In 2018 I joined FB as a Production Engineer. Now almost 4 years later I'm a senior, but since the beginning I've wanted to transition into SWE, and that feeling hasn't gone away. I've made 1 attempt already and failed to pass the internal SWE interview loop. So where do I go next? I've applied to Google/Amazon/Twitter/Apple/Microsoft/Snap. Got responses from Amazon (failed their screening, they also wanted to downlevel me though, so meh), Twitter (got to onsite but failed) and not much else. The rest of the companies I've seen (and applied to) would mean a significant TC cut. Should I stick it out at Meta and continue earning the TC? Am I hurting my career if I want to be a SWE in the long-term? Would I be better off moving to a tier-2 company in London? TC: $230k #productionengineer #sre #engineering #software #london
Try switching to enterprise engineering wait 1 year and switch to SWE with 1 interview
hah, now that's a hack that I didn't think of. Not sure if this is a serious suggestion, in case it is: doesn't the PE to EE transition also require interviewing? Maybe the interview loop is simpler at least?
Wait, what’s the difference between transferring from PE to SWE and EE to SWE? Thought they would be the same process Also, if OP did that, his refreshers would go down in EE
Stick to meta, OP. You can always leave PE @ Meta for any company as SWE, regardless of Tier. So just stay at Meta, try again to transfer, if it doesn’t work out, then interview again.
Yeah, but how long do I stick around for. I have actually done my first PE to SWE transition attempt a year ago now and am now in the process of scheduling another one to coincide with all the other interviews I'm doing. Definitely feeling a lot more burned out this time. Right now I'd be losing around $60k of my TC by moving to some of the tier-2 companies, but I wonder if that difference will become smaller after the 4 year cliff. Might just be worth it for my sanity.
Just have a cup of tea and get back to them SEVs.
The market in London sucks and unless you're joining a few select companies, the TC drop will be massive. If that's what you want to do, then by all means go for it but before that, I would have a clear idea of the reason for not passing the swe interviews (Meta and otherwise) and work on those growth areas first. I'm sure you can get that feedback from Meta and find mentors who'd be willing to work with you on your growth areas.
Try trading and hedge funds in London, they pay the most
Can meta production engineers in London help answering below: a) how’s wlb B) what’s oncall load like? c) what’s process to transfer to US from London?
a) good, at least in my team, but depends on team of course. b) also depends largely on the team c) that I don't know, but it is definitely doable (I know of folks who did it)
Would stick to Meta. One of the most mature PE / SRE orgs. It’s interesting that you still need to go through to 2 coding + 1 design if you wanna change. As far as I know you have coding + system design in PE loop, although system design might focus on a infra problem. I was thinking PE was seen as people who could do the SWE job but focusing on running large systems in prod and mostly use their prod exp as an SWE to do that. So not allowing such person to SWE feels weird to me. Some PE people might come from system admin bg, for those a track like Google’s might make sense SRE - Systems Engineer.
> So not allowing such person to SWE feels weird to me. Yep, many PEs feel that it is strange. Honestly it's feeling like there is high variability between teams. From what I can see, most PE teams you are working with a SWE team, then it's down to you as the PE to fix their scalability/reliability problems but the SWEs still own the product/service and you don't get to actually build its functionality. Then there are the rare PE teams that own systems end-to-end and are effectively specialised SWE teams. Starting to think that Meta should just get rid of this PE/SWE split completely.
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Coinbase pay top ££ in the UK. Have you tried them? Not sure how the transition from SRE/PE -> SWE would be though.
yeah, in fact I have a tech screen with them scheduled in the next few weeks. I have Deliveroo/Cloudflare finalising soon though and wondering if I should just accept them or hold my hopes with Coinbase. I'm also a bit distraught after Twitter. I thought I had it in the bag, waiting for their feedback as I'm actually quite confused why I got a rejection there. They gave me a hard LC, I was pretty proud of myself for getting it completed, either I missed something or I got rejected for one of the other interviews.