Ask Me Anything

Recent experiences, especially with being laid off, can understandably affect self-confidence. It's completely understandable you're hesitant about re-entering the interview cycle and seeking another employer in the tech space.

You have several potentially great choices before you, but there will be unresolvable ambiguity as to how to move forward. A few thoughts:

• How much do you want to explore or lean into your interest in capital allocation as a potential full time job? For instance, would a stint at a VC be of interest? Or even an EIR at a VC, which gives you a chance to interact weekly with the capital allocators while exploring your own projects?

• Are there companies outside of the main labs that are also interesting to you? I ask simply because getting into the main labs is incredibly competitive, such that I'd recommend backup plans for even the most qualified people. If you're interested in AI, there's hardly a major tech company which doesn't have significant investments, or at least teams which focus on AI (whether that's fine-tuning models or building their own).

My guess, given only what you've communicated, is that you might enjoy a stint at a VC quite a lot. During my time as an EIR at Madrona, I was able to sit in on the weekly partner meetings where investments were discussed, but also meet with a bunch of founders and research my own startup ideas. If you were to do the same, you might find you enjoy the partner role, or perhaps find an operational role you love.

Setting expectations first:

• I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of all engineers never get to IC6 in their entire 40-year career. There's a reason IC5 is considered a "career level" at most major companies.

• That said, 2.5 years from IC5 → IC6 is reasonably spritely, all things considered.

I don't know you personally so can't have an informed opinion about whether your appraisal of yourself (and the rush implied in your question) is reasonable given your talents and abilities, but I wanted to surface those expectations explicitly.

Managers and mentors would kept saying "create scope" but there were not a big enough problem that already an IC6 was not working on.

Is that the case? That you had multiple managers and mentors advising you to "create scope" where it was impossible? I'm trying to get a better sense the accuracy of your perception of what's blocking you from growth. If you have multiple managers and mentors advising you to do something that is impossible, you arguably have many terrible managers and mentors... or perhaps another parsimonious explanation is that they see a path where you don't.

It seems to me the best way to 6 is "influence in the org", but Meta seems much more top-down than before nowadays, so it seems people who get the opportunities on these top-down projects are the ones already having influence, so its hard to create own scope now.

I don't think this can be true. What you're saying implies that no one at Meta will grow from IC5 to IC6 because of some structural change in the company. I'm willing to bet this can't be true. There have got to be hundreds of people going from IC5 → IC6 at Meta in any given year. Perhaps especially at its current size, since large companies often succumb to grade inflation.

I fundamentally question the claim that Snap and Pinterest are faster places to grow, and that you're stuck in IC5 simply because you're at the wrong company. There are of course situations in rapid-growth companies (e.g. early Facebook) where people are given opportunities to learn much more quickly than at stagnant companies... but Snap and Pinterest aren't those fast-growth companies abounding in opportunities.

Your entire question and tone externalizes the cause of your stasis. Knowing only what you've told me, the error bars on my judgment are huge: but I'd hazard a guess that externalization might be the root explanation of why you're not growing. Everything you'd said is about how the situation isn't right for you: the team's not right, the mentors and managers are giving advice that's impossible to implement, friends are growing faster simply because they're at other companies. You haven't mentioned a single thing you'd like to grow in yourself to earn the IC6.

If I were a betting man, I'd likely guess that your best path to growth is to solicit feedback and introspect about the true blockers to your continued growth. If a single person is promoted from IC5 → IC6 within Meta, you should ask yourself how you could have been that person. And the answers need to be something within your agency; otherwise, you're just externalizing blame, and you may well find yourself growing much more slowly than your talents theoretically make possible.

Raw code output is no longer as differentiating (though I bet the best senior engineers can still output more production-quality code because of characteristics below). And in a funny way, I wonder whether the ability to communicate clearly & persuasively across functions might be diminishing in importance as more companies can be built out of just 2-5 people.

"Instincts," for lack of a better word, feel even more important. For instance, I often get a sense even before checking the code for ways in which AI would likely have made mistakes. Or the sense of how to factor a larger codebase such that the code is componentized in a way that minimizes dependencies.

The latter is something the AI is obviously getting better at with each revision, so I wonder how long it remains a differentiator for a great senior engineer. Overall, that's perhaps the biggest theme of my current take: that it's unclear to me how much longer the average senior engineer will have an advantage over AI.

I'm so sorry to hear you've had such a hard time getting back into the workforce.

This is an especially hard time to rejoin. The past year or so has been the first time in my professional life where I have a few friends, each with 20+ years of experience, each looking for jobs for over 9 months without landing one. Each of them has had plenty of FAANG experience, so I don't think it's just about their qualifications.

Although it's impossible to know, my intuition is that what you're experiencing isn't because you've had a gap in your employment (especially in your case, where you've been on parental leave, which is totally understandable). At least in all the times I've hired people personally (and I've interviewed over a thousand people), I've never considered gaps in employment problematic unless it felt related to poor performance. What I can't speak to is whether modern hiring/filtering tools might take gaps into account... but even there, I tend to doubt it. I suspect what you're experiencing is, for better or worse, a reflection of how hard it is in general to get a job in the current market.

My advice:

• You've not become a worse employee. A gap for parental leave is completely healthy and admirable.

• While awaiting callbacks and interviews, build with the latest AI tools and get very good at the latest approaches. Read up on new developments. Try things yourself. You have a huge edge right now that others in jobs don't have, which is the freedom to explore whatever technology you want. Use this to your advantage.

• In a tight job market, employers start biasing toward false negatives. Not being called back or not passing interviews isn't an indictment on you. Keep the faith and be prepared to take many shots at goal before something sticks.

You can do this. My sincere hope is that you land something great soon.

Deciding what to do here depends a lot on the outcome you want. For instance:

• Is your goal to become a director at Meta? A director at any major company? A director anywhere?

• Why is being a director the goal? Would you feel just as good as an IC8, compensated the same? What if you could get paid more being an M1/M2 elsewhere?

Although I've had several Meta coworkers go from IC8 straight into a directorship, those situations tended to happen only in cases when they had equivalent management scope in a prior job. So it feels not impossible, but unlikely, that you'd go IC6 → IC7 → D1.

Given that's the case, a big question is how you continue to learn and grow your ability to manage larger teams and/or more senior people. You mentioned an offer with a different company; what are your options for switching within Meta itself? Sometimes when switching within an existing company, you have the advantage of already having positive social capital as well as understanding how best to work within a culture. If you had an opportunity to manage a set of people as an M1 elsewhere in Meta, you'd likely start with an advantage over switching elsewhere. (This is said without knowing more context around your other offer).

From the way you describe it, I don't myself automatically think of what's happened to you as "all the progress... over 2 years of work, went out the window." You had two years' of experiences learning how to be a great M1. That's definitely progress.

Which brings me to a final point: remember that your level is a delayed external metric of your internal capabilities, if everything's working correctly. What's most important is growing those internal capabilities. Going from M1 → M2 isn't half as important as learning the skills to act at an M2 scope. Benjamin Graham (the investor) used to say, "In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine." Optimize for your intrinsic value, your ability to do larger scope work and manage larger scope teams. Sometimes, that'll mean being thrown into the deep end of managing something you're barely competent at in order to learn the skills before drowning. At other times, it's about finding opportunities to hone those skills so that when the right role arises, you're the obvious choice for the job.

Look for opportunities to do the latter, whether that's inside Meta or elsewhere. Always work with and for the best people you can, and focus on emulating and practicing the skills which will make you a slam-dunk candidate for the job you want. Don't let external measurements and metrics drive that decision.