How to exceed expectations
I keep hearing here that people have to exceed expectations to receive bigger bonuses/awards. As a SWE at FANG, what do you typically have to do to exceed expectations? How do you even know what exactly you need to do for that? Do you sit with your manager to define goals earlier so that you know exactly what target(s) are to be achieved by you? Edit: are you told earlier what rewards you would get if you achieved high performance rating?
In order to exceed expectations, you need to set them first. Pro-tip: try to keep the bar low enough so you can exceed it, yet high enough to show your current value.
This may not work as you are compared against peers in your grade. If you are not setting realistic expectations that are comparable to your peers, you are going to fail in any case.
Try to do more than whatever managers ask you
Usually this has to do more with politics than really exceeding expectations, so make sure you're on your manager's shortlist long before you actually put effort in 'exceeding expectations'.
Politics, good relationship with manager and also the skips. Make sure you have visibility in the org as well. People should know you.
Determine first what the expectations are. Then exceed them.
Be nice to people.
As others have said, exceeding expectations is about politics. I’ve been on teams where I always “exceeded expectations” because the boss wanted to give me a bigger raise/bonus regardless, and teams where no matter what I did there was zero chance of exceeding expectations. The trick is to know your situation. You don’t want to work super hard if there is zero upside.
See what the SWE in the next level are doing, and try to do those things. But first, you have to get Manager’s buy-in. Your manager might be working on promoting someone else and won’t be happy if you are in the way.
Make sure you set the bar low enough the short people can’t get over it and you can.
Exactly.