Ask HN: Meta/Google E8/L8 interview and role

1 points by Nemant 1 year ago | 1 comment

Any E8/L8s who could describe the role at Meta in detail? Eg

- What’s the sphere of influence? How many SWEs? 100? - how big is the product you’re influencing? Number of services? Revenue? Criticality of dependency you own? - what kind of impact are you having? Improving latency? Increasing revenue? Etc - how do you ramp up as a new hire? Surely you have to go very deep - how do you come up with projects that involve your entire org? How does your work exactly influence 100 engineers?

Also if you could please share a bit more about the interview process. Thanks!

brunooliv 1 year ago |

I think that the influence of 100 engineers is easy to answer: if you set technical direction as an EM or VP of engineering or whatever level E8 is, this means that _indirectly_ many teams will scramble to work to fullfill the exact technical direction you set, which means in turn that managers and senior engineers in those teams will be working on something that you at least had a saying in. That’s how you affect 100s of engineers.

More directly if at some point a bug appears and it’s a blocking issue for releases over an entire department or vertical in the company, if you fix it, you can even affect SEVERAL hundreds of engineers. Apart from these very high level overviews I doubt that E8 folks will look at a chunk of work and start thinking about the number of engineers they’ll affect… It’s also much more important at that level to be truly product oriented and seeing where the real impact can lie. Additionally to this, don’t forget the classic “promotion driven development” where features are reinvented or “trivial” changes that affect an entire user base are rolled out, etc