that what Simon tells me in these diff reviews makes me a better engineer and like can helps me contribute more to the team.
17:42 Ryan Peterman? Right, right. Makes sense. If you if I had asked you throughout that half, what rating do you think you're going to get? Would it have been aligned with what happened or what? Or did you even think about that at all? Ratings are just a byproduct of your work.
17:56 Speaker 00 To be honest, I I had no idea what to expect. I was a pretty fresh, blue eyed person from from Sweden coming into Silicon Valley.
18:03 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
18:04 Speaker 00 I didn't really know what RSUs were when I joined. I just looked at salary and I was like, yeah, that looks good. No idea that like RSU is going to become, you know, a major part of compensation.
18:14 Ryan Peterman? Right.
18:15 Speaker 00 When my for my first half, when I got my my promo, right? My manager actually just told me, hey, meet me down in the lobby. I had no idea what to expect, right? Like, we hadn't had our P C chat.
18:25 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
18:26 Speaker 00 Right. But we met in the lobby, we took an Uber to a restaurant. And it turns out that he actually has this routine of whenever one of his reports get a promo, he takes them out to dinner, right? So I sat there not knowing what to expect at all.
18:42 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
18:42 Speaker 00 I guess at that point, I started to suspect a little, right? But kind of come the second half for the RE, I really had no idea. Like, I I didn't know what the expectations were, really.
18:54 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
18:54 Speaker 00 Just that I knew I was doing well, but not how well.
18:57 Ryan Peterman? That's one thing I missed after COVID happened is no, there wasn't a lot of in person stuff.
19:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:03 Ryan Peterman? I remember before that, my manager would come with like an envelope and like paper. And we're like, here you go.
19:12 Ryan Peterman? And when you got the RE, were you what was the reaction?
19:16 Speaker 00 I mean, I was definitely happy, right? But the problem is that it came so early in the career, right? That it's like, it was hard to know that it was a difficult rating.
19:28 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
19:29 Speaker 00 Where like, I got in GE my first time, plus a promo. Now I got an RE, no promo. It's like, it's hard to contextualize it when all I've seen thus far is just like a promo plus a GE. Obviously, my manager told me that it's a hard one to achieve. But I actually knew someone, I'm not sure if he got RE when he was in IC3 or in IC4, in like a sister team. So I was like, okay, maybe it's not so hard, right?
19:56 Ryan Peterman? REs are really special, actually, so. So you mentioned no promo. How's that possible? You get the absolute highest rating that almost no one gets, that you don't get promoted. Why is that?
20:08 Speaker 00 There's a difference between promo and ratings. And I think this becomes especially important, actually, in the 4 to 5. Because I find that oftentimes in the 4 to 5, especially since we do have that time limit to it at Meta, where 5 is the terminal level that you need to reach within 33 months, is it?
20:25 Ryan Peterman? Something like that, yeah.
20:27 Speaker 00 Where promos and ratings are correlated, but there's not a one-to-one mapping between them, right? Where ratings is more so about what you achieved, and promos are more so about how you achieved it. As a 4, right, the expectation is that you can drive your projects forward, right? That that's kind of it. But as a 5, you need to take more ownership of other people. And I was starting to touch on that a little bit, right? In terms like onboarding others. But I wasn't responsible for their success or the success of their projects. My behaviors didn't align with those of IC5, because I didn't take that larger responsibility and scope.
21:10 Ryan Peterman? Was that a question that you asked your manager when you got the RE? Or you didn't think too much about that?
21:16 Speaker 00 I think I was happy enough with the RE, to be honest.
21:18 Ryan Peterman? I would be too.
21:21 Ryan Peterman? Promos are all about how you're getting it done and that you're getting it done in a sustainable way that is expected of the next level. But if you chanced upon, or you just did a lot of IC4 work and it was very impactful, that may not necessarily get you closer to the promo.
21:39 Speaker 00 Correct.
21:40 Ryan Peterman? I see. So then, and then in the next half, that was the COVID half, right?
21:44 Speaker 00 Correct, yeah. So during that half, right, there was kind of like a star, I guess. You could get like an annotation in your performance review, right, that said like, the first half of COVID, you were significantly above, which is practically equating to a GE rating.
22:00 Ryan Peterman? Right.
22:01 Speaker 00 Because we didn't do any official ratings, we didn't do any promos that half, which I remember being a little bit sour about, right? Because now I was like, okay, I had my RE the first half as an IC4. I felt like I said, if I would have been on track for that second half promo, especially knowing that I, you know, he didn't truly say that I got the annotation, right? But like, he was hinting at it, so I knew that I was doing really well.
22:29 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
22:30 Speaker 00 Right, so a little bit sour on that. Obviously, our careers are long, right? It's like, one half isn't a big deal. But since that, that half was 33% of my career, right? Like, it felt like a, like a big loss at the time.
22:45 Ryan Peterman? Okay, then let's talk about the next half, because you got another RE. So, what happened there? How, you didn't just get one, you got two. How did you redefine expectations a second time?
22:56 Speaker 00 Gotta say, it was a little bit of a fluke, slightly easier, because they did boost the rating somewhat from the previous one. So it's possible it would have been a GE, but I was probably pretty close to the, to the line regardless.
23:11 Ryan Peterman? I see, I see. And you're saying the bump was because they were trying to forward credit the lack of...
23:19 Speaker 00 Correct.
23:19 Ryan Peterman? Oh, okay.
23:20 Speaker 00 I don't think they bumped everyone to RE that had a GE.
23:22 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:23 Speaker 00 But I think... I was probably on the border if I would have gotten it otherwise. So I got the RE, my third half, or third half is IC4 plus the IC4 to IC5 promo.
23:35 Ryan Peterman? Right.
23:36 Speaker 00 And I think the important thing here is that my behavior has actually started to change. So the team, like I mentioned at the start, we were kind of pivoting between different responsibilities, right? Now we've switched from being a bit more of an infra team, back onto product. And we took on a new product space, right? We ended up splitting the team into two virtual teams or two teams. And we, and I took responsibility of one half of it, right? So for four people plus me, or three people plus me, I was now responsible for going from idea, completely un-scoped space to completed projects. And that was a first for me. That required a lot of growth in terms of like how I operated.
24:20 Speaker 00 But this was that big step change in terms of like my scope and responsibilities. Where now I'm no longer responsible for my own output and my own success. I'm not responsible for the project's success and the people within it.
24:33 Ryan Peterman? Right.
24:33 Speaker 00 Right? And in the end, the project wasn't actually as successful, but we dealt with it really well in terms of like how we behaved. We ended up having a bunch of leadership escalations up to director level, you know, with IC8s and stuff. You know, me being in IC4 at the time, I was getting a lot of credit for that communication.
24:56 Ryan Peterman? Why did your manager or whoever trust you as an IC4 to lead a pod of engineers? I, and I imagine not all those engineers were just new grads or something. So there was some identifying of you to lead that. That was a little bit earlier than maybe your, your experience. Why do you think that is?
25:18 Speaker 00 Because I think as a engineer, there are kind of like two primary themes to me, where I am just good technically, right? In terms of like the diff reviews, et cetera, right? Where like I, I just really love tech. And in Sweden, we actually choose our major already in high school. So I did computer science since I entered high school, right? So that's, I think, helped me kind of like get a nice head start. And I've tried to keep ahead of that the entire time. Just solid technically, which means that if there's any hairy technical issues, I can help solve them, actually regardless of platform, oftentimes. And number two, I love people, right? Like, I really enjoy working with people, growing people, ensuring that people are successful.
26:03 Speaker 00 Obviously, when I get responsibility, kind of like, leading this pod, right? I am responsible for the outcome of the products, the projects. But actually, what I find more important is the outcome of the people that's working on it. And I think it's shown many of these behaviors throughout of kind of like helping others improve. And I believe that that was one of the big reasons why Bala was willing to kind of give me this responsibility. And I had been doing some sprint planning for a couple of people before. Once again, I wasn't really responsible for their success or the project's success, but I was responsible for prioritization of projects with them.
26:42 Ryan Peterman? When you mentioned that you were leading that pod, were you meeting with these engineers one-on-one and also talking about career with them, aside from just the day-to-day tasks?
26:55 Speaker 00 A couple of people, I was talking about career, right? But some of them, it was more just like high-level stuff, ensuring that they're happy and they are growing on maybe the axes that they're lacking in, rather than like how to get to the next level kind of thing.
27:11 Ryan Peterman? Right, right.
27:12 Speaker 00 Like, I spot a gap and I help them fill it, kind of thing. But I was mentoring about, I think, four people that have.
27:19 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
27:20 Speaker 00 I think one IC3 and like three IC4s. I remember I was an IC4 at the time.
27:25 Ryan Peterman? Right, right, right.
27:27 Speaker 00 And the other thing about people, right, is that this was the first half that I was an intern manager. At the same time, I was an intern peer for four different interns.
27:37 Ryan Peterman? That's a lot.
27:38 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I was an intern manager and my intern struggled a lot at the start, actually. It's one of my proudest moments, actually, ensuring that they got that return offer.
27:47 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
27:48 Speaker 00 Because they were really struggling.
27:49 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
27:50 Speaker 00 Kind of getting them through that finish line.
27:52 Ryan Peterman? How'd you turn that around?
27:54 Speaker 00 So if I remember correctly, it was a like a React project or a Hack project, one or the other, right? And it was just some of the fundamentals that took longer to understand and really grok than, you know, anticipated. Sometimes you often just need to get people over that hump and then after that, they're totally fine.
28:16 Ryan Peterman? Right.
28:17 Speaker 00 And I think at Meta, that hump can sometimes be quite high.
28:21 Ryan Peterman? Right.
28:21 Speaker 00 Right? I often see interns struggling quite a bit, setting up our internal data model, right? With Ents, that can be a very like big hump sometimes.
28:33 Ryan Peterman? Right.
28:34 Speaker 00 With her, I was very generous with my time.
28:36 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
28:36 Speaker 00 And I think that's another thing that I find very important, that be generous with your time and in return, that's gonna, you know, help others grow, which is gonna make you a force multiplier, which is gonna like give you back time later. So being generous with your time is a very high leverage activity.
28:52 Ryan Peterman? Yes.
28:53 Speaker 00 Cause it's gonna work out better later.
28:55 Ryan Peterman? Yes, in most cases. There's also the case where you invest a bunch of time and the needle never moves and...
29:02 Speaker 00 Yes, there are definitely the cases where you need to call it quits.
29:05 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
29:06 Speaker 00 And I do think that I have not yet found the right balance. I think that I might stick with people for longer than is worth it sometimes.
29:14 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
29:15 Speaker 00 But at least that way, my conscience is clear throughout.
29:18 Ryan Peterman? Right.
29:19 Speaker 00 Cause I do care a lot about each person's success.
29:22 Ryan Peterman? The turnaround case, that is very impactful, taking someone, cause the opposite could have happened too. You could have saved your time and they could have kept going the other direction and kinda lose a person's worth of bandwidth, so.
29:34 Speaker 00 Yes, yes. It's actually quite funny. My, uh, my wife was getting a bit upset at me with just how much time I was spending with the intern, cause it was eating into our dinner and like date time, right? So.
29:46 Ryan Peterman? Okay, so you got the IC5 promo, double RE and everything was kind of, you know, it all made sense, you're leading a pod. And then the last thing is, you know, growing from five to six. You did that very quickly, two halves. Kind of wanna dig in, I think this one's more interesting too, because the behaviors change even more than, you know, four to five or three to four. So yeah, maybe you can tell me the story about the promo from five to six that we can dig in.
30:16 Speaker 00 So it took me two halves. And if we look at just like some of the behavior issues that I had, kind of like as I got promoted to five, and kind of looking forward as like what was missing for six, right? Is that like, while I was responsible for others, I had like fully grogged that, right? I wasn't very good at like, holding them accountable in return, right? To ensure that like, things are on track. And like, I wasn't very good at just like, tracking things, knowing where things were, etc., right? So I was still operating a lot on like a trust model and just like hoping that everything works out. So that was a big gap in general.
30:58 Speaker 00 So kind of like, as I went from five to six in my two halves.
31:02 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
31:03 Speaker 00 From four to five, I started leading one pod. My first half as a five, I started leading two pods. Given more responsibility, I'm now leading two pods with seven people in total. So the scope is increasing for me as a result, which means that I need to learn how to scale myself, which is another important skillset to learn as you're growing from being responsible for a small amount of people to a larger amount of people. You know, maybe as we're doing sprint planning now, previously I did it. Now instead, I, you know, assign pod leads that do it for me, right? Or like for the team.
31:40 Ryan Peterman? Right.
31:40 Speaker 00 Where I am involved guiding, coaching, but I let others take that. Which is another beautiful thing, because now they are growing in return, right? Now they're successful and they can make it towards whatever goals they have. I think my first half as an IC5, where it's where I'm starting to unlock the How to scale myself, whether it be sprint planning, whether it be recruiting onto the team, right? Where we were still meeting with a lot of bootcampers to keep growing the team. That was a different time at Meta for sure. And I can no longer do all this by myself.
32:16 Ryan Peterman? Right, right.
32:17 Speaker 00 Where I get a people within the team, it's like, hey, we need to coach more people. So I coached them in like how we do outreach, how we track the progress of each candidate. And then I might still do the hardest thing, which might be like that first cell call, right? Like really get them hooked, right? But then I have the others kind of like take responsibility of the candidate moving forward, right? So unlocking that skill was a very kind of like step change for me.
32:49 Ryan Peterman? Right.
32:50 Speaker 00 But still this first half, I didn't really know how to keep others accountable for that success. Where things were still slipping and I didn't uncover it until way too late. And my second half as an IC6 is then where I start to more so get that. Where I'm starting to be able to zoom out enough that I see that either when projects are starting to drop or people are starting to struggle, right? That there are, I've set up systems in place that can uncover either of these problems to ensure that people are successful and products are successful.
33:32 Speaker 00 So that either, you know, some kind of intervention is required or I just need to spend some time kind of like covering a gap for a little bit. It can be just like, oh, this person is struggling with this one specific piece. Well, let me as a TL step in, kind of like fix that one hairy bug. And then I know that they'll be totally fine.
33:49 Ryan Peterman? When I was going for IC6 and that was the biggest gap that, of feedback that I received, which was scaling myself. And it sounds like your first half, you delegated, you gave people pieces of work and you scaled yourself. But then there were maybe some gaps in assuring that those things. were successful afterwards, is that, did I understand correctly?
34:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that that's correct. There was a lot of kind of like, oh, the half is ending. This is not done yet. Wow, let's like figure out what happened and like how we can fix it ASAP.
34:22 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
34:22 Speaker 00 And that was, I'd say pretty systematic, systematic from the time I kind of like just got to five up until kind of like my, or like at the half I got from four to five, right? Like this, this was a problem. My second half as a five, this was a problem. And then kind of like the, towards the end of my five to six journey is kind of when that really clicked.
34:43 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
34:44 Speaker 00 Cause I, my second half as a five, I was given a lot of responsibility. We, the two pods I had before, right, about seven people, we had recruited some more. We ended up splitting the team officially into two parts. Right? So I now was responsible for one part of the team, which was eight people, right? So responsible for ensuring that, you know, they hit their goals. And we did, we exceeded those goals. But at the same time, we spun up a separate project, which ended up including 13 people. So I was kind of tealing both of these at the same time. That really stress tested my ability to, to scale myself, right? Specifically in that five to six journey, right? Like it's the scaling yourself.
35:24 Speaker 00 But something that is often discussed during kind of like someone preparing their pro and packet for five to six is like, what's the deep technical contribution, right? During my second half here, I think I was able to balance these two quite well, right? Where the high level stuff of like setting the roadmap of this project, right? Ensuring that like we have, we have clear milestones. Same thing with the, with the other team where, you know, we have, we have set the goals. We have hypotheses for how we might hit those goals and then coaching the people to move in that direction, right?
36:03 Speaker 00 At the same time, you need to show that you are a skilled engineer, right? And I did this through a couple of different ways. One was continued diff reviews. Throughout my career, I've always valued diff reviews, specifically high-quality diff reviews. I've often been in the top three, top five of amount of diff reviews, plus the amount of words in diff comments, which is a metric that I really enjoy looking at, actually. Because I find that there's a strong correlation between the amount of words you write and the quality that you give in those diff reviews. So I was spending hours a day just like reviewing code, which I found to be a very high-leverage activity, especially when you're like in a small to medium team,
36:46 Speaker 00 because then you as a TL can have a really good understanding of like all the different parts of the codebase and how they fit together. And you can really, you can catch issues early, right? For example, I was reviewing, you know, Android iOS server, which meant that when I saw that the Android engineer implemented something this way, the iOS engineer implemented this way, the server engineer was trying to do it a third way. It's like, wait, hey, guys, like, let's figure out like how, what's the one unified way of doing it, right? So diff reviews was one very high-leverage activity in terms of like technical contributions. And number two, on the big project that we had, we were getting really close to the milestone,
37:32 Speaker 00 but we were really struggling to kind of like get it over that line, right? It was a payments product that crossed between IG to Meta's main backend stack, onto the payments backend, which is in C++, onto a third-party payments partner, right? And we just couldn't make it all happen, right? So I went in as a TL. I spent many, many hours just like. Digging deep into the code, which meant that I had to go from the Android iOS code onto the ID server's backend, onto the meta main backend, onto C++. And I had like breakpoints all over these code bases, right?
38:16 Speaker 00 Would just show that like I was able to work at a very wide span, but also just like very detailed and go deep and solve the hairiest problems that we had.
38:26 Ryan Peterman? You were able to hand off things, but maybe not sure they're their success. What was the the one thing that you switched in the half? Where that really made the big difference and closed that gap?
38:37 Speaker 00 My manager used to say delegation is not abdication. It means that you may delegate whatever you want, but in the end you're responsible for the outcome. I assumed that this person would get it done and I hoped they would.
38:51 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
38:52 Speaker 00 But as I grew, I internalized this more. And I also set up processes that helped me catch these issues. Whether it's like a weekly meet sprint meeting or something where like you catch up with people and see like, oh, are they progressing? And you actually pay attention and see is the thing they're working on actually moving as we intended. I strongly believe actually that every team should have a people breakdown and a project breakdown.
39:20 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
39:21 Speaker 00 So I find that that to be incredibly helpful. Where a project might be on track, right? But that project might be supported by multiple different people. But then when you look at the people breakdown, it might be that, oh, this one person is doing really well on the project, but this other person is really struggling and hasn't really landed anything for a few weeks.
39:42 Ryan Peterman? Right.
39:43 Speaker 00 And that's a huge red flag, which like if you only look at the project level, you might be missing that there's someone on the team struggling that needs your support.
39:52 Ryan Peterman? So when you say Abdication, you just mean that when you hand something off for delegation, you continue to, in your mind, think that this is still my responsibility. I'm gonna deliver this. It's just, it's coming through someone. It's a tactic for getting it done, but it's not just like trust and forget about it kind of thing. You like continue to stay on top of it.
40:15 Speaker 00 I think early in my four to five journey, as I'm trying to scale myself through others, I got feedback like, hey, Simon, like, take a step back. Right? Like, you're stepping on my toes. Like, I need some room to like implement this. Right? Like, you gave me a project, just like, step away for a bit to ensure that like I can grow. I think that's a, one of the big steps between four and five, where you actually need to learn to let go, right? You can no longer achieve everything yourself. Even more so five to six, where like now you need to, you might not even be able to review all the code anymore, right? You need to trust that the other people in your team can support the different projects.
40:54 Ryan Peterman? But you still verify through them, just maybe not micromanage.
40:58 Speaker 00 Exactly.
40:59 Ryan Peterman? I'm curious, after you got promoted to six, your, your trajectory was so rocket shift, right? Did you, what, what were you thinking in terms of career planning? Cause you had exceeded your original goal. You wanted to get to five. You got to six faster than, you know, a lot of people thought. Were you thinking about seven? Or did you want to do management? Or were you thinking, I achieved the goal I want. It's time for a personal life or something like that?
41:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, I was definitely, you know, hungry for more, right? And I guess I still am in some ways.
41:33 Ryan Peterman? Yes.
41:34 Speaker 00 But I also recognized that like, in some ways, it's a bit of a crossroads, right? Where like now there's the option of management. And I guess we'll get to this, but I did choose the manager route for a little bit. But I struggled a lot with that decision. My identity was definitely part of like being a good engineer, right? And I was so worried about losing that. Five, 10 years down the line, if I switch to management now, will I just become a middle manager that have lost all their technical abilities? And like, I've stopped providing value and I'm just, you know, existing, right? That was a huge concern of mine, to be honest, right? So in the end, I did choose the, the management route. But ended up switching back to, to IC.
42:19 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, so I mean, I had a very similar exact thinking because I love the the building aspect of it and the technology. So how did you make that decision to become a manager?
42:31 Speaker 00 One large part actually is that I was still with my same manager. The same manager that I had since I started the company as an IC3. He was still my manager now as an IC6. And the funny thing is that we started together, or I mean, he started before me. But when I started, you know, I was in California. Now we're actually in London, right? We're both working in London.
42:50 Ryan Peterman? So you moved with him?
42:52 Speaker 00 Correct. Yeah, so.
42:54 Ryan Peterman? He sounds like a great manager, so it seems worth it.
42:57 Speaker 00 Truly. Yeah. So, you know, I'm now in in London. We're working together. We're starting up a new team. So he he was leading two teams. I got one of the teams as a TL. And then, you know, there was the opportunity to become a manager because the team was like seven, eight people. My manager was getting too many direct reports. And because I knew that I had my manager's support and that he's been coaching me so well throughout my entire career, and I find him to be an extraordinary manager, it felt like if I do the manager shift, doing it together with him might be the best thing. I like how he is as a manager. If I become a manager, I would like to become similar to him.
43:40 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
43:40 Speaker 00 And thus, now might be the time to do it.
43:44 Ryan Peterman? Right, right. Having a good manager may be the best gift that someone could have if they're very ambitious in career and wanting to grow. And you are were very lucky and fortunate to have such a wonderful manager. What are the the things that made him special as a manager?
44:05 Speaker 00 He cared, right? He cared about people. He cared about projects, about impact. He he knew the company, right? He, I mean, by now, he's been here 10 years, bit more. So when I joined, he had probably been in the company like four-ish years. So he knew the process, you know, he he knew everything, right? And he himself had had such a rocket ship trajectory within the company that he, I think, really understood what I wanted to achieve. I think the other thing that really made him stand out as an engineering manager is that. He was probably more of a product person, really. Which is funny because he actually just a few months back switched to a PM within Meta.
44:48 Speaker 00 Right, so he was really able to set the roadmap of the team at a really great level of detail. Upwards communication, downwards communication. Which then let the engineers in the team, once we were ready to, I guess, as he had coached us, to really run with it, right, on the engineering front. And then he kept coaching us on the product management and like data and growth front. To ensure that we can become engineers that are valuable to the company. And one more skill that he does very well is communication. And it's something that he coached us really well in.
45:31 Speaker 00 Because I do believe that to be successful at a large company as Meta, communication is key. Written communication especially is incredibly high leverage. I mean, we have our internal forum, workplace at Meta. If you post a post, thousands of people can see it. If you write effectively so that people actually get the message from what you're trying to say, it makes such a huge difference. I actually believe that a lot of people are held back in their career. Because they might be doing amazing things, but they can't communicate just how good that is. Of course, sometimes it's like in meetings, if people are struggling to communicate clearly in spoken word. But I believe that the biggest hindrance for people might be written communication.
46:13 Speaker 00 Where when they write a post to communicate that I achieved this project, this is why it's important. They might just say, I did this, right? Right, right. But like, but why? What was the learning? Like, what did Meta or the team or the org gain from this? And I think that's one big gap that people have.
46:32 Ryan Peterman? I agree a hundred percent and written versus spoken. I agree, written is definitely higher leverage because the largest audience, the average engineer is speaking to is maybe dozens of people at most. But in written language, it can be read by, you know, at least a hundred, very simply. And, you know, over time too, it's referenced again. Later, people look back on it, it's used for future decisions and, you know, I agree a hundred percent. What is it that makes an effective update or piece of writing about your project? Like, what makes it effective?
47:09 Speaker 00 Consider that the person that will read it will spend five, 10 seconds most. Make it incredibly parseable at a glance.
47:18 Ryan Peterman? Yes.
47:18 Speaker 00 Right? The TLDR, right?
47:20 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
47:21 Speaker 00 Make sure it's truly a TLDR.
47:23 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
47:24 Speaker 00 If possible, include numbers, right? Like, people understand numbers much better than, you know, written words. Truly, that's like the most important thing and that should be, so in workplace, we kind of like, you know, fold the posts together, right? When they're too long.
47:41 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
47:41 Speaker 00 So ensure that TLDR is truly above the fold, so that it's right there.
47:45 Ryan Peterman? Are you talking about the Seymour?
47:46 Speaker 00 Exactly.
47:47 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, okay. So whatever that first thing is that they see really gets across a strong message.
47:52 Speaker 00 Exactly.
47:53 Ryan Peterman? I see.
47:53 Speaker 00 And then also make sure that when you write the post, consider the audience. Or try to write the post in different sections, target different audiences. If you try to communicate to a large audience, let's say hundreds, likely, most of them won't have that same technical knowledge of the specific piece that you're working on. But they might care about the outcome and the why and maybe the next steps. So I often do, you know, like the flashy title, TLDR with some numbers, you know, set the context and then kind of like the impact and next steps, right? That's kind of like. Always what I keep towards the top as like the top three sections. But then I might have like a, and here's more, have all the technical details to, you know,
48:36 Speaker 00 attract the fellow nerds, right? Like, get the other people that are like really interested in like the how, not just the why.
48:44 Ryan Peterman? A hundred percent. I think that's the biggest communication mistake that software engineers make is they've been deep in the weeds of the project details. And then I read a post and it's full of all this stuff of, you know, I went to into this system and then I found this line of code and then, you know, it turns out that this this didn't execute and there's an exception and all of that, I mean, that only matters to maybe your one or two collaborators that knows all those details. And that happens in meetings as well. Someone's giving an update and it's just all this stuff that, I mean, it matters, but just not to the people that are listening. What's the, what's the high level? Is it on track or not?
49:28 Ryan Peterman? Is, what was the number movement? Why should they care in like two lines? Like, that's the most important fix, I feel. You said you were worried about losing the technical. After having tried management, what did you, you learn? Was it actually a concern that you lose the technical aspects?
49:48 Speaker 00 So I was only a manager for about a little bit less than a year, right? So I didn't have the time to measure if I would truly lose my technical ability.
49:56 Ryan Peterman? Right.
49:57 Speaker 00 And to be honest, it was one of the feedback I got from the people I was managing. It's like, Simon, step away from the technical. So I think I was struggling a little bit in the IC to manager transition in that I still wanted to do some technical work. This was a bit of a struggle for me, partially because at the company, they were trying at the time to encourage managers to do a bit more technical work. But also, if, if you've been the TL, you're now the manager, you see a gap and you're like, ooh, like I, I really want to fill that gap. I was really struggling there, to be honest. I got feedback on it. I don't think I fully, truly corrected in the end.
50:33 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
50:34 Speaker 00 Before I ended up switching. I had some really bad luck, actually, in my manager transition. My immediate manager, that had been with for such a long time, ended up in an accident and had to be out of work for like three, four months.
50:48 Ryan Peterman? Oh, wow.
50:49 Speaker 00 Right, so. No immediate support network there. My skip manager was on pat leave, right? So no, no support there. The closest person in the
51:02 Ryan Peterman? Management chain.
51:03 Speaker 00 Management chain was a director in California. And remember, we were in London, so time zones were hard. And this director had come back from a long term sick leave as well. So weren't like fully up to date on all that had happened.
51:18 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
51:18 Speaker 00 So that was tough, right? I, I was given this, where I moved into this role and pretty immediately after, lost a lot of my strong support network. I also had two people that wanted to grow from five to six. And I think I overpromised, right? I was like, you know, maybe we can make this happen.
51:35 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
51:35 Speaker 00 And I think I had one of them on the right trajectory, right? Because they were able to kind of like take my role as TL.
51:42 Ryan Peterman? Right, right.
51:42 Speaker 00 Really do that. But then for the other person, it was hard to really slot that in. To like get two people from five to six at the same time in the same team of like eight people.
51:52 Ryan Peterman? Right.
51:52 Speaker 00 Is a really tough thing to do. I think I overpromised there a little bit, which is definitely a learning. If I were to transition to management again. And for reasons, we also had to leave London and
52:07 Ryan Peterman? chaotic, ridiculous.
52:09 Speaker 00 Exactly. So with all that, there was just too much going on. A lot of just like heartache in leaving London and supporting the team at the same time. So I got burned out a little bit as a manager. Just decided to move back into IC, which I've been very happy with since.
52:27 Ryan Peterman? I mean, you could have also found another manager role or without all that chaos. What was the thing that made you want to go back to IC specifically?
52:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, I remember my director, she asked me like, Simon, you want to go back to IC? And it hit me like, yes, yes, I do.
52:46 Speaker 00 I think it was more of a gut feel, to be honest.
52:47 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
52:48 Speaker 00 Just like, alright, I tried it incredibly poor timing.
52:52 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
52:53 Speaker 00 Let me just like, take a break from it for a bit.
52:55 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
52:55 Speaker 00 Go back to what I know, just like, get back into the, the previous groove.
53:00 Ryan Peterman? Right.
53:01 Speaker 00 And, you know, I'm totally open to management.
53:03 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
53:04 Speaker 00 Not yet, though. I think I want another three to five years. I actually think that I C six is a great level at Meta.
53:12 Ryan Peterman? Right.
53:12 Speaker 00 Specifically when it comes to like, compared to management, right? Where, because the type of engineer I am is that I enjoy growing others, right? So now I actually get to spend my time doing edge work, spend a lot of time like mentoring and coaching others. And that like mentoring and coaching becomes a bit more of a, a bonus.
53:32 Ryan Peterman? Right, right, right.
53:33 Speaker 00 In terms of like my performance evaluation.
53:35 Ryan Peterman? Right, right, right.
53:36 Speaker 00 Compared to if I'm a manager, that becomes now like the main thing I'm evaluated on. And, you know, not everyone's fun to coach. And like now I can kind of pick and choose a little bit, like who and what I'd like to coach.
53:48 Ryan Peterman? Yeah.
53:49 Speaker 00 Um, so I find that as an I C that enjoys people's stuff, I actually have way more flexibility in how I apply that people's stuff.
53:59 Ryan Peterman? As a manager, you take on responsibility for everyone and it's an unconditional support. As an I C, you, you kind of pick your project, you know, you're, you're creating scope as I C six. So you kind of create scope that you, you want to work on and you are helping the people you want to help. I mean, not, not fully, there's still some stuff where you need to take responsibility, but there is a lot more optionality. I, that, that makes a lot of sense. And you got burned out, not specifically because of management, but there were aspects.
54:31 Speaker 00 The circumstances around it was just really tough. Um, I think I probably would have stuck with it if the circumstance had been better. I might have still switched back to I C. I find that quite likely to be honest. But I think I would have stuck with management for longer before I made that switch back.
54:46 Ryan Peterman? Before we fully leave your kind of fully transparent ratings and promos. I think you had mentioned that you received DE once or twice throughout your journey. And DE stands for discretionary equity. I think it's called AE in some cases, like additional equity.
55:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:04 Ryan Peterman? What is that? How does it work? Maybe you could tell us about your experience?
55:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, additional equity is when a director chooses to give you more RSUs, right? More stock options. This happened twice in my career. First time around was in my five to six promo where I got a random 15 minutes calendar slot on my calendar one day. I, with a director, I show up. He's there and he's like, Simon, do you know why we have this meeting? I'm like, I have no idea. He's like, oh, no. And he told me, you know, like, hey, yeah, like, we decided to give you discretionary equity. Which, you know, I had heard about because I'd been in the company for like three years now.
55:48 Speaker 00 But once again, I was pretty like naive and new and like I didn't really know what to expect. Right? Because sometimes you go into kind of like the internal compensation group where like people post about their success. And it's a huge selection bias about who posts in there.
56:04 Ryan Peterman? Right.
56:04 Speaker 00 It's usually the people that get great ratings, that get AE. So obviously I'd seen a bunch of those posts. I was like, okay, like, all right, great. That happens, right? So like, I was incredibly humbled, right? And like, it felt really good, but I didn't really understand it really. But I guess I, you know, I got in great ratings throughout. And since I started as an IC3, I assumed that maybe they were worried about some attrition, given that my stock options when I started probably quite a bit lower compared to what it would be for an IC6.
56:38 Ryan Peterman? I see. So that first DE was, it wasn't game changing? It just kind of gave you maybe a little bit more than market, is that right?
56:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, I believe so. It was a bit hard to know at the time because the meta stock had just crashed, which is great now when it has not crashed. That was actually similar with the second AE that I got a year later. So I'd been IC6 for a year. I guess I'd just transitioned to management.
57:06 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
57:07 Speaker 00 And I ended up getting my second AE. I believe it's primarily due to the success of the team I took over, right? So I moved to London, right? I took over part of the team. We shipped the products in a much faster timeline than anticipated, right? And it was a company priority, as so many things are at the company. But we executed well and like we got it done, right? So I think that the success of that and the behaviors I showed were a large part as why I got that second AE. And I'd say that these two combined have definitely had a large impact on my total comp and what it would be compared to normal market rate.
57:47 Ryan Peterman? When you see a fifteen minute, no agenda meeting from some senior director you never talked to, what did you think when you saw that on your calendar?
57:57 Speaker 00 I don't even know, man. Like it's, I honestly had no idea what to expect. I was a little sweaty going in, like, all right, what's gonna happen here?
58:03 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
58:04 Speaker 00 Turns out it was a good one, so.
58:05 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a friend who, you know, this is happening to you and he's like, I think I'm gonna get fired. Because it's like, you never get a meeting like that, so. You mentioned you were an intern, but also at some point you told me you were an intern director too. So you kind of seen internships on both sides of it. What's something that is like the, you know, top things to keep in mind? Or like the eighty, twenty tips that you see separate the best interns from the people who are not as good?
58:36 Speaker 00 Yes, let me briefly touch on my history when it comes to interns, right? So I was an intern to start, and honestly, I didn't do very well. I think I was very close to not getting an offer. Luckily, I'm here today because I did get the offer.
58:48 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
58:49 Speaker 00 But I think that I didn't do that well, and I think maybe we'll cover that. But then I was an intern manager twice. First time around, I had an intern that, like I mentioned, went from kind of meets most expectations to actually meeting and getting a return offer. And that, at the same time, I was a peer intern to four interns. Second time around, I had an intern, rock star intern. We had a couple new hire IC3s at the same time. And my intern was coaching the IC3s.
59:19 Ryan Peterman? Wow, how's that?
59:22 Speaker 00 He was just so good at JavaScript, so good at React. That's like he blew through everything and was like coaching the others and like this is how you do it.
59:32 Ryan Peterman? What university?
59:34 Speaker 00 It was over in Mexico.
59:35 Ryan Peterman? Okay, so yeah, it's interesting. And I asked, by the way, because I had a lot of interns as well. And I noticed the ones that come from Waterloo were just like.
59:43 Speaker 00 The Waterloo ones are great.
59:44 Ryan Peterman? They came in and they're like IC4. I'm like, you know how to do everything already.
59:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, then I had two summers, or I guess one winter and one summer that I was an intern director. Right? And the responsibility of an intern director is that you practically manage 10 intern managers. So you as the intern director is responsible that the intern manager actually produces a solid project plan. And then you do three check-ins with the intern managers. You do a three-week check-in, making sure that the intern is ramping up all right. You do the midpoint checking to make sure that like, are things like on track for the project? And then the final check-in, we're, you know, ahead of the final review. So then on to your question of like, what are some of the things that stand out between really solid interns? Maybe interns that don't make it? The simplest way to look at it, right, is like velocity in some ways, right?
1:00:31 Speaker 00 Like velocity is incredibly important, right? Because the main measure of success for an intern is, did you complete your intern projects? That is the primary thing we look at. Of course, it's important how you do it. But if you didn't do it, then that's almost like a fail by itself. Obviously, there are safeguards to see like, was the project just like completely mis-scoped, right? But hopefully throughout the process, that's been like corrected already. So velocity is incredibly important, right? And with that comes trying to do a fast ramp up, right? And I think a lot of interns that don't make it, don't ask enough questions early on. Whether you're an intern, whether you're an IC3, whether you're like joining a new team,
1:01:15 Speaker 00 those first couple of weeks are so important. To like utilize your ability to be dumb, right? To like ask those dumb questions. Right, right. Right, like it's the most valuable time that you have. Because the expectations of you are practically zero. So you can ask people however much you want. And this is something that I kept repeating to interns I had as well as like I see threes joining especially just like. If you have a question that takes you more than like thirty minutes to an hour, like ping me, please. Right, like if you keep spending an hour on like all these small questions that like we could resolve in thirty seconds. Like you will not be successful, right? So please, please, please ping questions, right? It's incredibly important, especially early on.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 Because it's very different to ask a question of like, oh, how do I do this super basic thing? Week one compared to week six, right? Like, please get that done early. Um, it's very, uh, it will really help your velocity. And another thing here is that the the intern program at Meta is set up that you have your intern manager. And then you have usually two peers, but sometimes more. Also do take advantage of your peers for two reasons. Um, one reason is maybe you're asking too many questions and your managers just can't deal with them all, right? So, uh, maybe you have a chat group with, you know, uh, your intern manager plus peers. Make sure you can ask questions in there, then kind of like load balance between themselves, right? Um, and number two is that when we look at intern performance, we actually.
1:02:43 Speaker 00 We obviously primarily look at the feedback from the intern manager. But the peer feedback from the peers you have are two other critical pieces of input. Um, and sometimes when there's insufficient amount of evidence of, um, you know, the right behaviors and such. Then intern managers, intern directors, we need to go in, do a lot of digging to to clarify that, right? But if your peers know you, they know your project, they know what you're doing, how you're doing it. Um, that makes everything much, much easier, um, and they can, uh, vouch for you much better.
1:03:18 Ryan Peterman? You've talked about the velocity and one immediate gut reaction is, okay, what if I work twice the hours to get it done? And I think some people might hear that, oh, if you're, if you're barely meeting expectations, but you're working crazy hours, then, you know, you might get penalized or something like this. Do you, do you have any thoughts on, on that?
1:03:42 Speaker 00 We do try to get a sense of just like, how much someone is working, like, is this feasible in the long term? If someone's just on the line and we see that like, they're pushing this at like six AM, but also three AM, like every day, right? Like, that's a huge red flag that like this person, might not be able to like sustain this for very long. Uh, and I'd say it's primarily an indicator when they're just around that line. But the, the other thing is that's not just for, for interns, right? But just like for, for any employee engineer, right? Like, taking care of yourself is important, right? I truly believe that you need to take care of like mind and body to be a successful person.
1:04:25 Speaker 00 To me, working out is incredibly important. I, I journal every day, right? I make sure that like, I have my focus time in the morning where I can like, do focus work, uh, instead of just like being stuck in meetings, right? And like, these rituals are something that like ensures that I function effectively. And obviously I've had times where like, um, specifically actually between five to six, trying to solve that like very hairy bug. I was doing like twelve, fourteen hour days, like for a week and a half straight. That was tough, right? But like, it was worth doing like a short sprint of like really hard work. But I, I know I couldn't keep that up. I was skipping my workouts, I was having way too much coffee and I could just feel,
1:05:10 Speaker 00 my mind every morning just like slowing down, right? So of course you can like put in more hours, but just try to be intentional about it to ensure that like, you can't put in more hours, the entirety of it. But to reach a specific milestone at times, um, could be one way of achieving that.
1:05:28 Ryan Peterman? In your ambitious growth, you had points where you're sprinting, but you were not, your steady state was never a ridiculous health sacrificing kind of grind. What is that peak steady state that you've you've learned you can maintain? Like maybe in hours per week?
1:05:46 Speaker 00 I probably average like fifty hours a week ish. Like I am a morning person, so I wake up, I have my coffee, walk the dog, work out. And then, you know, I maybe start work and then some days, maybe that's like seven thirty, eight o'clock and maybe I end up working to like six P M. because I need to have meetings with like California, right?
1:06:14 Ryan Peterman? Right, right, right.
1:06:15 Speaker 00 So some days are longer, some days are shorter. I also just like really enjoy what I do and like the team I work with. So I switched teams somewhat recently, specifically because I was losing the energy I had on like that same amount of hours, right? Where those same fifty hours starting to like really feel like a grind, right? Like, and I just couldn't understand why, right? So I had to do quite a bit of self-reflection to understand why that might be. Yeah, it was simply because I was like losing the interest in that one area. And one of the great things about Meta is that's a huge company and they're also very flexible about internal mobility, so is able to switch to a to a new team and an infra team.
1:06:58 Speaker 00 And honestly, it's been a lot of fun, got a lot of my fire back and I just like feel like I, the quality of work I'm able to produce is significantly different when I have that interest in fire compared to like just chugging along.
1:07:13 Ryan Peterman? I see, no, that makes sense. So you sounds like you're saying work-life balance is somewhat tied to your interest and motivation in the work. Like, sounds like you could, you could work twenty hours a week on something you hate and that could feel worse than fifty hours a week on something that you're really passionate about.
1:07:30 Speaker 00 Hundred percent.
1:07:31 Ryan Peterman? I see. In my career, when I was really grinding for promos and things. I felt that I had work-life balance, even though I was working a lot of hours.
1:07:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:42 Ryan Peterman? Because it's, if you love it, then it's not really, I mean, that's cliche, but you know,
1:07:47 Speaker 00 It's true.
1:07:47 Ryan Peterman? It does not feel like so much work, so. You know, for this last bit of the conversation, I kind of just wanna reflect on your career a bit and kind of ask you some higher level stuff, looking back. So, you know, when it comes to the whole thing so far, where did most of the growth come from? Like, what were the things, let's say I'm trying to reverse engineer your career growth. What were the, the factors that led to that growth?
1:08:16 Speaker 00 I mean, I think the overall word is like ownership, right? And then like, there's a million things within. I think ownership can be in the small, right? Like, I ensure that this task gets done. Or it can be, I own the success of this team, right? But if you start talking especially about like, early career people, right? Then like, ownership means that you, you ensure the success of your one thing, right? And to me, I find that this actually requires a lot of curiosity. And we have this saying at Meta of like, nothing at Meta is someone else's problem. The way that I interpret that, right, is that like, if you find an issue, right? That's like blocking you, you don't necessarily have to wait for the other team to tell you
1:09:01 Speaker 00 why you're getting blocked. Read the code, like, that's one of the great things about a monorepo. Just like, read the code, read the diffs, why did they add it? Like, what's the reasoning? Can we change it? Like, come up with a, a brief proposal, right? And like, research your, your questions, or just like, approach ahead of time to be able to move forward. That kind of curiosity slash ownership slash, you know, not.
1:09:29 Speaker 00 Accepting being blocked, I think, is really critical for that fast growth, especially early on. Now, it's no longer just like that one piece of code. Maybe it's like collaboration with a cross-functional partner, like, why is that not working? Let's understand their intention, right? Like, let's be empathetic, like, why is someone behaving a certain way? Like, are they getting evaluated on this one metric that you're regressing, right? Like, trying to be kind and understand others, I think, is also a really other important piece.
1:10:03 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, and it sounds like as your career grew, that umbrella of ownership just kind of kept expanding, kept expanding. And I imagine it even continues further. If you were like a I C eight, you're like, I care about what these three hundred people are doing and that it's successful.
1:10:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:10:19 Ryan Peterman? It's interesting, you say, when I ask you that question, the answer is kind of a non-technical behavior. It's, you know, of ownership. When you think about a successful engineer, do what percent of it? I know it's kind of hard to quantify, but what percent of it is non-technical stuff? And what percent of it is technical stuff that leads to kind of career growth?
1:10:44 Speaker 00 I think you can be incredibly successful with just a baseline level of technical skills. You need to be able to know how to get the task done, right? But you can totally get to I C five without like being able to be like the true, I can solve any problem, throw it my way kind of person.
1:11:01 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah.
1:11:02 Speaker 00 Like, if you can get your stuff done and like your overall contributions of like chatting with the designer, pulling the data, you know, collaborating with others, like, you don't need much more than that, like, baseline level of like, I can ensure that like what is given to me can be executed and like done in a high enough quality way.
1:11:24 Ryan Peterman? I see, okay. So it sounds like technical skills need it up to a point, but past that point, diminishing returns. And the non-technical skills are kind of what really differentiates and grows people quickly.
1:11:37 Speaker 00 I would say so, with the one caveat of like, there are some people are just like so technically talented that like that just like outweighs everything.
1:11:45 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:11:46 Speaker 00 There are obviously the edge cases there, right?
1:11:48 Ryan Peterman? Yes, yes.
1:11:49 Speaker 00 But to, I do think that like soft skills is incredibly important for a fast career. Because people need to enjoy working with you for them to kind of give you those opportunities to grow, to trust you.
1:12:03 Ryan Peterman? You've been at Meta your entire career at this point, which in this industry is unusual. What is the thing that's kept you at Meta for so long?
1:12:16 Speaker 00 Bit of a cop out answer, but people is definitely a big part of it, right? Like, I do really love the people at Meta.
1:12:23 Speaker 00 My manager, obviously, right? But also my coworkers, right? And I think this was especially true, actually, in my first team, right? Where I joined as a second engineer, we ended up growing the team to like sixteen people before we like split into two, right? And since that was a large part of recruiting there, honestly, like it felt like a bit of a family, right? Like it was, it was a really happy, supportive environment. To be honest, a lot of people we hired were also like straight out of college. Like it was a very like young, fun thing, especially since I was just out of college too, right? So it was a really just like welcoming, happy experience. Obviously, I'm not, no longer straight out of college, but still I really enjoy my coworkers.
1:13:07 Speaker 00 I find that people are mostly empathetic with each others, right? Like people understand others' reasons and we try to be kind to each other. And people are just really good technically too.
1:13:19 Ryan Peterman? Right.
1:13:20 Speaker 00 So people is definitely like one big part, right? Why I'm staying at Meta.
1:13:24 Ryan Peterman? Right.
1:13:24 Speaker 00 Number two is that I find that the flexibility of Meta is also quite incredible, right? In terms of like internal mobility. I've been working in California, so I worked in Menlo Park to start, the HQ. During COVID, I was down in LA, I went back to SF, you know, did a year in London, came back this time to New York. So just like. That flexibility in terms of like global location has been really great.
1:13:50 Ryan Peterman? Right.
1:13:51 Speaker 00 But also like internal projects. Obviously, my first team was actually quite a bit of forced movement in terms of like what to be focused on. But now, like I mentioned, I was losing my drive. The hour is starting to feel like a real drag, a real slug. And I figured, you know, I need to change something up. I did consider going elsewhere, but I figured, let's give Meta another shot, right? And like, see what's up. And I joined this new team in the ID server in Fraspace. And it's been great. Like, once again, people are great. I'm learning so much. I can go incredibly deep technically, which is something that I love nerding out about. A lot of those like checkboxes as to like what makes me tick. Just like keep appearing within Meta.
1:14:34 Speaker 00 And thus, I don't have like a strong drive to seek elsewhere. Which, you know, might change in the future. I find that there are some things you just can't experience at Meta. But I haven't reached a point yet.
1:14:50 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, that makes sense. There was someone that I worked with who was exceptionally senior. You know, everything was going well at Meta. And I was thinking, have you ever considered leaving? And he said, actually, he considers leaving every year. Not, not from a perspective of I don't like it here, but more of like a housekeeping of, you know, you consider it. And if it turns out I am happiest where I am now, that gives you even more confidence that this is the right place, I'm doing the right thing and all that. So, okay, and then the last question, the question I want to ask is, if you were to go back in time, you're talking to yourself right when you had graduated and joined Meta. And you give yourself advice, what would that advice be?
1:15:34 Speaker 00 Be curious and like nothing else is someone else's problem. Take ownership, right? And obviously, when you're new, you gotta keep in mind how much time you spend on each thing, right? Similar to like the intern, right? Like, ask a lot of questions early on, like get that velocity, right? But once you got that velocity, right? And that like baseline level of productivity, start asking these questions, right? Like, why was this done this way within the codes? Become a bit of like a archaeologist to understand like why certain decisions were made, if it's blocking you. Don't just say, oh, it is this way, therefore it. Would always be this way, kind of like question those early decisions.
1:16:18 Speaker 00 Because especially at a big company like Meta, there are layers and layers and layers of tech debt and just like overall decisions that may no longer hold. There are a lot of like dead experiments lying around the codebase and like maybe we can just like clean that up, that would make your things easier. Take ownership, be curious, and nothing is someone else's problem.
1:16:38 Ryan Peterman? Okay, well, thanks for the interview. Is there anyone you wanted to shout out before we end?
1:16:42 Speaker 00 Yes, I promised Chris that is covering my on-call shift right now to give him a shout out, so thank you, Chris, for covering my on-call.
1:16:50 Ryan Peterman? Awesome. Thanks so much for this interview, Simon. I was really looking forward to it. Someone that had worked with you said you were, you know, one of their favorite people that they've ever worked with, so thanks for giving to the community. Appreciate it.
1:17:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, all right. Thank you very much, Ryan.
1:17:05 Ryan Peterman? Hey, thanks for watching the show. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to support, you can subscribe on YouTube or you can leave a review on Spotify. And I'm always looking for new guests to interview. So if anyone comes up who you think you really want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll try to reach out to them and get them on the show. Thanks for listening as always, and I'll see you next time.
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