Meta Senior Manager (M2) on Manager Career Growth, PIPs, Amazon vs Meta | Stefan Mai

26:36All of these pieces fit together in a really magical way to produce an output that is just pretty forgettable. It's like the item arrives at your front doorstep. But there is just so much complexity. I think it's quite beautiful behind those systems. And that's true of general software systems, but maybe not in the same way. I found ML systems to be particularly attractive, I guess. You're going to your time at Meta. I saw that you got promoted from a frontline manager to a senior manager. And I think a lot of people struggle with that growth. So I'm curious, what did that look like for you? What was the story behind that promotion to M2?

27:16Yeah, it was a long story. I think I got promoted about three and a half years into my time at Meta. Overall, I had, I think, seven different managers over my time. So like one every six months. So it was very tumultuous for a bunch of different reasons. I think ultimately that held me back. And maybe part of my promotion story is actually like how to handle organizational shifts and, you know, maintain some momentum there. But when I first joined, I wanted to be useful as quickly as I could, which actually fit very well with what Meta was looking for Facebook at the time. And so I joined the on-call.

27:57I, you know, I started writing code. I basically acted like an engineer. And I think both this built a lot of trust with both the engineers on my team as well as some of the peer teams, but also made me much more comfortable with the work than I think some of my peers who really tried to stay out of it. that is not sustainable. I don't think that, you know, people can do that for a long time. And in fact, I needed to shift my focus to recruiting. I basically had a blank check on recruiting from my director at the time. But that base was really important because in some respects, you know, how people perceive you, especially as a manager, is going to either be a huge headwind or a major tailwind for your progression.

28:40I think a lot of people do end up in spots where people feel like they know who this person is and where they fit. And that can actually be devastating for your career just because it means those opportunities may or may not be coming to you. People have difficulty shifting what they think a person is going to be like in the future. So that was really important. After I had kind of like established myself and, you know, shown the effectiveness of our team, I was eventually given an additional manager who would work with me. and she kicked ass. She did a really great job. We worked pretty well together.

29:16There was a bunch about that process of leading another leader that I really needed to learn. I'd say it's kind of the same process. Becoming a manager has a lot of things that just hit you differently and you don't really understand them completely until you sat on the other side. Because I think there's this expectation, especially amongst a lot of line managers that I talk to that, okay, I know how to lead other people. I know how to like have impact indirectly. Surely layering another manager beneath me is just kind of that same thing, right? It's that same pattern. And the response that I have to that is like, yes and no.

29:55Like it is nowhere near the same degree of difficulty shift from making that initial transition. But I think if you assume that leading other managers is going to be like leading engineers, then you are going to fail very quickly. For a lot of people, it'll just be mutiny. Your managers will find some way to displace you. I think what people don't realize is that, especially in manager stacks, that in some sense you're competing with each other. It's basically unstated in a lot of fashion, but if your org is not growing, the path forward for some of the managers who are leaf nodes in this org is actually to take the position of the people that they're reporting to.

30:36And in many cases, that person will just leave and someone will take that spot. In other cases, that person will get displaced in part because the people beneath them are far more competent. And so there is a very weird dynamic that unfolds amongst managers leading managers. And I had a surface level grasp of this, but it was a lot more for me to learn in order to be effective and also just to add value to people beneath me. You know, that went on for some time. The transition didn't happen until I had an org of about 30 to 40 people. In other companies, I guess you'll typically see a promotion before then.

31:16But by that point, you know, I was basically sitting in calibrations alongside a bunch of other M2s. And, you know, at a certain point, it's kind of hard to deny that, you know, this person's doing the job. So that was my promotion story. The mutiny you mentioned is really interesting. How does that surface in practice? How could someone underneath you kind of usurp you or kind of that mutiny could come in? I think that the easiest way you'd see that is just in skip level meetings, the managers are describing. They're saying, you know, Jim, he's not helping me out much and doesn't understand my career.

31:57You know, Jim's changing our roadmap or our priorities too much. In a lot of ways, people, you know, they grumble about things that are real, but some people grumble about things that are just, you know, reason to try to make their relative comparison between them and their immediate manager. In other places, people can get really sophisticated with this. I hate to make it sound very political, and maybe we can get into this in a second. but the way that people kind of operate in organizations can get very creative very quickly. I remember having a conversation with my director at one point and we had two teams in very different organizations with overlapping responsibilities and to me this sounded like a great test right it's like a scientific experiment we'll let them run side by side we'll see who wins and then you know, the company gets the better benefit, albeit with, you know, twice as much resources expended.

32:55And he's like, Stefan, you could not be more naive. Let me tell you what's going to happen. And he was absolutely right. These two teams are going to find ways to undercut each other and fight with each other inside the organization that have absolutely nothing to do, you know, with their terminal goal. And the kind of like noise and friction and everything else is going to dwarf any sort of gain that you might get. And you actually might have those teams end up in a worse spot than if you just had one team doing it. That's like not a reason to say you don't ever have redundancy in investments.

33:26But I think as it pertains to large organizations, especially when you're leading other leaders or even leading very senior ICs, you have to be cognizant of the gamesmanship that might be happening under the covers. And you can definitely assume good intent. Most people are not doing this because they're evil. But in subtle ways, people want to move. They want to improve and grow. And not all of those things are always aligned with the organization's best interest. And your job as a senior leader is to make sure that you can line those things up, that you can kind of keep people on this path to delivering value.

34:03As a manager, especially not just a frontline manager, but more senior manager, are you saying that there is a secret chess almost where there's a behind the scenes motives that people have, aside from the business motives, that are maybe their personal career motives. And that can lead to some unusual behaviors or maybe these political behaviors that you're talking about. I don't know if I would use the word secret chest because it seems like much more obvious. Like generally speaking, most people's objective isn't to go and make, you know, Facebook a higher value company. If you talk with people about their objectives, objectives they're vast you know some people they want to get more money some people want you know certain positions or influence some people want to work on really interesting problems some people want to work with certain people the things that people are after are many and and they're very rarely kind of like single faceted but in as much as people have different objectives they're going to do a bunch of interesting things to try to make those things happen It would almost be foolish to assume that they wouldn't.

35:15You know, if there is, for instance, and this would be true for most ICs, an interesting project that you want to do. Most people have seen this play out on a number of occasions. It's kind of like, well, how do I make sure that I'm on that project? Well, I might pair up with other people so that way we can, you know, have a coalition that is making progress on it. I might go cookie lick. I might go to the project and be the first one to go and lay my name on it. I'm going to write a post and tell everyone that I'm at it. So that's hard to pull me away from that project. I might try to go and demonstrate that I'm the best person for it.

35:49But maybe the way that I demonstrate I'm the best person for it is by showing why the other people who might be taking that position are incompetent or they're not capable. And so you end up with all these behaviors that kind of happen. And if you observe people for enough time, you'll have a catalog of them. But in some sense, understanding that dimension, kind of like that secret chess, and then making sure that you're cognizant of it as you're taking actions is really key to being a senior leader of any large organization. It sounds like a lot of these behaviors are kind of zero-sum behaviors.

36:28So I could imagine in an environment of either shrinking company or stagnant company or, I guess, sub-org of a company, that these would be more prevalent. And am I understanding correctly that if a company or an org is growing a lot, there's just abundance. So there's a lot less of this going on because everyone can get their what they want. Totally. Yeah, I think this is a fantastic call. In some sense, the zero-sum mentality usually happens when the winning starts to slow down, the org stops growing, the successes are less obvious. And then suddenly people are redefining success in different ways.

37:08It's kind of like, okay, well, the business isn't doing very good, but our test code coverage is awesome. That really needs to matter to us now. Well, is that true? Who knows? But I think it really points to a couple of things. One is the imperative of winning that I talked about earlier. It's kind of like as a leader, it's your job to make sure that your team is positioned and equipped by you to be winning. And the focus on performance is really kind of like one of the more fundamental focuses that you can have. And a lot of other problems that we're talking about here are downstream of that.

37:44The second thing that's kind of interesting there is that as orgs evolve, different leadership styles are more appropriate. It's kind of like a mature organization that, you know, is maybe relatively flat, requires a different kind of leadership that's more attuned to some of the ways that things are going to go wrong than that early stage where, you know, you can kind of like not pay attention. Like, I think a lot of early Facebook leadership was kind of like this. Very, very talented engineering leaders who, in some sense, rode this tremendous wave of growth. But are those leaders the same ones that are going to do best during a period of plateau?

38:24Who knows? That's kind of an open question. You mentioned when I asked about what does mutiny look like, you said that, and I just want to confirm, it was that M1 would go to their skip, so I guess your manager, and say, hey, Stefan is thrashing things. Are you sure he's good? kind of things like that behind the scenes when in meetings you are not present? I mean, yeah, generally speaking, you see it in the same way that like disgruntled teams operate. It's kind of like everybody's making a lot of noise because they're unhappy. And in some sense, the implicit goal for them is to make a change.

39:05And the most obvious change is to change people. One of the things that is pretty interesting about being a more senior leader is actually your control over outcomes is even more diminished. For a lot of people, when they become managers, they get really uncomfortable with the idea that generally they're not the ones writing the code. They're not the ones making the design decision. They need somebody else to do that, one of the engineers in their team. If you're a senior leader and one of your managers is underperforming, what are your options? You can't step in and go and do their job for them.

39:38That's just not an option. And in that case, that person's going to hate you and they will leave very quickly. You can give them some insights, but if you give them a lot of insights, then they're going to feel like you're trying to do their job or they're going to feel like they're underperforming. And so as you kind of walk up the org chart, the ability for a manager to make an impact on their immediate reports is less and less. It becomes more and more binary action. It's kind of like, you know, we're obviously going to have conversations or how these are going, blah, blah, blah. but if Mark has an SVP who's just not making the cut, he's going to let them go.

40:15He's not going to jump in and coach and try to have all sorts of programs to get them to the right level. Of course, that doesn't apply necessarily at a senior manager level, but the same sort of trend does apply up and down the org chart. You've got less and less levers that you can pull to kind of turn things around. You mentioned manager underperformance. I'm curious because there were a lot of layoffs in the past. Do you feel like managers have, they're harder to lay off than ICs are? And if so, why? Moving managers around is like inherently painful. Usually like when you put someone in a manager position, you're accepting that the blast radius of that change is larger.

40:58Again, we can extrapolate from if you grow the org, like if you're going to bring in a new VP, everybody's going to know about it. Like it's going to be a major and intrusive change. So that comes with the territory. Whether like taking someone out of that position or not is hard is in large part, whether they're like load bearing for that position. If they've got a really tight relationship with their team and they know a bunch of like internal domain pieces and their cross-functional team really isn't pulling their weight and they're doing a lot of that, That's incredibly painful. Moving that person out can be very hard.

41:35If, on the other hand, their team actually doesn't feel like they're adding a lot of value, their cross-functional team members are complaining about them, they might be doing an okay job, in some cases it can be invigorating to get someone who's not pulling their way out of that position. It's part of why leadership positions in general get so much attention and why they earn so much money is just that the ramifications in the org chart are just so large. I think if the assumption is like, during layoffs, are you less likely to get laid off if you're a manager? I don't think so. Most companies are going to target a specific ratio of managers to ICs.

42:16And if you let go of a host of ICs, you don't need that many managers. They don't just keep them around. You probably won't see this if you're looking locally just because the likelihood of a manager being laid off is not as high. But we've even seen recently, you know, companies will do what's called a span of control reduction. We'll try to say, you know, we want to make sure that managers have 12 reports or we want to look at the ratio between. I think Amazon did this recently between ICs and managers and we want to increase it. And in that case, you know, the managers are the first in the chopping block.

42:48So, yeah, I don't think it's it's necessarily easier or harder, at least in a comparable leveled IC. Yeah, I think I see the occasional comment that assumes that leaders have some special treatment and they can't be fired or it's harder. But yeah, I agree. I think we've seen that that is not necessarily the case. You mentioned types of leadership per stage of company, and there's different effectiveness if the company is smaller or more scrappy versus the larger companies. I'm kind of curious about that. What type of leadership do you think is most effective when the company is really small, and what type of leadership do you think is most effective when the company is very big?

43:32So I think when companies are small, you really need kind of inspirational executors. In some sense, it's all hands on debt to go and deliver this thing. There's a lot of excitement. People want to work for someone who's impressive, who could do their job and in a pinch could kind of step in. if you look at kind of company history there are plenty of examples of this and you know generally speaking you've got these SPPs or directors who were there in the trenches designing some of the initial features and that can be kind of so attractive but I think as companies scale that becomes harder to pull off and then those same individuals oftentimes don't have the same sort of organizational aptitude that they need.

44:22And so it is like a very different skill set to be able to work in a larger organization where, you know, you're actually not going to have much of an impact by just digging in and getting your hands dirty. And then there's not going to be a bunch of momentum behind it. It's kind of interesting if you think about big companies, they focus is like a precious commodity and it's very hard to achieve. People will talk about this in terms of alignment. But the biggest opportunities, there are just a few of them for a very large company. But you have this very large organization who can look in 100 different ways and go in 100 different directions.

45:02So if you've got those individuals who are go-getters and they see an opportunity and they just run at it and they're not able to align and move information up and down the org chart, they're actually going to get in the way. They're going to siphon off energy that could otherwise be put behind kind of the core initiatives. So I'd say that's at least one way that you might think about what leadership is most appropriate is kind of like, you know, how close to the execution do these people need to be? But, you know, each company is going to transition in different ways. Like this was fascinating for me watching.

45:39So Amazon, the way that they scaled is by basically setting up each team and building really concrete APIs between each team. One of the early CTOs at Amazon used to call them fitness functions. I think he got fired or let go. But, you know, the idea was basically this team would be responsible for two or three metrics and they would labor under those metrics and focus on them to the full extent. And the nice thing about this is it meant that the engineering leadership could then just assemble these pieces kind of like you would assemble a system of APIs. And because each piece was dependable, you know, you can build a pretty tall stack.

46:16And so at Amazon, that worked really well for scaling out the org, but it necessarily meant you left a lot of kind of interesting things in organizational scenes. teams so like if two teams draw their lines here you might be cutting out a whole lot of value and also if these teams need to move to like adapt to a new change well they don't know how to they're going to be focused on that one thing that they've been focused on for a long time so you know leadership has to come in and spin up a new team and that takes a while they're not very responsive so that's one style of scaling that amazon is kind of known for meta slash Facebook took a very different approach.

46:56The org is very malleable. Engineers move between projects. Teams don't have really strong assignments, or at least they didn't at a point in time. The code was owned communally by everyone. And what that meant is that as a Facebook scale, they needed leaders who were able to kind of work the soft alignment throughout that organization without these big boxes that they could draw around them. Amazon leadership could benefit from engineers who were kind of building an organization on top of these API primitives. Meta leaders needed to understand the people that were involved and what they were best at and how to move them and inspire them.

47:40And so the kind of person that you need in each situation is going to be very different. So there's a bunch of different dimensions that are going to change, depending upon company dynamics. But it is somewhat illuminating looking at those two examples just because they, well, theoretically at the same level, it's two big tech companies, ended up in very different locations from a leadership perspective. And that kind of informs at least my thinking about how leadership looks like across companies. The caveat that I want to toss onto the table is you can't just staff a company with organizationally savvy people.

48:17Like eventually it becomes negative sum. At a certain point, you just have a bunch of sharks who are all fighting each other and they're not getting anything done. So there's always a balance that's actually required. But like look at, I think OpenAI is kind of a good example. And it's a company I haven't worked at. So this is observations of their hiring process and then talking to people on the inside. But generally speaking, when OpenAI does interviews, they focus a lot on technical achievements at the expense of some of those organizational pieces. So like one of the pieces of guidance that we often offer people who are preparing for like project retrospectives and more of the behaviorals is to go deep on those things that are just like really impressive technical achievements or hacks.

49:00And not as much on a built alignment between six different parties, blah, blah, blah. law. Now, look, OpenAI has a ton of politics inside the company. It is not immune to these forces by any means, but they still kind of paint themselves in that early phase where they need to be driven by these people with these technical achievements as a means of them attracting the right talent, of achieving kind of their breakout velocity in terms of what they're able to deliver. So lots of different dimensions that are at play. I don't think you can generalize across these to any degree, but you can kind of notice some trends.

49:38And in general, there is maybe an entropy. As orgs get bigger, you have to have people who know how to navigate. It's just, it's not something that you can avoid. When I asked you about the promotion to senior manager, you mentioned the size of your org and that managers were reporting to. So it sounds like that was a big part of the promotion to have the scope to be a senior manager. I'm curious about the skill difference between an M1 and an M2 in your opinion. So I'm curious, like if we were to just imagine, I took a random M1 or maybe yourself and before you were promoted and you were just a new M1 and I put you in an M2 role and we just said, have at it.

50:22What are the biggest skill gaps that you would have had. So I think being able to like credibly add value to the people who are reporting to you is probably the major one. I mentioned some ways at which managers have reduced or managers of managers have reduced kind of options in terms of how they can interact with their teams. And so knowing what those restrictions are and then knowing where to exercise the most important ones is something that's hard for like a straight M1 to recognize. So as an example, you know, you might have a new M1. They're feeling really good about their understanding of people.

51:02They go set up skip levels with, you know, all of their indirect reports. And they ask them, oh, you know, what do you think of Jim? Does he say anything that, you know, you don't like? Is he touching on all of the important career pieces? And then a week later, Jim's going to walk into your office and go, you know, you talked with Jan and you asked her a bunch of leading questions around whether I was doing my job or not. And now she doesn't feel like I'm being supportive enough. Like, why did you do that? And then Jan comes to you and she says, well, you know, I really think that you can help me out a lot with my career because, you know, you seem to have some really good insights that, you know, Jim wasn't able to see.

51:41And so in that moment, you've just disintermediated Jim, you've demotivated Jan, and you've created a host of problems that you now have to solve. It's like a lot of very small things that you can do as a senior leader have these magnification effects. And unfortunately, you don't really learn about those or you won't learn maybe the small things until you've either observed them yourself, where you can kind of introspect and say, all right, let me think about all the interactions I've had with my senior leadership and where those worked or where they didn't. Or you've got like a good mental model for how these things sort of propagate in an organization.

52:18But I think subtle mistakes like that end up being kind of like the easy ways for an M1 and newly in that position to fail. And the expectation in a lot of cases is that they're going to make those mistakes. Just like when you transition someone from an IC to a manager, you're expecting them to make a lot of mistakes just because it's unnatural. Nobody really knows about this. You can read it in books all you want, but until you practice it, it's a different story. And so, you know, my leadership chain when I was doing the M1 to M2 transition was probably thinking the same thing. Sitting very closely with me.

52:52This is part of the promotion panel. Like what kind of support are they going to have? Does the person who they are reporting to have enough acumen to be able to bail them out if things start to go awry, that sort of thing? but a bunch of small behavioral things would be the first thing that they would screw up. Longer term, there's strategy and org design and a bunch of mistakes that you can make there, but those small things, especially in the first few weeks, are enough to sink you. It's kind of a scary environment to operate in, to be honest. You've experienced IC career growth and manager career growth.

53:25I'm curious to compare and contrast IC versus management, I guess, growth paths.

53:31Stefan Mai:What do you think of the differences between the two? And also, I'm curious, do you find that they're both meritocratic? I often hear that there's some cynical takes on some, you know, one being less meritocratic than the other. So curious your thoughts. I think at high levels, everything becomes a little bit opaque and fuzzy. One of the things that always kind of like was difficult for me to stomach as a manager sitting in calibrations was very senior level ICs talked a big game about their accomplishments, but I didn't really see the evidence. It wasn't really obvious whether they were just around for these big initiatives that were clearly valuable initiatives or they were instrumental in driving them.

54:15And the saying can be said of managers across the board. It's really hard to do attribution. And I think over a long run, things are a little bit more obvious. Like if you have a manager sit in a role for four years and they continue to produce success, it's kind of undeniable. But on a half to half basis, it's pretty dubious. So I could see why people would feel that way. I think for ICs, especially when you're like sixes, maybe sevens, it's a little bit more apparent to an external observer whether they're doing that or not. I think for an M1, you can usually look at their team if you look at it holistically, if you look at some of their deliverables and make a pretty good assessment.

55:02But I don't think someone who's outside of their leadership chain or not involved in that minutiae would be able to recognize it as clearly. At higher levels, I think that there's a bit of unaccountability for a lot of management. This is true in the stock market. It's kind of like hard to assess whether a leadership team is any good or not. You really don't know until you watch it for a while. And then somebody might spin up a really great story to say, it was macroeconomic conditions that sunk my company. Not, I failed to actually recognize that my customers were slowly walking away from me.

55:37That's true, I think, at the highest levels. And I think it can be quite frustrating for people who are kind of sitting at a spot of limited visibility with a group that is really hard to kind of tie directly to any particular deliverable and go, this is fair. You want it to be as fair as you can. But I think at a certain level, it's difficult to have the data. I see. So the early promotions are the most easy to verify and fair. And the higher level ones are a little bit more. I mean, I'm sure there are fair ones as well. But you're saying it's a lot easier for there to be optics coming into play, narratives and stories that are kind of hard to tell what exactly is going on and who deserves what.

56:21Is that right? Yeah, I think it's a good summary. I see. Okay, cool. I think one thing I was curious to dig into is that knowing that you've been at Meta and you've been at Amazon and you had a fair amount of time at both, I thought it'd be interesting to kind of ask you the pros and cons of each or at least your personal experience. I know these companies are very large and some people have great experiences in a small team and others have bad ones within these companies. But I'm curious, when you think about Meta versus Amazon, what are the cultural differences that stand out to you? So I think Amazon is disciplined.

57:01And I think this is a major strong point. I felt like in general, if you really wanted to reach the height of very structured engineering design, you probably find that more likely in an Amazon review than you would at Meta. I think probably on average, I'd say meta engineers were a bit stronger, but they weren't as disciplined. And that meant that design reviews and things along those lines were a bit more fuzzy and kind of hand wavy than they were at Amazon. It also was a place where things were a bit more predictable, partly because the business just moved slower, but partly because you can depend on other teams to kind of meet certain SLAs.

57:45And, you know, you can page them if they're not doing the thing that you want. Whereas at Meta, if somebody's work isn't, you know, living up, you got to go make that change yourself because he's working on photos now. He hasn't been working in that code for months. So that can be a little bit frustrating. I find that a lot of people who transition from Amazon to Meta in particular find that unstructured environment that's so endemic of the culture to be pretty paralyzing. They don't even know how to operate. And in some ways, that's good. In some ways, that's bad. At Meta, the main thing that I saw as kind of like a major positive was just how open and collaborative the company is.

58:28I thought it was amazing how engineers on my team were working with orgs that were completely across the company on various things. We might be working with a researcher in Paris on some sort of image model. And then, you know, some infra was being built out of London. And for the most part, I, as a manager, wasn't even involved in setting up these collaborations. People just found each other and they worked together, which I thought was super cool. I also really like how at Meta, there's a very acute focus on people and kind of like empowering people to make decisions. Amazon has a really very process-oriented mindset.

59:06They talk about mechanisms. So like when something fails, they want to try to introduce process to prevent the failure. At Meta, it's more likely that someone will go, well, we learned our lesson. You know, we'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Now, look, that has its downsides. Like a lot of Facebook's privacy issues are in some sense, it's inability to contend with the same process that Amazon does incredibly well. But it means it holds, you know, the culture back in a lot of cases. Like one of the things that was very surprising to me working in ML at Amazon is how hard it was to get access to data.

59:44Data is the lifeblood of ML and AI applications. And in a lot of cases that aren't actually these privacy constraints, especially for public data. But at Amazon, you had to go and build your own data lake and go and pull everything into your Spark data warehouse. At Meta, that data warehouse existed and everyone used the same one. So you didn't even have those same challenges. So they're two companies that I think have very different approaches. I tend to prefer meta's approach, especially as it pertains to leadership. But Amazon had some things that I definitely missed as I made that transition.

1:00:16And there's clearly reasons why it worked. Like there are some individuals where I talk with them for five or 10 minutes and I go, I think Amazon's a better fit for you. Accepting all the other externalities of an actual position, I think you're going to like it more than you might the chaos that's usually a meta execution. Having been a manager at each company, you experience the performance system intimately. What about comparing and contrasting the performance systems at Meta and Amazon? I'd say they're pretty close, to be honest. I think everybody's kind of like descending into the same valley in terms of optimality.

1:00:54What you basically have is like a very public kind of publicized process wherein ratings are established and handed out to reports. This is things that managers will talk about and will kind of hit on external pieces. And then you've got a more private, usually restricted to higher levels process wherein you're trying to decide where to make investment. Like at Amazon, there's this top tier designation and at Meta, there's additional equity or discretionary equity, which is basically trying to say who are the real linchpins in the organization that we want to invest in to make sure that we're successful long term.

1:01:31And I think the important thing for both companies is to make sure that people feel like the process rewards performance. That perception is incredibly important. I did an estimate. I went through and I kept time of all the different activities and managers and preparing for PSE and basically said, you know, here's how much we spend per employee on PSE processes. And I think there's one takeaway to this, which is like, this is wasteful. Like, how dare we spend$15 ,000 per engineer? We should be building products. But I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees there, that the integrity of the performance review process is the whole ballgame.

1:02:13If you get that wrong and people don't believe the process is going to produce outcomes for them, they're not going to perform. In some sense, you know, the financial rewards and promotions and everything else, you need to put as much effort, even if it's just a ceremony that doesn't actually do anything behind the scenes. You need to make it very believable and credible to people. Now, I think both companies do do a lot of diligence to try to maintain the integrity of the process. I think it's valid. But I did find that Meta was willing to really go to bat for, say, the upper quintile, as opposed to Amazon, where I think partially due to frugality and partially due to kind of this fairness, they really were willing to just really double down on top performers.

1:02:56like there would be engineers and people in my organization who would clear twice as much as their peers just because they had gotten so much additional investment in equity in part because we knew that they were very important and they were going somewhere at amazon and that's pretty uncommon you don't see that as much and they they would find some way to try to pull that back they are a very frugal company yeah i remember when i i worked at amazon briefly and one of the leadership principles was frugality and i i never uh i never liked that one but uh nobody does yeah it's a horrible one um you mentioned the additional equity or discretionary equity or is called top tier at amazon um how does how do those conversations work is it derived from the performance ratings or just you know directors and senior managers kind of get together how does that decision come to play.

1:03:52Yeah. And this usually gets driven by like the VPs and directors of an organization and how much they choose to involve the different managers and making that decision varies. You'll know if you have a lot of trust, if they come to you and go, hey, who deserves this? I was in that position regularly in part because my org chain was constantly in flux. But I might not have been in that position quite as frequently if people were able to actually to keep track of my org because they actually had a boss who was consistent. But what they're really trying to do there is just figure out kind of A, who's got trajectory?

1:04:28Like who is the rocket ship? Even if you had like a, I wouldn't say niddling, but like a stellar, but not exceptional half, but it was obvious that that was going to keep going. That was a criteria. I remember at Amazon, they talked about kind of, I think there was two dimensions. I don't remember the exact ones, but growth was definitely one of them. And then the second piece, and I think this actually plays a lot, is kind of like how replaceable is this person? If they walk away tomorrow, is that going to break our organization? In some sense, getting into those positions can be very lucrative just because they're going to, in some sense, try to put those golden hand cuffs on you as tightly as they can if the org depends on it.

1:05:10The companies, generally speaking, know how to avoid completely embarrassing themselves with attrition. And sometimes the lever that they pull is just financial. But yeah, most of the time they hope that it's more than that. You know, with some of the layoffs that kind of happened in the past, there was the, there's mentions of lower, low performer quotas. And I'm kind of curious, is that something that you experienced when you were working at these companies and how does they, how do they work? Yeah, definitely. I think every company is going to have this. Every company that is of scale, you might not see this at very small companies.

1:05:47But the idea being there is a lot of gaming of performance. And you'll notice this, I'll refer to PSC, so Meta's performance review process, where, you know, suddenly the half that seemed pretty good or maybe okay, seems like it was world shaking. You know, as people are writing their reviews about it, and then every single achievement is just mind-blowing. And there's this inflation that happens in everyone's assessment. And ultimately, that's not true. It just can't be true on average. So a lot of companies will have, you know, some sort of overall distribution that they're trying to target.

1:06:28And in order to maintain high performance, they necessarily need to be letting some people go. Managers don't like letting people go. I don't like letting people go. It is very uncomfortable. And so you have to beat people and make them do it. And it's mostly like a group survival thing. But in most cases, what ends up happening is that, you know, people check out or, you know, they decide that they want to go do something else. And if you're not, you know, reasonable with kind of acting on that, then the team starts to suffer. You notice that that person's not pulling their weight. And, you know, you're going to start to check out too because it doesn't seem fair any longer.

1:07:09So quota wise, the numbers will vary. Like for a lot of companies, it's, you know, somewhere between like seven and 15. Sometimes it can be as high as 20 percent where they're going to try to put you in the lower bucket. At Amazon, it was like needs improvement. And at Meta, it's like meets some or meets most. And the idea there is that amongst that bucket, they're expecting some of those people to not meet the cut. And that's, again, just statistics. but that's usually when like the pips would start to get engaged and managers would fight aggressively to try to keep their people out of those buckets and most of this is saving face like here is the worst scenario for you as a manager and this ends up being heartbreaking you work with a team you guys kick ass everybody works really really hard and then at the end of the half after you've told everyone how much ass they've kicked you get instruction from your director that somebody's got to be in that low bucket.

1:08:04And now you've got to go change your tact. You've got to go back to that person and say, no, actually, you know, you didn't kick ass that hard. That wasn't even acceptable. And so those sort of like egg on the face moments are what most managers are afraid of. And they try their damnedest to try to prevent those situations. The reality is a better circumstance would be the manager is aware that somebody may be in the lower quartile and can message it appropriately. That way, they're not surprised. You're not surprised. The structure works fairly. But if you've got a lot of immature managers or just relatively new, or maybe they just don't see it clearly, then you end up with lots of situations like what I just described, where people have to go mea culpa with their reports.

1:08:48And honestly, for everyone involved, most of which the actual person who's receiving that news, it can be devastating. So it's pretty bad. You mentioned pips. I'm curious, do you think that they work? And were there any differences between pips across the companies? This is based off that Reddit thread. I think someone asked, are they just a formality to create a paper trail or can people actually get out of a pip? So people can definitely get out of a pip. I think pips are first and foremost a legal paper trail. But in order to maintain credibility of that legal paper trail, people have to make it through it.

1:09:26If you just create this process wherein you just create a paper trail and nobody makes it out of it, that's not really going to hold up legally. So at some level, it needs to be fair. Most of the time, HR is moderating this and HR's appetite to advocate on behalf of the employee in these cases is variable. So like at Amazon, at least while I was there, HR really just wanted to make sure that you were checking the boxes. It was a pretty savage culture, to be honest. In most cases, you're setting expectations with an employee and saying, here's what you need to do. And if they make it, then they can turn it around.

1:10:01And if they don't, then they're gone. It needed to be reasonable, but the manager held a lot of discretion on whether they wanted to pull the trigger. Now, again, most managers don't like firing people. So their preference is actually going to be for someone to go into PIP and then recover. And so in a lot of cases, if you are the person on the other side of the pit, your manager could legitimately be rooting for you. They're not just lying to your face. But, you know, whether their hands are tied or not is up to some other power in some cases. For meta, I noted in a lot of cases that HR really, really, really wanted to make sure that we had exhausted kind of every avenue before letting someone go.

1:10:43This is probably not true of modern meta, but it was true several years back, and in part because they really wanted to protect their reputation as an employer. And so, you know, I've had engineers who just had completely checked out and HR was asking questions that really didn't make sense. And, you know, in a lot of cases, this person would probably not object to the way that we would summarize their work. Like it's not always just like a completely crazy occurrence, but sometimes companies will opt to try to be overly accommodating to the employee. I hate talking about this in some respects because it sounds so like cold and calculating.

1:11:24But the reality is just at the largest level, companies have to reward performance and they have to be sensitive with how they're making their resources. And as a result, terminations are part of the picture. And it's important that companies do it fairly with sensitivity to the people involved, but they have to do it. Otherwise, the company won't exist for long. You conducted over 500 interviews across your time in big tech. And you also have Hello Interview, which is an excellent service for interview preparation and many other resources for people in the industry, which my roommate said it was like the best thing that he used in his prep.

1:12:09And he got an offer at Anthropik. So every time I interview you or Evan, he's, he's say, oh, it's, it's those guys. I love their product. But I wanted to ask you about interviewing because I felt like you might have something interesting to say. With the, the rise of these AI cheating tools and, you know, LLM assistance, I'm curious, you know, how much do you see that, that coming up when you're either helping people prepare or maybe you're just in the, the space thinking about interview prep? it's kind of funny because like as it pertains to interview prep our incentives are mostly aligned like uh you know for the candidates we want to help them to succeed and so them cheating at like mock interviews for instance doesn't make a lot of sense but surprisingly we've seen it happen on a few occasions i guess the the the situation is probably like they're trying to like test out their setup to see if somebody will notice um so like you'll hear uh one of our coaches reached that he said, the guy's talking to his friend in the background.

1:13:08Like, what do I do in this situation? It doesn't make any sense. Remote interviews have always been a little bit cheatable. I think the existing tools make this horrible. Recruiting teams seem to be modestly aware of it. I think they are overly dependent on some mechanisms that probably aren't completely effective. So like in browser interviews, they're looking at whether the page has focus or whether there's copy and paste activity, which is like, yeah, the least sophisticated people, you will definitely catch them. And surprisingly, they do. So they're clearly weeding out some people. But to be honest, I feel like a lot of interviews are going to change in part because the role is shifting.

1:13:54It's like the way that software engineering is going to work in the future is pretty different than how it did, you know, over the past two decades. And as a result, it seems kind of crazy if the interviewing itself doesn't adapt to it. We see some companies trying things here. So like they will have assignments that allow you to use AI, which is theoretically AI proof, or they'll choose questions that AI routinely gets wrong and, you know, try to be robust in that way. But I'm more optimistic in the challenges and assessments evolving than I am in any of the kind of the anti-cheat stuff. Now, the sad part about this is companies are ruthless right now with performance.

1:14:40People who cheat in the interviews might get the role, but like that cheating is not necessarily going to pan out when you actually get the job. So, you know, I don't have any formal accounting of this. I don't know many cheaters myself. But, you know, there's plenty of people who find themselves on the rough side of their performance review shortly afterward, which I don't think serves anybody's purpose. I'm curious because I imagine a algo interview is more easy to cheat than a system design one. Do you see any differences in, I don't know, maybe the growth of algo interview signups is like lower than the growth of system design signups or something like that?

1:15:21or anything that might make us infer that cheating has any impact on the future? So I think people are leaning or companies are leaning more heavily into design interviews. And that doesn't necessarily mean like system design, which I think is more standardized across big tech, but also like lower level design, being able to reason about, you know, classes and coupling and, you know, various interactions between subsystems. And it's interesting because in some sense, the quality of that design ends up being load-bearing in like an AI-coded world. You being able to come up with good abstractions and reason through them is more important.

1:16:03So definitely are seeing that shift. I wouldn't say I've noticed any really acute departures from coding interviews themselves. People have been calling for the demise of LeetCode for forever. It actually serves a pretty useful purpose. It works for companies. As much as people want to say interviewing is broken, I think it's painful. It's very painful. But broken is probably a step too far in part because it's serving companies' needs up until this point. And so I think it's a bit premature to assume that that's not going to be a part of the interviewing process, at least in the short to midterm.

1:16:40If someone was hellbent on passing OpenAI or Anthropic interviews, what's the optimal game plan from your experience at Hello Interview? I think it varies. Those companies are looking for depth. OpenAI was notorious for asking the same questions in basically every interview. I do not know why they were doing this. But going deep on kind of the functional areas that they tended to ask around was a pretty effective preparation strategy. That's not to say you could just memorize solutions. The interviewers are far more clever than that. But you can get a step up if you actually knew approximately the areas that they were in.

1:17:23The behavioral and retrospective interviews end up being really important for these companies. they really want to see like have you walked the walk and I think how you represent yourself and how you talk about that work also ends up being really important some of this stuff can be really hard to do introspectively as an individual like being able to actually talk to a friend or someone else who can tell you here's how you came across like here's the vibe that I got from you can be really helpful in refining your presentation and in particular the thing that I mentioned earlier was just moving toward the technical accomplishments and less about how you massage the organization to make things happen.

1:18:04I think for a lot of people, the crowning achievement of their staff engineer career at big tech is they wrote seven docs and then got six different teams to align and then finally wrote five lines of code in addition to like 100 ,000 that were written by junior engineers. And it's like, that was hard. I know that that worked deeply. But these companies don't look at it the same way. And you have to recognize that in order to really nail it. I see. Coming to the end of the interview, I wanted to ask you some career reflections. Things just looking back on everything so far kind of reflect on some of the things that you've learned.

1:18:43And so I saw that, you know, in your resume, you worked in both of your stints in big tech. You stayed in the roles for quite some time, maybe around four years or longer. And so I'm curious your thoughts on job hopping quickly, because that is advice that a lot of people give. What are your thoughts on job hopping? I think if you look at the data for people who are like really ambitious in lower levels, moving around usually has a lot of advantages. It's going to, if you think back and I'd love to actually hear your reflections, but if you think back in your career, usually those moments of growth are when you're most uncomfortable.

1:19:19It's like it's a new scenario, a new environment. You've got to go and generalize your skills and you're learning a bunch. And so it's not just the hopping itself. It's mostly just immersing yourself in a new environment that can lead to that growth. So it's hard to say no to that. I personally have not really subscribed to this in part because the motivating factor for me is going really deep on something. Like I find that after two years, now I'm at the level where I can actually start to, you know, really make an impact. And those are the parts that are just the most rewarding for me from a career perspective.

1:19:54So it kind of depends on what you're after. Now, at the higher levels, moving around at a high frequency is a pretty bad sign. It's just like, it's very hard for you to get deep enough to have a real impact, to build the relationships, to understand the domain, just to be effective. And so, you know, generally speaking, if people are moving every 18 months or two years and they're in a really senior position. As a hiring manager, I'm second guessing. And I'm trying to wonder, I'm going to invest for a year just to get you ramped up. And then you're going to go move again in six months. That can be a tough pill to swallow.

1:20:29For a mid-level hire, that's a pretty decent tenure. But for a staff level engineer, I'm second guessing it. So I'd say from a career perspective, early on, moving makes sense unless you're just really excited about the work, especially if you're not excited. Yeah, go get a new job, man. But as you get more senior, it pays to find some places that you can actually put down roots. And it really helps when people can sense that, that you're here to stay and you're wanting to really make some changes. Definitely. Yeah, and I think what you're saying about job hopping not being as effective later makes a lot of sense too because, for instance, a lot of what you talked about in being a successful senior leader, either as an IC or as an EM came through influence and credibility and your ability to get people to go in a certain direction.

1:21:22And that's one of those things that, I mean, if you just show up somewhere, you can build credibility. You can always rebuild credibility, but it is one of those things that as you have, it's like a snowball. It keeps getting bigger, your credibility in that organization. you'll be able to move people a lot easier. So people who are early in their org have a disproportionate amount of influence because of their time in the role and what they've done already and what they know. I want to add one thing to that, that there is a trap which you can have in that snowball. That snowball becomes a shackle for you.

1:22:01There are certainly some very senior engineers who become known for that system that they created. and as much as they try to go and extend or move in new directions, everybody knows them for that thing and they're stuck there. That can be a real career trap for people. So a good question to ask yourself is how comfortable you are. It's great to feel like your work is rewarding, but if you don't feel like you're being challenged, even if you're really senior, it may be that it's time to move. And part of it might be that you just got stuck in a hole. Otherwise that snowball is gonna work in your favor.

1:22:35When you think back to your career and when you felt the most growth, on average looking across everything, when would you say is the time that you grew most and why? I'd say it's mostly around kind of those transition periods where I'm in a new space and learning something and then also applying it. Those are usually the places where you can battle test and stress test your own skill set and know what's actually durable and what was fake. But it's also a place where, you know, there's new stuff to learn and adapt and kind of grow. A couple pivotal moments for me, moving to Facebook was huge for me, at least from a leadership perspective.

1:23:13It was stretched in ways that I wasn't expecting. There's also a lot of stress in the company at the time, which was interesting. I'd say pivoting into a more ML-focused role was a big shift for me. And I felt like I had a lot to prove. So it brought a lot of external pressure, which I appreciated. And it gave me a chance to really go and kind of shine. And, you know, other career growth happens in like much smaller durations. Like it's interesting looking back longitudinally. Like I feel like a lot of my effectiveness, both as an IC and a manager, is partially due to my ability to write effectively.

1:23:56I learned a lot of my writing at Amazon. Amazon is known for their writing culture. Some of this is actually a complete waste of time. People just nitpicking the most stupid stuff. But it is a company that really does encourage good writing, which means good thinking at some level. And that has stuck with me. It wouldn't be like a moment that I would notice, but that continued practice was really beneficial for me throughout my career. So those are some of the things that really stand out. On the topic of writing, because I know it's really important. I'm just curious, what would be your top tip if there's some, you know, IC or EM you're saying, hey, you need to improve your writing?

1:24:32What would be the thing? My main thing would be learn to be a critic first. Go and figure out what it is you like or dislike about writing. Go read a doc. Figure out what hits you on the head, what doesn't. Go and scan it. You know, see if you can get the big picture in just a few seconds. Go look for points of like imprecision or, you know, places where the logical conclusions are well-supported. Those are all going to be things that are going to help you, much like I talked about earlier, that generally understanding what separates good from bad helps you to make sure that you're focused on the good.

1:25:07I know when I first wrote some docs at Amazon, I got a bunch of negative feedback, and I thought they were great. I thought they were awesome. It's kind of like it. One of the writing exercises they do is called a PR FAQ, a press release and then frequently asked questions. And the idea is like, get me excited about that thing that we're going to deliver. Go fast forward all the way to the end. And then if you can do that, then everything before it is worthwhile. But if at the end you can't really sell it to me, then it probably wasn't worthwhile to begin with. And a lot of PR FAQs at Amazon start with, oh, we will have a single pane of glass or like one screen where we can go to to get everything that we need.

1:25:47and nobody's excited about that. They're excited about, you know, 50 % reduction in time spent or, you know, being able to go and hire this new person or whatever and being able to look at yourself and go, wow, that was just boring. Like what I was explaining, if I wasn't knee deep in it, nobody would be excited is kind of the first step to good writing. I see. So if I'm understanding, it's hone your taste as a reader first and that will let you critically reflect on your own writing and improve it. And then practice, practice, practice, practice. I mean, at this point, you've, you had a lot of success at Meta.

1:26:26Most people never grow to the level that you grew to. What motivates you in your career now too? Because you also, you left to go to a startup. Yeah. What is your motivation? I really like working on interesting problems. I like working on things that I can tell my kids about and then, you know, them feel like it's meaningful to the world. And I like working on things that I think are kind of setting the stage for the future. And so I always have kind of a tilt toward those objectives and all that I'm working on. I think for me, the relentless march up the career ladder is secondary. It's not to say that money isn't important.

1:27:05It clearly is. Money powers everything. but I had a point in my career where that was that focus on getting promoted and moving through the ranks was very important and I think what I realized eventually is just like okay you're kind of there or at least you're at a place where you know maybe this will be the cap of where you're able to achieve what's next and if you can finally ask yourself that question and then work backwards and ask okay well if I want to get to that thing why not now what's keeping me and for me for the longest time, it was, I want to start a business. I think that would be really fun.

1:27:42I would learn a lot and it's a great way to impact the world. And I gave myself all sorts of excuses for more than a decade. And eventually it was like, you're just lying to yourself. You're putting this off. And so that was what was the impetus for me in leaving big tech and building a business. But also it's kind of the animating force for me going forward. It's just kind of look to that next piece. What is it that I'm really after here? And then last question, if you could go back to yourself when you had just graduated college and give yourself some advice, what would you say? I think for me, I probably could have been better about finding mentorship.

1:28:27I think I did a lot of it alone. And ultimately, if I had found someone like myself and asked them three questions. I probably could have saved myself months of toil. There was a few moments where I put together plans where I basically said, hey, I'm going to take stock of where I'm at, try to figure out where I want to go, and then put together a checklist. I have one such plan somewhere in my Dropbox from ages ago saying, I want to get into ML. This is where I want to go. Here is my plan. Those kinds of things have paid these incredible dividends that continue to be under-emphasized by me even to this day.

1:29:06Most people don't have that level of agency to kind of like just figure out where they want to go and then go and take it. But the world is very malleable to those kinds of plans. I remember a pretty interesting moment. It was actually shortly after I had gotten promoted to senior manager. And I went to my boss and director at the time. And I basically said, you know, here are the things that I'm going to get done. you know and it was a long list of things that I didn't know how to do to be honest I was kind of like this is what I think I probably should be doing now but I'm gonna like figure it out like this is this is my list and he recalled later to me I think shortly after I had left that that moment was when he knew that I was going to be successful in this new position because for a lot of people that lack of agency is what holds them back it's very hard to instill although I think there are some practices that you could probably go through in order to build up your own agency.

1:30:03But if you just force yourself to come up with a plan and ask yourself, what do you really want? And what are the steps to get there? In a lot of cases, that is going to have a huge gradient on your ability to grow. So yeah, I think that'd be what I would tell myself out of college. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for your time, Stefan. I was really looking forward to talking to you and kind of digging into all this management stuff. Well, thank you for having me. I guess for Hello Interview, if you are at a kind of elite tech company and interested in helping us out with coaching people through the interview process and basically making the process less painful for engineers, which is generally speaking what we're after, we'd love to hear from you.

1:30:45So if you work at OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or Google and you want to help us out by working with candidates, send us an email. My email is stefan at hellointerview.com. And happy to kind of brief you on what we're building and how you might be able to help.

1:31:03Stefan Mai: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. Thanks for listening as always, and I'll see you next time.