26 Year Old Meta Staff Eng (IC6) On Promotions, Redefining Expectations, Secret Equity Bonuses

23:53Simon Kindström:We ended up splitting the team into two virtual teams or two teams, and I took responsibility of one half of it, right? So for four people plus me or three people plus me, I was now responsible for going from idea, completely unscoped space, to completed projects. And that was a first for me. That required a lot of growth in terms of how I operated. But this was that big step change in terms of my scope and responsibilities, where now I'm no longer responsible for my own output and my own success. I'm not responsible for the project success and the people within it. Right. Right. And in the end, the project wasn't actually as successful, but we dealt with it really well in terms of how we behaved.

24:43Simon Kindström:We ended up having a bunch of leadership escalations up to director level with IC8s and stuff. Me being an IC4 at the time, I was getting a lot of credit for that communication. Why did your manager or whoever trust you as an IC4 to lead a pod of engineers? I imagine not all those engineers were just new grads or something. So there was some identifying of you to lead that that was a little bit earlier than maybe your experience. Why do you think that is? So I think as an engineer, there are two primary themes to me, where I am just good technically, in terms of the diff reviews, et cetera. I just really love tech.

25:33Simon Kindström:And in Sweden, we actually choose our major already in high school. So I did computer science since I entered high school. So that's, I think, helped me get a nice head start. And I've tried to keep ahead of that the entire time. Just solve it technically, which means that if there's any hairy technical issues, I can help solve them, actually regardless of platform, oftentimes. And number two, I love people, right? Like I really enjoy working with people, growing people, ensuring that people are successful. Obviously, when I get responsibility kind of like leading this pod, right, I am responsible for the outcome of the product, the project.

26:12Simon Kindström:But actually, what I find more important is the outcome of the people that's working on it. And I think I had shown many of these behaviors throughout of kind of like helping others improve. And I believe that that was one of the big reasons why Bala was willing to kind of give me this responsibility. And I had been doing some sprint planning for a couple people before. Once again, I wasn't really responsible for their success or the project success, but I was responsible for prioritization of projects with them. When you mentioned that you were leading that pod, were you meeting with these engineers one-on-one and also talking about career with them aside from just the day-to-day tasks?

26:54Simon Kindström:A couple people I was talking about career, right? But some of them it was more just like high-level stuff, ensuring that they're happy and they are growing on maybe the axes that they're lacking in rather than how to get to the next level kind of thing. Like I spot a gap and I help them fill it kind of thing. But I was mentoring about, I think, four people that have. I think one IC3 and like three IC4s. I remember I was an IC4 at the time. And the other thing about people, right, is that this was the first half that I was an intern manager. At the same time, I was an intern peer for four different interns.

27:37Simon Kindström:That's a lot. Yeah. So I was an intern manager and my intern struggled a lot at the start, actually. It's one of my proudest moments, actually, ensuring that they got that return offer. Because they were really struggling getting them through that finish line. How did you turn that around? So if I remember correctly, it was a React project or a hack project. One or the other, right? And it was just some of the fundamentals that took longer to understand and really grok than anticipated. Sometimes you often just need to get people over that hump. And then after that, they're totally fine. And I think at Meta, that hump can sometimes be quite high.

28:21Simon Kindström:I often see interns struggling quite a bit setting up our internal data model with ENTS. That can be a very big hump sometimes. I was very generous with my time. And I think that's another thing that I find very important, that be generous with your time. And in return, that's going to help others grow, which is going to make you a force multiplier, which is going to give you back time later. So being generous with your time is a very high leverage activity because it's going to work out better later. Yes, in most cases. There's also the case where you invest a bunch of time and the needle never moves.

29:02Simon Kindström:Yes, there are definitely the cases where you need to call it quits. Yeah. And I do think that I have not yet found the right balance. I think that I might stick with people for longer than is worth it sometimes. Yeah. But at least that way my conscience is clear throughout because I do care a lot about each person's success. The turnaround case, that is very impactful. taking someone because the opposite could have happened too you could have saved your time and they could have kept going the other direction and kind of lose a person's worth of bandwidth so yes yes uh it's actually quite funny my uh my wife was getting a bit upset at me with just how much time i was spending with the intern because it was eating into our dinner and like dates time right so yeah okay so you got the the ic5 promo double re and everything was kind of you know it all it all made sense you're leading a pod and then the last thing is you know growing from five to six you did that very quickly two halves kind of want to dig in I think this one's more interesting too because the behaviors change even more than you know four to five or three to four so yeah maybe you can tell me the story about the promo from five to six and we can't dig in so it took me two halves.

30:19Simon Kindström:And if we look at just some of the behavior issues that I had as I got promoted to five and looking forward as what was missing for six. While I was responsible for others, I had fully grok that. I wasn't very good at holding them accountable in return to ensure that things are on track and I wasn't very good at just tracking things, knowing where things were, et cetera. So I was still operating a lot on a trust model and just hoping that everything works out. So that was a big gap in general. So as I went from five to six in my two halves, from four to five, I started leading one pod. My first half as a five, I started leading two pods.

31:08Simon Kindström:Given more responsibility, I'm now leading two pods with seven people in total. so the scope is increasing for me as a result which means that I need to learn how to scale myself which is another important skill set to learn as you're growing from being responsible for a small amount of people to a large amount of people maybe as we're doing sprint planning now previously I did it now instead I assign pod leads that do it for me or for the team where I am involved, guiding, coaching but I let others take that which is another beautiful thing because now they are growing in return now they're successful and they can make it towards whatever goals they have I think my first half as an IC5 where it's where I'm starting to unlock the how to scale myself whether it be sprint planning whether it be recruiting onto the team where we were still meeting with a lot of boot campers to keep growing the team it was a different time at Meta for sure and I can no longer do all this by myself.

32:17Where I get people within the team,

32:21Simon Kindström:it's like, hey, we need to coach more people. So I coach them in how we do outreach, how we track the progress of each candidate. And then I might still do the hardest thing, which might be that first sell call. Really get them hooked. But then I have the others take responsibility of the candidate moving forward. So unlocking that skill was a very kind of like step change for me. But still this first half, I didn't really know how to keep others accountable for that success where things were still slipping and I didn't uncover it until way too late. And my second half as an IC6 is then where I start to more so get that, where I'm starting to be able to zoom out enough that I see that either when projects are starting to drop or people are starting to struggle, right?

33:22Simon Kindström:That there are, I've set up systems in place that can uncover either of these problems to ensure that people are successful and products are successful so that either, you know, some kind of intervention is required or I just need to spend some time kind of like covering a gap for a little bit. It can be just like, oh, this person is struggling with this one specific piece. Well, let me as a TL step in, kind of like fix that one hairy bug. And then I know that they'll be totally fine. When I was going for IC6 and that was the biggest gap that a feedback that I received, which was scaling myself.

33:59And sounds like your first half, you delegated, you gave people pieces of work and you scaled yourself but then there were maybe some gaps in assuring that those things were successful afterwards is that did i understand correctly yeah i think that that's correct there was a lot

34:14Simon Kindström:of kind of like oh the half is ending this is not done yet wow let's like figure out what happened like how i can fix it asap yeah yeah um and that was i'd say pretty systematic systematic from the time i kind of like just got to five up until kind of like my um or like at the half i got from four to five, right? Like this was a problem. My second half as a five, this was a problem. And then kind of like the, towards the end of my five to six journeys kind of like when that really clicked. Cause I, um, my second half as a five, um, I was given a lot of responsibility. We, the two pods I had before, right?

34:51Simon Kindström:About seven people, we had recruited some more. We ended up splitting the team officially into two parts, right? So I now was responsible for one part of the team, which was eight people, right? So responsible for ensuring that, you know, They hit their goals, and we did. We exceeded those goals. But at the same time, we spun up a separate project, which ended up including 13 people. So I was kind of like TLing both of these at the same time. That really stress tested my ability to scale myself. Specifically in that five to six journey, it's the scaling yourself. But something that is often discussed during someone preparing their promo packet for five to six is It's like, what's the deep technical contribution, right?

35:36Simon Kindström:During my second half here, I think I was able to balance these two quite well, right? Where the high level stuff of like setting the roadmap of this project, right? Ensuring that like we have clear milestones. Same thing with the other team where, you know, we have set the goals. We have hypotheses for how we might hit those goals and then coaching the people to move in that direction. At the same time, you need to show that you are a skilled engineer. And I did this through a couple of different ways. One was continued diff reviews. Throughout my career, I've always valued diff reviews, specifically high-quality diff reviews.

36:17Simon Kindström:I've often been in the top three, top five amount of diff reviews plus the amount of words in diff comments, which is a metric that I really enjoy looking at actually because I find that there's a strong correlation between the amount of words you write and the quality that you give in those diff reviews. So I was spending hours a day just like reviewing code which I found to be a very high leverage activity especially when you're like in a small to medium team because then you as a TL can have a really good understanding of like all the different parts of the code base and how they fit together.

36:53Simon Kindström:and you can catch issues early. For example, I was reviewing Android iOS server, which meant that when I saw that the Android engineer implemented something this way, the iOS engineer implemented it this way, the server engineer was trying to do it a third way. It's like, wait, hey guys, let's figure out what's the one unified way of doing it. So different use was one very high leverage activity in terms of technical contributions. And number two, on the big project that we had, we were getting really close to the milestone, but we were really struggling to get it over that line. It was a payments product that crossed between IG to Meta's main backend stack onto the payments backend, which is in C++, onto a third-party payments partner.

37:50Simon Kindström:and we just couldn't make it all happen. So I went in as a TL. I spent many, many hours just digging deep into the code, which meant that I had to go from the Android iOS code onto the ID servers backend, onto the meta main backend, onto C++, and I had breakpoints all over these code bases would just show that I was able to work at a very wide span, but also just very detailed and go deep and solve the hairiest problems that we had. You were able to hand off things, but maybe not assure their success. What was the one thing that you switched in that half that really made the big difference and closed that gap?

38:37Simon Kindström:My manager used to say, delegation is not abdication. It means that you may delegate whatever you want, But in the end, you were responsible for the outcome. I assumed that this person would get it done, and I hoped they would. But as I grew, I internalized this more, and I also set up processes that helped me catch these issues. Whether it's like a weekly sprint meeting or something where you catch up with people and see, oh, are they progressing? And you actually pay attention and see, is the thing they're working on actually moving as we intended. I strongly believe actually that every team should have a people breakdown and a project breakdown.

39:20Simon Kindström:I find that to be incredibly helpful where a project might be on track, but that project might be supported by multiple different people. But then when you look at the people breakdown, it might be that, oh, this one person is doing really well on the project, but this other person is really struggling and hasn't really landed anything. for a few weeks. And that's a huge red flag, which like if you only look at the project level, you might be missing that there's someone on the team struggling that needs your support. So when you say abdication, you just mean that when you hand something off for delegation, you continue to, in your mind, think that this is still my responsibility.

40:04I'm going to deliver this. It's just, it's coming through someone. It's a tactic for getting it done, but it's not just like trust and forget about it kind of thing. You like continue to stay on top of it.

40:15Simon Kindström:I think early in my four to five journey, as I'm trying to scale myself through others, I got feedback like, hey, Simon, like take a step back. Like you're stepping on my toes. Like I need some room to like implement this. Like you gave me a project, just like step away for a bit to ensure that like I can grow. I think that's one of the big steps between four and five where you actually need to learn to let go, right? You can no longer achieve everything yourself, even more so five to six, where like now you need to, you might not even be able to review all the code anymore. You need to trust that the other people in your team can support the different projects.

40:54But you still verify through them, just maybe not micromanage. Exactly.

40:59Simon Kindström:I'm curious, after you got promoted to six, your trajectory was so rocket ship, right? Right. What were you thinking in terms of career planning? Because you had exceeded your original goal. You wanted to get to five. You got to six faster than a lot of people thought. Were you thinking about seven or did you want to do management or were you thinking I achieved the goal? It's time for a personal life or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I was definitely hungry for more, right? And I guess I still am in some ways. But I also recognize that like, in some ways, it's a bit of a crossroads, right?

41:39Simon Kindström:We're like now there's the option of management. And I guess we'll get to this, but I did choose to manage a route for a little bit. But I struggled a lot with that decision. My identity was definitely part of like being a good engineer, right and I was so worried about losing that five ten years down the line if I switch to management now will I just become a middle manager that have lost all their technical abilities and like I've stopped providing value and I'm just you know existing right that was a huge concern of mine to be honest right so in the end I did choose the management route yeah but ended up switching back to IC.

42:19Yeah, so I mean, I had a very similar exact thinking because I love the building aspect of it and the technology. So how did you make that decision to become a manager? One large part,

42:32Simon Kindström:actually, is that I was still with my same manager, the same manager that I had since I started the company as an IC3. He was still my manager now as an IC6. And the funny thing is that we started together, or I mean, he started before me, but when I started, you know, I was in California, Now we're actually in London, right? We're both working in London. So you moved with him. Correct. Yeah. He sounds like a great manager, so it seems worth it. Truly. Yeah. So, you know, I'm now in London. We're working together. We're starting up a new team. So he was leading two teams. I got one of the teams as a TL.

43:07Simon Kindström:And then, you know, there was the opportunity to become a manager because the team was like seven, eight people. My manager was getting too many direct reports. and because I knew that I had my manager support and that he's been coaching me so well throughout my entire career and I find him to be an extraordinary manager, it felt like if I do the manager shift, doing it together with him might be the best thing. I like how he is as a manager. If I become a manager, I would like to become similar to him and thus now might be the time to do it. Right, right. Having a good manager may be the best gift that someone could have if they're very ambitious in career and wanting to grow.

43:55And you were very lucky and fortunate to have such a wonderful manager. What are the things that made him special as a manager?

44:05Simon Kindström:He cared, right? He cared about people. He cared about projects, about impact. He knew the company, right? By now he's been here 10 years, a bit more. So when I joined, he'd probably been at the company like four-ish years. So he knew the process. He knew everything. And he himself had had such a rocket ship trajectory within the company that he, I think, really understood what I wanted to achieve. I think the other thing that really made him stand out as an engineering manager is that he was probably more of a product person, really, which is funny because he actually just a few months back switched us to a PM within Meta.

44:48Simon Kindström:So he was really able to set the roadmap of the team at a really great level of detail, upwards communication, downwards communication, which then let the engineers in the team, once we were ready to, I guess as he had coached us, to really run with it on the engineering front. And then he kept coaching us on the product management and data and growth front to ensure that we can become engineers that are valuable to the company. And one more skill that he does very well is communication. And it's something that he coached us really well in. Because I do believe that to be successful at a large company as Meta, communication is key.

45:36Simon Kindström:Written communication especially is incredibly high leverage. I mean, we have our internal forum workplace at Meta. If you post a post, thousands of people can see it. If you write effectively so that people actually get the message from what you're trying to say, it makes such a huge difference. I actually believe that a lot of people are held back in their career because they might be doing amazing things, but they can't communicate just how good that is. Of course, sometimes it's like in meetings, if people are struggling to communicate clearly in spoken word. but I believe that the biggest hindrance for people might be written communication where when they write a post to communicate that I achieved this project, this is why it's important, they might just say I did this, right?

46:23Simon Kindström:But why? What was the learning? What did Meta or the team or the org gain from this? And I think that's one big gap that people have. I agree 100%. And written versus spoken, I agree. written is definitely higher leverage because the largest audience the average engineer is speaking to is maybe dozens of people at most. But in written language, it can be read by at least 100 very simply. And over time too, it's referenced again. Later, people look back on it. It's used for future decisions. And I agree 100%. What is it that makes an effective update or piece of writing about your project? Like what makes it effective?

47:09Simon Kindström:Consider that the person that will read it will spend five, 10 seconds most. Make it incredibly parsable at a glance. The TLDR, right? Make sure it's truly a TLDR. If possible, include numbers. People understand numbers much better than written words. Truly, that's the the most important thing. And that should be, so in Workplace, we kind of like, you know, fold the posts together, right, when they're too long. Yeah. So ensure that TLDR is truly above the fold so that it's right there. Oh, you're talking about the see more. Exactly. Yeah, okay. So whatever that first thing is that they see really gets across a strong message.

47:52Exactly. I see.

47:53Simon Kindström:And then also make sure that when you write the post, consider the audience or try to write the post in different sections, target different audiences. If you try to communicate to a large audience, let's say hundreds, likely most of them won't have that same technical knowledge of the specific piece that you're working on. But they might care about the outcome and the why and maybe the next steps. So I often do, you know, like the flashy title, TLDR with some numbers, you know, set the context and then kind of like the impact and the next steps, right? That's kind of like always what I keep towards the top as like the top three sections.

48:32Simon Kindström:But then I might have like a, and here's more, have all the technical details to attract the fellow nerds, right? Like get the other people that are like really interested in like the how, not just the why. A hundred percent. I think that's the biggest communication mistake that software engineers make is they've been deep in the weeds of the project details. And then I read a post and it's full of all this stuff of, you know, I went into this system and then I found this line of code. And then, you know, it turns out that this this didn't execute and there's an exception. And all of that, I mean, that only matters to maybe your one or two collaborators that knows all those details.

49:17And that happens in meetings as well. Someone's giving an update and it's just all this stuff that I mean, it matters, but just not to the people that are listening. What's the what's the high level? Is it on track or not? is what was the number movement? Why should they care in like two lines? That's the most important fix, I feel. You said you were worried about losing the technical. After having tried management, what did you learn? Was it actually a concern that you lose the technical aspects?

49:47Simon Kindström:So I was only a manager for about a little bit less than a year, right? So I didn't have the time to measure if I would truly lose my technical ability. And to be honest, it was one of the feedback I got from the people I was managing. It's like, Simon, step away from the technical. So I think I was struggling a little bit in the IC to manager transition and that I still wanted to do some technical work. This was a bit of a struggle for me, partially because at the company, they were trying at the time to encourage managers to do a bit more technical work. But also, if you've been the TL, you're now the manager, you see a gap and you're like, oh, I really want to fill that gap.

50:27Simon Kindström:I was really struggling there, to be honest. I got feedback on it. I don't think I fully, truly corrected in the end before I ended up switching. I had some really bad luck, actually, in my manager transition. My immediate manager that I've been with for such a long time ended up in an accident and had to be out of work for like three, four months. Oh, wow. So no immediate support network there. My skip manager was on path leave, right? So no support there. The closest person in the management chain was a director in California. And remember, we were in London, so time zones were hard. And this director had come back from long-term sick leave as well.

51:15Simon Kindström:So weren't fully up to date on all that had happened. And so that was tough, right? I was given this, or I moved into this role and pretty immediately after lost a lot of my strong support network. I also had two people that wanted to grow from five to six. And I think I over-promised, right? I was like, you know, maybe we can make this happen. And I think I had one of them on the right trajectory, right? Because they were able to kind of take my role as TL, really do that. But then for the other person, it was hard to really slot that in to get two people from five to six at the same time in the same team of eight people is a really tough thing to do.

51:55Simon Kindström:I think I overpromised there a little bit, which is definitely a learning if ever transition to management again. And for reasons, we also had to leave London. Chaotic, ridiculous. Exactly. So with all that, there was just too much going on. A lot of just heartache in leaving London and supporting the team at the same time. So I got burned out a little bit as a manager and just decided to move back into IC, which I've been very happy with since. I mean, you could have also found another manager role or without all that chaos. What was the thing that made you want to go back to IC specifically?

52:36Simon Kindström:Yeah, I remember my director, she asked me like, Simon, do you want to go back to IC? And it hit me like, yes, yes, I do. I think it was more of a gut feel, to be honest. Just like, all right, I tried it. Incredibly poor timing. Let me just like take a break from it for a bit. Go back to what I know. Just like get back into the previous groove. And, you know, I'm totally open to management. Not yet, though. I think I want another three to five years. I actually think that IC6 is a great level of metal. specifically when it comes to like compared to management, right? Where because the type of engineer I am is that I enjoy growing others, right?

53:21Simon Kindström:So now I actually get to spend my time doing edge work, spend a lot of time like mentoring and coaching others. And that like mentoring and coaching becomes a bit more of a bonus, right? In terms of like my performance evaluation, right? Compared to if I'm a manager, that becomes now like the main thing I'm evaluated on. and you know not everyone's fun to coach and like now i can kind of pick and choose a little bit like who and what i'd like to coach yeah um so i find that as an ic that enjoys people stuff actually have way more flexibility in how i apply um that people stuff as a manager you take on responsibility for everyone and it's an unconditional support as an ic you you kind of pick your project you know you're you're creating scope as ic6 so you kind of create scope that you you want to work on and you are helping the people you want to help i mean not not fully there's still some stuff where you need to take responsibility but there is a lot more optionality that that makes a lot of sense and you got burned out not specifically because of management but the circumstances around it was just really tough i think i probably would have stuck with it if the circumstances had been better.

54:38Simon Kindström:I might have still switched back to IC. I find that quite likely to be honest. But I think I would have stuck with management for longer before I made that switch back. Before we fully leave your kind of fully transparent ratings and promos, I think you had mentioned that you received DE once or twice throughout your journey. And DE stands for discretionary equity. I think it's called AE in some cases, like additional equity. yeah what what is that how does it work maybe you tell us about your experience yeah additional equity um is when a director chooses to give you more rsus right more stock options this happened twice in my career um first time around was in my five to six promo where i got a random 15 minutes calendar slot on my calendar one day um i with a with a director um i show up um he's there and He's like, Simon, do you know why we have this meeting?

55:35Simon Kindström:I'm like, I have no idea. He's like, oh, no. And he told me, you know, like, hey, yeah, like we decided to give you discretionary equity, which, you know, I had heard about because I'd been in the company for like three years now. But once again, I was pretty like naive and new and like I didn't really know what to expect. Sometimes you go into kind of like the internal compensation group where like people post about their success. and it's a huge selection bias about who posts in there. It's usually the people that get great ratings, that get AE. So obviously I'd seen a bunch of those posts. I was like, okay, all right, great, that happens, right?

56:13Simon Kindström:So I was incredibly humbled, right? And it felt really good, but I didn't really understand it really. But I guess I got in great ratings throughout. And since I started as an IC3, I assume that maybe they were worried about some attrition, given that my stock options when I started were probably quite a bit lower compared to what it would be for an IC6. I see. So that first DE, it wasn't game-changing. It just kind of gave you maybe a little bit more than market. Is that right? Yeah, I believe so. It was a bit hard to know at the time because the meta stock had just crashed, which is great now when it has not crashed.

56:55Simon Kindström:But that was actually similar with the second AE that I got a year later. So I've been in IC6 for a year. I guess I just transitioned to management. And I ended up getting my second AE. I believe it's primarily due to the success of the team I took over. So I moved to London. I took over part of the team. We shipped the product in a much faster timeline than anticipated. and it was a company priority as so many things are at the company. But we executed well and we got it done. So I think that the success of that and the behaviors I showed were in large part as why I got that second AE. And I would say that these two combined have definitely had a large impact on my total comp and what it would be compared to normal market rate.

57:46When you see a 15-minute no agenda meeting from some senior director you never talked to, what did you think when you saw that on your calendar?

57:57Simon Kindström:I don't even know, man. I honestly had no idea what to expect. I was a little sweaty going in. I was like, all right, what's going to happen here? Yeah, yeah. Turns out it was a good one. Yeah, yeah. I have a friend who, you know, this is happening to you and he's like, I think I'm going to get fired. It's like you never get a meeting like that. So you mentioned you were an intern, but also at some point you told me you were an intern director too. So you kind of seen internships on both sides of it. What's something that is like the top things to keep in mind or like the 80-20 tips that you see separate the best interns from the people who are not as good?

58:36Simon Kindström:Yes, let me briefly touch on my history when it comes to interns. right so I was an intern to start and honestly I didn't do very well I think I was very close to not getting an offer luckily I'm here today because I did get the offer yeah but I think that I didn't do that well and I think maybe we'll cover that but then I was an intern manager twice first time around I had an intern that like I mentioned went from kind of meets most expectations to actually meeting and getting a return offer and that at the same time I was a peer intern to four interns. The second time around, I had an intern, rockstar intern.

59:12Simon Kindström:We had a couple new hire IC3s at the same time, and my intern was coaching the IC3s. Wow. How's that? He was just so good at JavaScript, so good at React, that he blew through everything and was coaching the others, and this is how you do it. What university? It was over in Mexico. So, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And I asked, by the way, because I had a lot of interns as well. And I noticed the ones that come from Waterloo were just like crazy. The Waterloo ones are great. They came in and they're like an IC4. I'm like, you know how to do everything already. Then I had two summers, or I guess one winter and one summer that I was an intern director.

59:53Simon Kindström:Right. And the responsibility of an intern director is that you practically manage 10 intern managers. So you as the intern director is responsible that the intern manager actually produces a solid project plan. and then you do three check-ins with the intern managers. You do a three-week check-in, making sure that the intern is ramping up all right. You do the midpoint checking to make sure are things on track for the project and then the final check-in ahead of the final review. So then on to your question of what are some of the things that stand out between really solid interns, maybe interns that don't make it.

1:00:26Simon Kindström:The simplest way to look at it is velocity in some ways. Velocity is incredibly important. right? Because the main measure of success for an intern is, did you complete your intern projects? That is the primary thing we look at. Of course, it's important how you do it. But if you didn't do it, then that's almost like a fail by itself. Obviously, there are safeguards to see like, was the project just like completely miss scoped, right? But hopefully throughout the process, that's been like corrected already. So velocity is incredibly important, right? And with that comes trying to do a fast ramp up, right?

1:01:05Simon Kindström:And I think a lot of interns that don't make it don't ask enough questions early on. Whether you're an intern, whether you're an IC3, whether you're like joining a new team, those first couple of weeks are so important to like utilize your ability to be dumb, right? To like ask those dumb questions, right? Like it's the most valuable time that you have because the expectations of you are practically zero. So you can ask people however much you want. And this is something that I kept repeating to interns I had, as well as like, I see three joining, especially just like, if you have a question that takes you more than like 30 minutes to an hour, like ping me, please.

1:01:44Simon Kindström:Right? Like if you keep spending an hour on like all these small questions that like we could resolve in 30 seconds, like you will not be successful. Right? So please, please, please ping questions. Right? It's incredibly important, especially early on, because it's very different to ask a question of like, oh, how do I do this super basic thing week one compared to week six, right? Like, please get that done early. It's very, it will really help your velocity. And another thing here is that the intern program at Meta is set up that you have your intern manager, and then you have usually two peers, but sometimes more.

1:02:19Simon Kindström:Also do take advantage of your peers for two reasons. One reason is maybe you're asking too many questions, your managers just can't deal with them all, right? So maybe you have a chat group with your intern manager plus peers. Make sure you can ask questions in there. They can kind of like load balance between themselves. And number two is that when we look at intern performance, we obviously primarily look at the feedback from the intern manager, but the peer feedback from the peers you have are two other critical pieces of input. and sometimes when there's insufficient amount of evidence of you know the right behaviors and such then intern managers intern directors we need to go in do a lot of digging to to clarify that right but if your peers know you they know your project they know what you're doing how you're doing it that makes everything much much easier and they can vouch for you much better you've talked about the velocity and one immediate gut reaction is, okay, what if I work twice the hours to get it done?

1:03:27And I think some people might hear that, oh, if you're barely meeting expectations, but you're working crazy hours, then, you know, you might get penalized or something. Like, do you have any thoughts on that?

1:03:42Simon Kindström:We do try to get a sense of just like, how much someone is working like is this feasible in the long term if someone's just on the line and we see that like they're pushing diffs at like 6 a.m but also 3 a.m like every day right like that's a huge red flag that like this person might not be able to like sustain this for very long and I'd say it's primarily an indicator when they're just around that line but the the other thing is that not just for for interns right but just like for for any employee engineer right like taking care of yourself is important right i truly believe that you need to take care of like mind and body to be a successful person to me working out is incredibly important i journal every day right i make sure that like i have my focus time in the morning where i can like do focus work uh instead of just like being stuck in meetings right and like these rituals are something that like ensures that I function effectively.

1:04:42Simon Kindström:And obviously I've had times where like, um, specifically actually between five to six, um, trying to solve that, like very hairy bug. I was doing like 12, 14 hour days, like for a week and a half straight. That was tough. Right. But like, it was worth doing like a short sprint of like really hard work. Um, but I, I know I couldn't keep that up. I was skipping my workouts. I was having way too much coffee and I could just feel my mind every morning just like slowing down. Right. So of course you can like put in more hours but just try to be intentional about it to ensure that like you can't put in more hours the entirety of it but to reach a specific milestone at times could be one way of achieving that.

1:05:28In your ambitious growth, you had points where you're sprinting, but you knew your steady state was never a ridiculous health sacrificing kind of grind. What is that peak steady state that you've learned you can maintain, like maybe an hour per week?

1:05:46Simon Kindström:I probably average like 50 hours a week-ish. um like i i'm a morning person so um i wake up i have my coffee walk the dog uh work out and then you know i maybe start work and then some days maybe that's like 7 30 8 o 'clock um and maybe i end up working till like 6 p.m because i need to um have meetings with like um california right right right right um so some days are longer some days are shorter i also just like really enjoy what I do and like the team I work with. So I switched teams somewhat recently, specifically because I was losing the energy I had on like that same amount of hours, right?

1:06:33Where those same 50 hours

1:06:36Simon Kindström:starting to like really feel like a grind, right? Like, and I just couldn't understand why, right? So I had to do quite a bit of self-reflection to understand why that might be. Yeah, it was simply because I was like losing the interest in that one area. And one of the great things about Meta is that it's a huge company and they're also very flexible about internal mobility. So it's able to switch to a new team, an infra team. And honestly, it's been a lot of fun. Got a lot of my fire back and I just feel like the quality of work I'm able to produce is significantly different when I have that interest in fire compared to just chugging along.

1:07:13That makes sense. So it sounds like you're saying work-life balance is somewhat tied to your interest and motivation in the work. Like, sounds like you could, you could work 20 hours a week on something you hate. And that could feel worse than 50 hours a week on something that you're really passionate about. 100%. I see. Yeah. In my career, when I was really grinding for promos and things, I felt that I had work life balance, even though I was working a lot of hours. Yeah. Because it's if you love it, then it's not really I mean, you that's cliche, but, you know, it does not feel like so much work.

1:07:50So, you know, for this last bit of the conversation, I kind of just want to reflect on your career a bit and kind of ask you some higher level stuff looking back. So, you know, when it comes to the whole thing so far, where did most of the growth come from? Like, what were the things, let's say I'm trying to reverse engineer your career growth, what were the factors that led to that growth? I mean, I think the overall word is like ownership, right?

1:08:20Simon Kindström:And then like there's a million things within. I think ownership can be in the small, right? Like I ensure that this task gets done or it can be I own the success of this team, right? But if you start talking especially about like early career people, right? then ownership means that you ensure the success of your one thing. And to me, I find that this actually requires a lot of curiosity. And we have this saying at Meta of nothing at Meta is someone else's problem. The way that I interpret that is that if you find an issue that's blocking you, you don't necessarily have to wait for the other team to tell you why you're getting blocked.

1:09:03Simon Kindström:Read the code. That's one of the great things about a monorepo. just like read the code, read the diffs. Why did they add it? Like, what's the reasoning? Can we change it? Like, come up with a brief proposal, right? And like, research your questions or just like approach ahead of time to be able to move forward. That kind of curiosity, slash ownership slash, you know, not accepting being blocked, I think is really critical for that fast growth, especially early on. Now it's no longer just like that one piece of code. Maybe it's like collaboration with a cross-functional partner. Like, why is that not working?

1:09:44Simon Kindström:Let's understand their intention, right? Like, let's be empathetic. Like, why is someone behaving a certain way? Like, are they getting evaluated on this one metric that you're regressing, right? Like, trying to be kind and understand others. I think it's also a really other important piece. Yeah. And it sounds like as your career grew, that umbrella of ownership just kind of kept expanding, kept expanding. And I imagine it even continues further. If you were like a IC8, you're like, I care about what these 300 people are doing and that it's successful. So it's interesting you say when I ask you that question, the answer is kind of a non-technical behavior.

1:10:28It's, you know, of ownership. When you think about a successful engineer, do what percent of it, I know it's kind of hard to quantify, but what percent of it is non-technical stuff and what percent of it is technical stuff that leads to kind of career growth?

1:10:44Simon Kindström:I think you can be incredibly successful with just a baseline level of technical skills. You need to be able to know how to get the task done, right? But you can totally get to IC5 without being able to be the true I can solve any problem thrown my way kind of person. If you can get your stuff done and your overall contributions of chatting with the designer, pulling the data, you know, collaborating with others. Like you don't need much more than that like baseline level of like I can ensure that like what is given to me can be executed and like done in a high enough quality way. I see. Okay.

1:11:25So it sounds like technical skills need it up to a point, but past that point, diminishing returns and the non-technical skills are kind of what really differentiates

1:11:35Simon Kindström:and grows people quickly. I would say so. So with the one caveat of like, there are some people are just like so technically talented that like, that just like outweighs everything. So like there are obviously the edge cases there, right? But to, I do think that like soft skills is incredibly important for a fast career because people need to enjoy working with you for them to kind of give you those opportunities to grow, to trust you. So you've been at Meta your entire career at this point, which in this industry is unusual. What is the thing that's kept you at Meta for so long? A bit of a cop-out answer, but people is definitely a big part of it, right?

1:12:19Simon Kindström:Like I do really love the people at Meta. My manager, obviously, right? But also my coworkers, right? And I think this was especially true, actually, in my first team, right? where I joined as a second engineer. We ended up growing the team to like 16 people before we like split it into two, right? And since that was a large part of recruiting there, honestly, like it felt like a bit of a family, right? Like it was a really happy, supportive environment. To be honest, a lot of people we hired were also like straight out of college. Like it was a very like young, fun thing, especially since I was just out of college too, right?

1:12:56Simon Kindström:So it was a really just like welcoming, happy experience. Obviously, I'm no longer straight out of college, but still, I really enjoy my coworkers. I find that people are mostly empathetic with each other's, right? Like people understand others' reasons and we try to be kind to each other. And people are just really good technically too. So people is definitely like one big part, right? Why I'm staying at Meta. Number two is that I find that the flexibility of Meta is also quite incredible, right? In terms of like internal mobility. I've been working in California. So I worked in Menlo Park to start, which is the HQ.

1:13:38Simon Kindström:During COVID, I was down in LA. I went back to SF, you know, did a year in London, came back this time to New York. So just like that flexibility in terms of like global location has been really great. Right. But also like internal projects. Obviously, my first team was actually quite a bit of forced movement in terms of like what we focused on. But now, like I mentioned, I was losing my drive. The hour is starting to feel like a real drag, a real slug. And I figured, you know, I need to change something up. I did consider going elsewhere, but I figured let's give meta another shot, right? And like, see what's up.

1:14:14Simon Kindström:And I joined this new team in the IG server infraspace. And it's been great. Like, once again, people are great. I'm learning so much. I can go incredibly deep technically, which is something that I love nerding out about. A lot of those checkboxes as to what makes me tick just keep appearing within Meta. And thus, I don't have a strong drive to seek elsewhere, which might change in the future. I find that there are some things you just can't experience at Meta. But I haven't reached a point yet. Yeah, that makes sense. There was someone that I worked with who was exceptionally senior. you know everything was going well and meta and i was thinking you know have you ever considered leaving and he said actually he considers leaving every year not not from a perspective i don't like it here but more of like a housekeeping of you know you consider it and if it turns out i am happiest where i am now that gives you even more confidence that this is the right place i'm doing the right thing and all that so okay and then the last question the the question i want to ask is if you were to go back in time, you're talking to yourself right when you had graduated and joined Meta and you give yourself advice, what would that advice be?

1:15:34Simon Kindström:Be curious and like nothing else, someone else's problem. Take ownership, right? And obviously when you're new, you gotta keep in mind how much time you spend on each thing, right? Similar to like the intern, right? Like ask a lot of questions early on, like get that velocity, right. But once you got that velocity, right, and that like baseline level of productivity, start asking these questions, right? Like, why was this done this way within the codes? Become a bit of like a archaeologist to understand like why certain decisions were made, if it's blocking you. Don't just say, oh, it is this way, therefore it will always be this way.

1:16:15Simon Kindström:Kind of like question those earlier decisions, because especially at a big company like Meta, there are layers and layers and layers of tech debt and just like overall decisions that may no longer hold. There are a lot of like dead experiments lying around the code base and like maybe you can just like clean that up. That would make your things easier. Take ownership, be curious and nothing is someone else's problem. Okay, well, thanks for the interview. Is there anyone you wanted to shout out before we end? Yes, I promised Chris that is covering my on-call shift right now to give him a shout out.

1:16:46Simon Kindström:So thank you, Chris, for covering my own call. Awesome. Thanks so much for this interview, Simon. I was really looking forward to it. Someone that had worked with you said you were one of their favorite people that they've ever worked with. So thanks for giving to the community. Appreciate it. All right. Thank you very much, Ryan. Hey, thanks for watching the show. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships. But if you want to support, you can subscribe on YouTube or you can leave a review on Spotify. and I'm always looking for new guests to interview. So if anyone comes up who you think you really want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll try to reach out to them and get them on the show.

1:17:25Thanks for listening as always and I'll see you next time.