Meta Senior Staff (IC7) Eng's Honest Demotion Story

Seeking a Demotion at Meta [0:04]

• Igor, a senior staff engineer, sought a demotion at Meta because he felt he couldn't justify his high level (E7) with his current project completion.
• He found Meta lacked a formal process for demotions, but they made an exception for him.
• The expectation for an E7 engineer involves being a deep expert, knowing many people, understanding infrastructure thoroughly, and being familiar with surrounding teams' work.
• Igor felt he started from "level zero" at Meta, requiring a significant ramp-up.
• He believes he only reached the E6 level during his year and two months at Meta, not the E7 he was hired for.

"You cannot still justify my level with the project being completed."

The Appeal of Hands-On Coding [04:47]

• Igor discovered he genuinely enjoyed coding and debugging, which he loved from his early years as a programmer.
• As a senior staff engineer, he found the role involved more meetings, design documents, and less direct coding, a shift he realized he didn't prefer.
• He identified the E5/E6 territory as his ideal, where he could focus more on coding and mentoring.
• He explicitly asked his management if he could drop a level, acknowledging the complexity due to existing stock grants and compensation packages.

"I really enjoyed doing like the coding stuff like just sitting down debugging things like that what I really loved about the job."

Comparing Meta and Google Cultures [16:05]

• Meta is characterized by setting very ambitious, sometimes arbitrary, goals with aggressive deadlines, leading to significant pressure and projects that drag on.
• Igor observed that this constant artificial pressure at Meta could lead to employees disengaging or becoming desensitized to deadlines.
• Google, in contrast, is perceived as more reasonable with deadlines, often set for good reasons, and people work hard without the same level of pressure, though this is based on his experience from about 10 years ago.
• He felt Meta's internal culture didn't fit him as well as Google's.

"Meta tends to to set up very ambitious goals. They give you like often times they will give you very arbitrary deadline saying like okay this project you need to finish it within like you know by September 15th whatever like 1 month from now."

Returning to Google and Demotion Process [19:11]

• Igor explicitly sought a return to Google at a lower level (L6 from L7), which presented a challenge for the recruiter as Google typically has processes for hiring at the same or higher levels, not lower.
• The recruiter had to overcome the perception that requesting a lower level might indicate red flags or a gamble for a hiring manager.
• Google offered him a lower compensation package, which he accepted, acknowledging that many people would not make such a significant drop.
• He did not require a coding interview to return, which was an exception given it had been over three years since he last worked there, and he was returning at a lower level.

"They don't have a process for bringing people at a level down, but they made it possible for me."

The Value of Mentorship and Career Reflection [42:29]

• Igor shares a story of mentoring an intern who later became the manager of the team he interned with, highlighting the potential of junior talent.
• He advises against underestimating interns, as they can become highly successful.
• Reflecting on his career, he doesn't have major regrets, viewing his challenging periods as learning experiences that shaped him.
• He became disillusioned with Google over the years, finding that despite its initial values, it ultimately operates as a corporation driven by the bottom line.
• A key piece of advice for junior engineers is to ensure their work benefits the company and, if not, to seek out other projects or managers.

"Don't underestimate your interns. They can be really really good."

Engineering Levels and Quality of Life [26:22]

• If money were no constraint, Igor believes the E5/L5 senior engineer level offers the best quality of life.
• At this level, engineers are typically shielded from excessive pressure by higher-level engineers (e.g., E6 TLs) and lower-level managers.
• This allows engineers to focus on the work they enjoy, such as coding and debugging, rather than solely for financial gain.
• He personally enjoys programming and would do it even if it didn't pay well, contrasting with some who enter the field primarily for the money.

"Which engineering level has the best quality of life? ... Uh senior uh engineer like E5, L5."

Building TPU Infrastructure for Ads [31:06]

• Igor's promotion to senior staff at Google was due to a project in ads that involved building machine learning infrastructure for TPUs.
• He was tasked with making the ads training infrastructure compatible with TPUs, a new hardware Google was developing.
• This involved significant challenges in scaling and optimizing for TPUs, which are orders of magnitude faster than CPUs.
• He had to build new input processing pipelines and address bottlenecks that weren't apparent with CPU training.
• The project required extensive cross-team collaboration with TPU, compiler, and TensorFlow teams, emphasizing the importance of credibility and relationships.

"My role was to make sure that this ads uh training infrastructure can run on those TPUs and uh additionally when you train machine learning models uh the scale matters and uh the utilization matters..."