Career advice from FB Eng director (ex-Google L7/M2)

Apparently once he got NI — lowest rating at Google. From some LinkdedIn contact, Ritendra Datta, who promoted to D1 @ FB. Felt it share worthy -- --- Just hit a personal milestone of becoming a director of engineering at Facebook. So I thought I'd reflect a bit on career, hoping it's of some value to my network. Please expect some survivorship bias. At Google, director-level promos were celebrated - a recognition of scaling up effectively while holding high values - Senior VPs widely announced them, while CEO announced VP promos. While Google and Facebook engineering levels are comparable, I also appreciate FB's approach of not making any noise about promos. Regardless, this felt like a meaningful milestone. Below I've jotted down what helped, what didn't help, and what didn't matter. What didn't help: - Skills Gap: Growing up, I stood out for my coding skills because I started early. Later I found out that many had similar skills. OTOH, not knowing enough advanced linear algebra slowed me down on foundational ML. - Low Performance: Early at Google, I got a performance rating that the bottom 2-3% gets. Made me doubt how I got the job. - Low EQ: As a first-time manager, when someone left my team, I was very emotional and upset. Not helpful. - Imposter Syndrome: Always surrounded by amazing achievers: -- A co-worker/housemate, and a PM lead, both All-India Rank 1 at IIT-JEE. -- A co-worker ranked World no. 1 in Topcoder. -- A close collaborator whose amazing work was called out by Stephen Colbert. -- Co-workers who navigate extreme ambiguity at breakneck pace with confidence I don't possess. What helped: - Peers: Having very capable people around has perks. They push you to be better. - Managers: My managers in the last 5 years - Greg Friedman and Amit Puntambekar - incredible humble leaders. Emulating them was worth a dozen leadership courses. - Team: People I've managed are better than me. I grow more by working with them. - Empathy: Folks can tell when empathy is genuine and support you back. - Resilience: The 5-year grad school grind of writing/rewriting papers, often failing - a lifelong lesson in resilience - Introspection: From a 3-person team to now 120 people, I never stopped introspecting. Can I scale? Making right decisions? Overconfident but wrong? - Luck: Hard to overstate the massive role luck plays in careers. What didn't matter: - School reputation: Though many co-workers are from top-ranked schools, that's not held me back. - Grades: Never got near-perfect GPA/rank. These are used as filters for hiring. Beyond that, not much. - Expertise: Not being in academic research, my specific research mattered less. I am no 'expert'. - Overworking: I rarely work nights/weekends. Nobody asks me to. I find that trying too hard to get promoted can be net negative. Instead, I've tried to: - set career milestones - fix skill gaps - not be intimidated by high achievers but learn from them - associate with strong leaders - always introspect - take on challenges not knowing how to do it - avoid overworking - be empathetic - hope for some luck. Thanks for reading. --- #engineering #software #swe #tech