Facebook "coding machine" archetype
Any coding machines out there? What does a typical workday look like? What does a typical career progression look like for this archetype? Is it really possible in practice to move beyond E5 as a coding machine? I realize that archetypes don't formally come into play until E7, but I assume people tend to start falling into particular molds well before then, so please do chime in regardless of level if you think of yourself as a coding machine.
This "level stuff" reminds me of scientology....
Yes - there's obviously a bit more of a focus on coding, and that usually comes deliberately at focusing less on projects and people (having indirect rather than direct contributions there). They are usually really defensive of their calendar and context switching costs, and opt into coding heavy projects where they can go heads down and build things quickly. Career progression isn't too hard to CMs, since the output is very quantifiable. And the archetype doesn't formally happen until very senior levels, but it's definitely possible to be more junior and follow the same style.
What's "coding machine" in reference to? The only group at FB that I can think of is the hack compiler team... what are the others? Never been sure how many folks worked on MySQL or Cassandra...
It means you're a machine for cranking out large amounts of code. You're not a subject expert, you don't find one line changes that solve a massive problem, etc. You have a line count that's an order of magnitude or two above the average. It's valuable when prototyping. Managers love it because it's easy to measure lines of code. Whether it's really that valuable is not clear to me - but I'm definitely not that person.
Archetype come in play way before e7. When I was an E5 my manager was already talking about which archetype I was more aligned
What are examples of other archetypes? (I’m non-eng)
Which I remember from heart is just the coding machine and the Eng/PM hybrid
Intrigued by this archetype thing is it a Facebook thing or public? Now I wanna figure out what archetype I fit.
FB internal stuff. The names are pretty self explanatory though
Archetypes are only something we talk about at much more senior levels. If you're specializing like this at e5 you're probably missing some important skills imo.
We have internal videos for most archetypes, I think we had at least two folks as coding machines giving an interview. Presumably they are both E7.