I have been in the industry for almost 12 years. I wear a lot of hats before joining PwC. But have always stayed close to coding. I mean during development phase, I spend 80% of time coding. Since, I didn't have a badge to prove that I can be an E5 or E6 (or may be based on the examples I used during my behavioral round), I was offered an E4 (which I have made my mind with). But, I think I am a E6 material. May be I am wrong, given that I have not done anything at the scale of Facebook. Recruiter said given your experience and the way you did your system design, you could easily get promoted (typical recruiter pitch). We have a 3 year old and we are expecting (I have not talked about this yet to the recruiter). How would the competition be for someone like me to climb the ladder? Is that directly proportional to the number of hours you spend at work? Let me ask it differently. How smart or how good are the E4's at Meta coming from other companies like Amazon or MSFT, etc. ? How should I prepare myself to this competition? New TC: 330k Little bit about myself: I get things done even though I have no idea about the programming language being used. And I am fast at doing it. Have been doing Java from college days. I have also done React, Angular, Node Js, etc. (basically adapted to the situation and the ask). Update 1: I have done sales, pre sales, xTeam management, Client x Organizational Management, Built Products from scratch (architecture, design, ux, ui, backend, cloud architecture, devops), Manage team of 20+ people, Manage 7+ projects at a time doing architecture/design/stakeholdering/collaboration/dev/delivery #meta #e4ToE5 #experience #distributedSystems
At the moment you’re accepting E4 you have been matched at that level - end of the story. No promises or talks with recruiters will be counted, if you consider yourself higher either keep interviewing or agree with E4. E4 is level for eng with 1-3 years of experience. P.s. made similar mistake in my carrier, was lowballed in the first big tech company
There will be E4s with 1 YOE. That’s all you need to know.
You need to go to E5 within 36 months, as E4 is not terminal level. If you don't you will be evaluated at that level and managed out if you don't meet expectations. How much swe experience do you have before this ? Within Fb E3 -> E4 timeline is 24 months. New grads would join as E3, while folks with phd join as E4.
I have 12+ years of SWE experience (updated post)
I am surprised that they offered E4 with 12 years of experience. It is generally at least E5 or reject with this amount of experience. I would definitely recommend trying other companies. Fb doesn't hire for a specific team so they can wait.
E4 is not career level at Meta. Expect intense competition with college grads for that promotion. It is not all about your past exp and skills. It is more about if you can put overtime work into it.
You will need to crank out code and features at a rapid clip while also doing cross org design work to be able to make it to 5
If you are E6 material, why did you accept E4? There is a huge diff in initial stock grant between climbing internally and joining as E6. I think you accepted the E4 level because deep in your mind you know you can’t pass E6 bar even when you reapply in 6 months
Accepting E4 offer was a bad decision. It would be better to interview somewhere else and land E5 offers. You will be competing with people that have < 1 yoe. They may be more productive than you, since they did internship at Meta and were promoted from 3 to 4
Just reject the offer, no big deal. I rejected E4, will try again for E5 after some time.
I think they look at where you are coming from. If you havent worked in a large scale, high tech place they lowball. They can afford to get rejected by those people, there are enough of candidates applying with the latter experience. Why bring up a new baby? They are already agist, why poke them in the eye? They want fresh blood for E3 and E4 not someone who cant overtime because of family
It sounds like E4 might be right since you only talk about coding in this entire post.
Thanks for pointing that out. I updated the post to describe more about what I do