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

0:00Then I asked the management, can I actually drop a level?

0:03Igor:This is Igor, a senior staff engineer at Meta, Google, and Cruz who wanted a demotion. You cannot still justify my level with the project being completed. He failed to get the demotion at Meta, and going back to Google at a lower level was harder than expected. They don't have a process for bringing people at a level down, but they made it possible for me. We went over that experience and some transparent discussion across levels. which engineering level has the best quality of life. There are many things that can go wrong when you share stuff like this. What makes you willing to share? Here's the full episode.

0:45You mentioned in a post, a pretty famous post that I'll link so people can see, that Meta didn't have a process for demotion and you were looking for demotion. can you talk about what led you to wanting it to motion at meta yeah so when you join a big company meta is not the exception here but you're joining a big company at the very high level like senior staff there are certain expectations from your performance right come performance review like it met it's called psc uh you you're being judged against other senior staff engineers in organization. As of a year ago, they started to lay off people.

1:33They started doing the Amazon thing essentially, like let's lay off the 10 % lowest performance. What it means is that you have at most one year to ramp up to be comparable in performance to other old timers of the company. And also, what does it even mean to be an E7 in a company like this? You need to be an expert, a big expert in the field. You need to know a lot of people. You need to understand the infrastructure that you're working with very deeply. You probably need to be easily familiar with any piece of code that your team is working with. and also you need to know all the surrounding, like what all the surrounding teams are doing.

2:22And you need to know all these people, like all core people around you, and they need to know you and they need to trust you, right? That's a very difficult thing to achieve within like a relatively short period of time. I initially saw that, okay, when you were, so again, joining Meta day one, I know less than an intern sitting next to me, who was hired two weeks prior to me. So I start from level zero. And then hopefully you'll be able to get to something that L3 would perform. So you can take some very easy task that under supervision from other folks, you can kind of promote yourself to a junior engineer.

3:11Then you do some more stuff. You learn additional things. you can get promoted to like a less junior engineer, like a E4. And then slowly you ramp up, you know, to more and more like higher levels. Essentially, like you start from zero and you climb the ladder as fast as you can. Yeah. So you ramp up yourself to, you know, the level that you're supposed to achieve. And, you know, the more senior you are, the more levels you need to jump through. And I believe that within this year and two months that I spent in meta, maybe if I'm generous with myself, I maybe achieved like E6. So I don't feel like I reached E7.

3:55What did you see that made you think you weren't living up to the expectations? It's self-judgment, mostly. This scale where we call numbers, it's not like quantum states, right? There are many things in the middle, right? It's a continuous scale. So it's very hard to say where you are on the ladder. But again, comparing myself to other senior staff engineers, the work that I knew, I felt like if anybody is going to be on the chopping board, that's going to be me. Right. So that was one thing about this ramp-up process. And the second thing, I also noticed that I really enjoyed doing the coding stuff, like just sitting down, debugging things.

4:53That's what I really loved about the job. So during my ramp up, when I was around like E5, E6 territory, that's what I really wanted to do, right? I felt like as someone who was programming from the age of 12, I really liked coding, debugging, designing, mentoring more junior people. But like a senior staff engineer, it's more than that. It's like a leader who spends most of the time in meetings and design docs and touches much less code. It's a slightly different type of work. And just by going through this process, I realized that actually I want to be in the E5, E6 territory. And then I asked the management, can I actually drop a level?

5:50And I understand that for the company, it's a difficult thing to implement because I already have some granted stock. I have a certain compensation package. And so how do you execute that? It's not a well-polished process. I know that they can switch levels when you go from one title to another. So let's say you were a director and you want to become an AC. So they do have some of that demotion process. And frankly, I don't know how they do it. But yeah, staying in the same job category and dropping level, they said it's not possible. I see. So when you asked if it's possible for Demotion, your manager went to HR and kind of the result was just it's just an impossible thing to do.

6:47You know, I asked the question and I got the answer. No, maybe if I pushed harder, if I like went to talk to the, you know, VP or something, they would have made it possible. but at the same time I also felt like I'm too far outside of my comfort zone and before coming to Meta I worked a little bit at Cruise and before that I worked at Google for 14 and a half years and that was my comfort zone I just had this option the easy way out essentially I had a recruiter who was contacting me periodically like i already better to come back to google so this time i just said yeah let's talk when you were at google and at cruise you were at these senior levels as a senior staff engineer what's the difference that makes it so that you can perform there but not at meta so when i came to google i started from the lowest e3 like l3 level uh so junior software engineer and slowly Over the many years, I raced through promotions, many times failing.

8:02They got promoted and then a year or two later asking again and then climbing the ladder. My last promotion to senior staff happened because I was able to accomplish something big. The project that I worked in that project for several years, so I was already an expert. I knew everybody, right? Everybody knew me and I was able to build something that I can be proud of. But again, coming then, then leaving Google and going to cruise, it was also very difficult for me to ramp up there because you're coming, starting from zero. And the first year was very difficult for me in cruise but over time i found like a relatively safe uh like you know my found some comfort zone there until cruises a company uh went the bad like they had the accident and then they had layoffs and then like people were just quitting all the time like losing people so I decided that I want to leave as well.

9:13But before the accident at Cruise, I actually was quite happy. I was able to do some coding. I was able to do mentoring of VacerFox, and I was able to also act as an UberTL a little bit, guiding the team on things that they need to do. You successfully ramped up the senior staff at Cruise, and then at Meta it was a bit harder. What were the differences between those two ramp-ups in your opinion? Cruise was a smaller company, so less infrastructure to learn. The team is less crowded space, I would say. You can easily carve out space for you to grow into. There is lack of people and you can say, okay well this project needs someone to work on and and you can just go and work on on this stuff at meta i felt like uh it's quite crowded like especially among the city of hogs it felt a little bit like they have too many frankly at least in the work where i worked so i don't know about all of meta but it felt like the space is a little bit crowded you need You need to find scope for yourself.

10:38Is there anything that you would have changed in your onboarding process that could have made things different? Probably. Again, I didn't switch companies that many times in my career. I started at Google, spent so many years there, then I only switched to Cruiser, then Meta. So I'm not very well experienced in switching companies. and essentially, you know, this whole ramp-up process is new to me. And I also felt like the management at Meta also doesn't know how to import senior folks because most of the senior folks in the company, they grew within the company to those senior levels. Even if they came to this specific org, you know, from another org within Meta, but at least they already have the meta knowledge.

11:35They know how to run a job in the cluster. I think I spent a lot of time just reading docs and trying to build this foundational knowledge. I think I spent too much time doing that. It is much better to just get your hands dirty and just try doing stuff. And then doing those things in parallel, like you build something, accomplish some tasks, and also you're learning in parallel. And I did more of the learning part, less of the... The building. Yeah. Is there something that you wish was done or maybe something that would have helped you from the manager side? You're just guiding me, right? If they say, like, this other person just ramped up, like, you know, three quarters ago, and here's what they did, I would have followed that recipe.

12:33We just didn't have the recipe. Like, I'm not, I don't have any complaints against my management. Like, they, you know, they tried to support me the best. They just also lacked this expertise of, like, ramping up with senior folks, you know. So it was a learning experience for all of us. I've heard in conversations from other people as well that I guess job mobility as a senior IC actually becomes progressively riskier or maybe scarier, I guess, because you get so used to your existing org and all of that. um is that something that you've seen in other people or like peers and and as well in that uh senior ic job ability is a lot tougher i've seen folks at google that uh left google and then came back a year or two later saying that it didn't work out well for them um And I, yeah, it's, you know, people don't share things like that openly usually.

13:40So it's much harder to hear those stories. You hear the success stories, you don't hear the failures. Also, I think that if I kept trying, like instead of going back to Google, I went to, I don't know, some other company, I would be much like, you know, more experienced in ramping up and then maybe maybe if you do this often enough uh it becomes a habit and and then and then you can do it easily you mentioned that you you thought you weren't meeting expectations based on your own judgments um i'm curious did you ever get any feedback from your manager or anyone saying hey you need to do more for your level's expectations yeah i did get feedback i just you I don't necessarily want to openly share all of that.

14:28But yeah, I was, so the part, like just the few months leading to my leaving meta, I was working on a project that initially I thought it would take me like two weeks to accomplish. It was like a small thing that I thought would be easy to do and turned out to be actually a lot more involved and a lot more complicated. and I felt like even if I finish it, which I almost did, like I almost brought it to completion, even if I finish it and launch it, everything's successful, it is still not an E7-level project. You cannot still just justify my level with the project being completed. Probably it's my fault in which projects I pick.

15:18uh you know or how i underestimated the complexity of the thing because you're going back to google um are you going back to an org where you have all the existing context and and relationships and all that no no everything will be new to me new people new infrastructure new new everything but at least I know I know how Google operates I know the culture there are differences in cultures also between the companies and I think that Meta also in terms of internal culture at Meta I didn't feel like it fits me the best What's the biggest cultural differences between Meta and Google? Meta tends to set up very ambitious goals.

16:10They give you, like, oftentimes they will give you a very arbitrary deadline saying like, okay, this project, you need to finish it within like, you know, by September 15th, whatever, like one month from now. And then everybody works hard. Like there is a lot of pressure. Like you need to constantly send the updates to the leadership, how the project progresses. Comes the date, the deadline, the project is still unfinished and it just keeps dragging on. and everybody is fine with that. Again, I don't know, I haven't seen all of Meta. I've seen the specific org where I work and it feels like, so then what was the purpose of setting this aggressive deadline, right?

16:53Then like, you know, are we like, you know, you can do it once, but like after five times going through this project, through this like artificial pressure with like non-realistic goals, then people just say, okay, you know what? 5 p.m., I'm going home. I'm not going to try to work hard because I know that this whole pressure is artificial. I think Google is much more reasonable in that regard. If there is a deadline, it's probably for good reasons and people would work hard, but usually there will not be pressure. again talking about google like as of 10 years ago i'm not sure that it's still true today but you would be pressured to to fix something or to accomplish something when there is really uh you know exceptional case for that like you you wouldn't be pressured to to work on the pressure you know for years yeah i mean i get the sense that the industry as a whole is kind of becoming a little bit more intense when it comes to execution and deadlines.

18:06I've heard some people saying that Google as well has felt a little bit of pressure too, but hard to say. It depends on the org, I'm sure. Yeah, it could be. And again, I didn't feel personally much pressure at Meta, but just talking to other folks, seeing how they work and operate. And as I said, there is this cultural thing where the leadership wants updates and everything, and then the people on the ground, they actually kind of dismiss it, essentially. It's like, you know, it almost feels like elementary school, where the teacher is yelling, but kids are still playing. If you're yelling too much, it stops working, essentially.

18:55If you constantly put pressure on your people, it just doesn't work anymore. So what do you do next? You start laying off people. Yeah, it might work to some degree, but again, people adjust to everything. That's crazy. You mentioned that when you reached out to Google, you explicitly asked for a demotion or going back as a L6 before you were in L7. Was that a challenge or was that just a very straightforward process with the recruiter? It was a challenge for the recruiter to also make this happen because they have a process for bringing people in back at the same level or even level up. They don't have a process for bringing people at a level down, but they made it possible for me.

19:41Again, I can totally see how a person comes back and says, I want to be a level down. There might be some red flags. There might be things that I'm not telling. It's a gamble for a manager to hire a person like that. Also, just by giving me offer at the level down, they understand that they will not be able to match my compensation at the previous place. So would they even accept it? right and so so i had to like and assure my recruiter that yes i'm happy to accept the offer at the lower compensation like you know a lot of people will not do something like i did because it's like a significant drop in compensation you mentioned um stuff that people might be hiding from the recruiter what comes to mind when you you mention that i don't know maybe you maybe you did something in the company that you know you like a fireball offense or something like a like i i don't know like if if you're a manager and somebody comes to you with like you know saying like yeah previously i was the this level now i want to be level below please hire me it does sound fishy like why don't you like what's wrong with you like you like you know there are so many companies out there like why why would you come back to do this company like why don't you try something elsewhere like i i don't know what questions popped up in my hiring manager's head when he saw this google's current process do they do host matching or what was the like did you meet up with the hiring manager beforehand or just through the recruiter?

21:34The recruiter sent me a few openings and, uh, asked me which one sound interesting. I spoke to a few hiring managers. Um, one was, uh, sound like sounded like the best match for me. And, uh, then I spoke to a few engineers on the team. Then I spoke to the manager's manager. and that was it. Another nice thing for me is that they didn't require me to re-interview.

22:04Igor:Oh, interesting. But it had been like three years maybe? Over, yeah, three and a half years. So yeah, they didn't ask me to re-interview. Actually, that was another interesting thing that they said. Like if you're coming back as E7, you definitely don't need an interview because you were already L7. But if you're going to be L6, then you might need to do a coding interview because who knows if you wrote code while you were out. That's kind of funny. Yeah. I got an exception from coding. I see. That's funny. You got promoted out of competence in the lower levels. Yes. But it's understandable when people go to higher levels, they write less code.

22:53and maybe they get rusty who knows it's kind of crazy that you could boomerang after had been three years or more yeah to be fair i don't know if that's a general google's policy or it was just a special case for me i don't i don't have any friends that did this recently to to understand if if like they did it for anybody else you mentioned earlier that you know a lot of people don't share this kind of stuff about emotions and these types of things and i'm curious what makes you willing to share i'm generally a very open person like i i like sharing my my life experiences positive and negative with friends and the you know i'm yeah i'm generally quite open and also i'm quite confident that's another thing like you wouldn't share if you're worried about your career, if you're worried about, you know, there are many things that can go wrong when you share stuff like this, right?

23:58So I'm very privileged, essentially. I don't need the work visa, so I can live in this country without being attached to a certain employer. My spouse has health insurance. My kids are already grown up and off to college and don't have mortgage on my house. So I can afford not to work for a few years.

24:30I'm fine with... Let's say I said something in this chat right now and Google says, we don't want you for some reason. I'm totally fine. I will just... So that's a position of privilege, right? Definitely. I mean, you're free. Yeah, you're entirely free. You're your own person, which is awesome. Yeah, so that's a position of privilege that many other people wouldn't have. So if another person asked me, should I post about my challenges at work? I would probably say no. unless you feel it's so so safe and secure and i mean you mentioned that google you were asking for promos you went from their lowest level up and you were pushing and pushing for promos and that's a very different mindset from now which you were kind of pushing for the motion i'm curious is there did something major change that made you um not motivated to go for promos anymore in your career?

25:36Essentially, if you are a senior engineer, right, E5 or E4, you don't even know what the life of two levels above you looks like. You can imagine what happens at one level above you, but it's very hard to see what does a principal engineer do. Most people don't know. And I don't know. By going through this, I realized that my happiest time was when I was working in a relatively small team, doing a lot of coding, debugging, designing, mentoring more junior folks. That's where I felt the happiest. let's say money is not a constraint at all and it was just which engineering level has the best quality of life in your opinion which one would you say uh senior uh engineer like e5 l5 uh yeah that's probably least pressure you're still shielded by uh you know probably like if If you're working on a team, you probably have an ETL who is six on the team who, you know, sends all the updates to the upper levels and shields the lower, like the team from all this stuff.

27:04You have the management, also like the lower level managers who shield you from all this stuff. So you can just do the stuff that hopefully you enjoy what you're doing. Like not everybody enjoys doing work. Like a lot of people do it just for money, right? I personally, I was programming since I was 12 years old. So I really like this stuff. I got into this job because I love it and it happens to pay well. So like, but I would do it even if it wasn't paying well. Like a lot of people come to software engineering because just because that's the money thing. So then if it was easy, as easy to do, would your ideal situation be two levels of demotion that's too extreme I think I can still enjoy being like E6 I'm quite comfortable with and maybe I haven't been E7 long enough to get comfortable in the role, maybe if I just kept doing it for some time longer I would have started enjoying it Yeah.

28:16Like, you know, one thing is like, was I really... Like, you know, imposter syndrome is something that everybody has regardless of what your level is. I'm sure Elon Musk has imposter syndrome. So you know, I'm questioning myself, like, was I really, you know, qualified to be E7? And my answer is like, partially yes, but not fully. it's like a multi-dimensional thing and in some dimensions it probably was good and in some dimensions was not this good you mentioned working with other peer ICs that were also really high level is there skills that you saw that they had which would have closed the gap for you personally or something that you thought made them so strong it's often a mistake to compare yourself against a group of people.

29:08That's what gives you a lot of imposter syndrome, where you're saying like, oh, those people around me, they're so smart. They are so good at talking. They're so good at doing presentations. They're so good at communicating. They're so good at leading. But it turns out that it's like one person is good at this, another person is good at this. And you're comparing yourself against a team of people. And so that's always you need to be careful not to make that mistake. So yeah, I think I, you know, given enough ramp up time, I would have been able to reach like full productivity and being useful to the company at E7.

29:50I just felt like I was not enjoying the ride essentially. And I didn't have to. And I debated a lot before making the decision to leave. I was talking to friends, I was talking to family, And pretty much everybody was telling me, like, are you crazy? Like, you're not laid off yet. You're not, nobody showed you the door. Why would you do something crazy like that? And even if you're leaving, like, you don't enjoy it, why won't you try E7 elsewhere? Like, why do you need to go level down? That's, there is a lot of peer pressure. And my answer to that was just like, yes, I can try that. I can do that.

30:29But, like, I don't want that. It's like, why, you know, I'm capable of running a marathon, but I don't like running a marathon. I don't like running. It's like, why would I do that? You mentioned that you kind of rose through the ranks at Google. I'm kind of curious, what was the project that got you promoted to senior staff at Google? It was a project in ads. Ads builds a lot of machine learning infrastructure because, you know, the ranking of ads is a essentially a recommendation system. And I was working on this machine learning infra and when I came to the team, they were doing training on CPUs, not on GPUs, but on CPUs.

31:17And TPU was a new thing, new hardware that Google was developing. It was about to be released like maybe a year or two when I joined the team. And my role was to make sure that this ADS training infrastructure can run on those TPUs. And additionally, when you train machine learning models, the scale matters and the utilization matters. And there are lots of nuances that can, like, you know, your model may be training, but things go wrong. It's online training, which is also, like, something that most people don't know. Like, LLMs don't usually train in online training mode. So there are lots of experience on the team.

32:18Like, the whole infrastructure that existed within that team was built for the CPU training, and it was polished over, I don't know, over 10 years. It was polished to be super reliable, super like you've well monitored, unit tested. Everything is like very rigid, very like polished, right? And here I am coming and building a completely new piece of infrastructure to run on TPUs. And it has to be as good as the old, you know as polished as as monitored as tested as reliable um so it was a big project and uh you know it succeeded yeah it's something to be like i was proud of what i built and so that got me promoted what was the operating model of that project were you tl or were you kind of writing a lot of it yourself or how would you describe the execution Yeah.

33:18Initially, it was a quite exploratory project. So it was just two people. It was the TL plus one person to building a prototype. Plus a lot of people from other teams helping, like the TPU team, the compiler team. There are lots of other people who were helping us succeed. Like the TensorFlow team, we were writing TensorFlow back then. And, you know, so it's also like where you need credibility. Like that's why knowing people and them knowing you is very important. Like trusting you. If you don't have that, you cannot succeed. So it's a really like cross-team collaboration, very big project. And again, hardware like this, you need to decide how many of these chips you want to order.

34:12and they will be delivered like 18 months from now. And right now you don't have any. It's not like you can try out and see. And those chips are super expensive, right? So it's a very risky thing to do for the company and yeah, it's like a lot of risk taking, a lot of like leadership skills that they needed for doing stuff like that. So you were on the, well, kind of the product team, not actually product, you were machine learning infra for the ads org. And then all the underlying infra teams were helping collaborate with you. You mentioned compilers, maybe some training infra, other infrastructure teams.

35:04Yeah. And once the thing started working a little bit, the team grew quite a bit more. A lot more people joined the effort and started working polishing. And then again, first-generation TPUs come in, and then they already tell you, we already designed the next generation for becoming next year. So you're already rushing to adjust your infrastructure to the next thing. And that's pretty much every year you're upgrading your infrastructure. How did you test the initial builds of this infrastructure if you didn't have the chips to begin with? A lot of things were just about input reading and processing, which you can do without having the chips.

35:50The difference between CPU training where you have the CPU and Intel CPU, they can do floating point arithmetic and integer arithmetic in parallel. And the floating point arithmetic is relatively slow. So input reading and processing was free on the same CPU. Going from that mode of operation to you have a relatively weak computer with eight TPU chips. each one of those TPU chips is like order of magnitude faster than the CPU that you had before. If several orders, I think it's like two orders of magnitude faster. Now there is no chance you can do the input reading on the host of those TPUs. So you need to like build the input processing pipelines and everything, but that's something you can test outside of, like, without having TPUs.