This is a wonderful write up! Thank you for taking the time to structure this information. One aspect of Metas day to day work structure I am curious about is the interaction between an M1 and an E6.
In the write up you note that they are equivalent within their respective tracks, and the E6 gives a lot of direction to the team they are on. How do they collaborate with their manager on approaching projects or priorities for their product?
1/ Interaction between Team Member X and Team Member Y is always individual and team and org and company dependent. There’s not one way.
2/ That being said, in my orgs (which were all product orgs), planning was always a shared partnership between EM/PM/L6+ of all disciplines (could be Eng, could be design). Project ideas would originate from any of these people during planning phases.
3/ The E6s were always in charge of the better engineering/tech debt work—planning and delegating that. They have more hands on expertise in what the codebase needs.
To your first point that's definitely true, and I appreciate you sharing your personal experience in the other points. That context is very helpful.
One follow up question is despite the fact that each team can function slightly differently, is there an abstract ideal that Meta looks for when conducting behavioral interviews? For example, if EMs in the abstract are expected to drive product strategy with PM and E6 then would it be to a candidates advantage to lean on similar stories during the interview.
Yes, when evaluating an E6 in a behavioral, I would look for evidence that they’ve influenced the team roadmap, that they’ve taken ownership of team-level deliverables (like suggesting changes to staffing/process/technology when things aren’t going well), and participated in people leadership at the hiring and coaching level.
I would ask questions explicitly about how they’ve contributed to the roadmap, the largest scale change they made to the organization around them that wasn’t their job, and how they’ve mentored SWE II engineers into senior engineers.
Glad we got a chance to connect on this and hope it helps folks! Post your questions here if you have a Meta loop coming up!
Hi Austen, awesome part 1, eagerly waiting for part 2. Any chance you can share the relese date for it, I have meta behavioural coming up.
This is a wonderful write up! Thank you for taking the time to structure this information. One aspect of Metas day to day work structure I am curious about is the interaction between an M1 and an E6.
In the write up you note that they are equivalent within their respective tracks, and the E6 gives a lot of direction to the team they are on. How do they collaborate with their manager on approaching projects or priorities for their product?
Answering that could take a while :)
1/ Interaction between Team Member X and Team Member Y is always individual and team and org and company dependent. There’s not one way.
2/ That being said, in my orgs (which were all product orgs), planning was always a shared partnership between EM/PM/L6+ of all disciplines (could be Eng, could be design). Project ideas would originate from any of these people during planning phases.
3/ The E6s were always in charge of the better engineering/tech debt work—planning and delegating that. They have more hands on expertise in what the codebase needs.
To your first point that's definitely true, and I appreciate you sharing your personal experience in the other points. That context is very helpful.
One follow up question is despite the fact that each team can function slightly differently, is there an abstract ideal that Meta looks for when conducting behavioral interviews? For example, if EMs in the abstract are expected to drive product strategy with PM and E6 then would it be to a candidates advantage to lean on similar stories during the interview.
Great follow up.
Yes, when evaluating an E6 in a behavioral, I would look for evidence that they’ve influenced the team roadmap, that they’ve taken ownership of team-level deliverables (like suggesting changes to staffing/process/technology when things aren’t going well), and participated in people leadership at the hiring and coaching level.
I would ask questions explicitly about how they’ve contributed to the roadmap, the largest scale change they made to the organization around them that wasn’t their job, and how they’ve mentored SWE II engineers into senior engineers.