Fb vs Google promo
For folks who were at fb and Google especially at promo/calibration meeting for bothcould you share compare how both approaches promo. Specifically How much emphasis on sustained impact/upward trajectory compared to google Is there an equivalent of swe ladder How does their move fast and break things impact tech debt How rare is it get an NI or Meets Most. For a senior IC/TL how does promo differ from Google and are there that many senior IC/TL like Google.
The primary difference I see is that at Google you normally need at minimum 2 cycles at SEE+ and in some cases, 3 cycles. At FB, there’s no such requirement and people get promoted with a single cycle of SEE, and I’ve even heard of a few cases of promo with a single cycle of EE. This is why you see more E5s at FB with less than 2 YOE. There’s even Directors at Facebook with less than 7 YOE total ...
Sustained performance is less needed.
Promo feels similar (demonstrate sustained performance at next level), but faster / fewer hoops in the process / much more manager driven. Similar swe ladder, maps roughly onto Google's, esp at higher levels. Lots of tech debt, but things do move a lot more quickly. It seems like a better trade-off. Google was becoming glacial when I left. I think NI/MM have similar criteria to Google.
I heard fb doesnt have good unit test/testing in general so how does new work get done, so if you want to replace some component do you just rewrite it
Eh, it's a balance. I had teams at Google where I was coerced to write hundreds of fragile shitty unit tests for trivial functions. That made everyone feel good about coverage, but I don't think it actually helped with quality. There's a bit more of a pragmatic thing at FB. There are tests, they're by and large more e2e ish than I recall Google's being.