🙋♂️ Hi there, I’m Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta. I’ve got a new step-by-step support package for people preparing for interviews called Premium Access. It includes a (print) copy of the book plus my AI copilot, built on Claude Code, that helps you craft stories, practice with simulated interviews, and prepare for specific companies—all while keeping you in control of your own files, on your own machine. Pick it up now and get access to any future premium content I ever create, starting with the audiobook (preview here).
I don’t usually write about career advice on this newsletter. I write about how to rock your behavioral interviews. But so many of my behavioral coaching clients who successfully land roles at Meta turn around and book another chat with me about how to succeed once they’re there.
It’s a fair question.
I spent almost ten years at Meta as a Manager, supporting over 200 engineers. I sat through 17 multi-week calibration sessions where we decided who gets promoted and who doesn’t, who gets the bonus and who gets managed out. I onboarded dozens of new engineers into the company and watched what worked and what didn’t.
Today, I’m sharing the four things you need to know to be successful as a new engineer at Meta. The stuff I told my new reports when I onboarded them.
Meta is a performance-driven company
Meta is a metrics-driven company
Meta is a relationship company
Meta is a “show your work” company
Meta is a Performance-Driven Company
Obviously, your manager’s job is to rate your performance, but at Meta, like most big companies, the evaluation process is pretty onerous for management. And while they’ve played with it in the past few years, trying to make it lighter weight, the process still guides decision making on the ground, since doing work that’s not appreciated at performance time doesn’t make much sense.
Understanding the performance evaluation criteria your manager will use to assess you (and everyone around you) is going to help you from day one:
Your impact: What have you done for the business?
Your engineering excellence: How well do you execute against technical standards?
Your leadership and direction setting: How do you guide yourself and others?
Your impact on the people around you: Including mentoring, team health, and collaborative projects
Internalizing these matters because you need to begin with the end in mind.
Before you even start your first project, sit down with your manager and ask: “What does a successful performance review look like for me in six months?” Get specific. Get specific across all four axes.
It might surprise you, but not every manager will think like this. Sounds like it should be their job to set up their reports for success at review time, right? It is. But new managers might not actually know what these dimensions mean—or might not know what “meets expectations” at your level looks like on each axis.
If your manager is new to managing or new to Meta, they probably haven’t calibrated their ratings through enough performance review cycles. They might not realize that what felt like a “strongly exceeds” performance from a previous company only registers as “meets” in Meta’s culture. It’s a subjective process and takes a lot of reps to get right.
You can compensate for this gap by building relationships with and leveraging the experience of the people around you:
Get to know your tech lead
Get to know other managers in your org
Run your project plans by them. They can give you feedback on whether your plan sounds like a “meets” or “exceeds” for your level, giving you the opportunity to adjust before the cycle ends.
If you do this, then during the performance cycle, when all the managers and tech leads gather to discuss your work, there will be more than just your manager with context on your performance. You’ll have built advocates—people with some sense of ownership over your career that extends beyond your direct reporting chain.
Meta is a Metrics-Driven Company
Meta, and even many people at Meta, don’t care about your project because it’s technically interesting. Meta cares about your project because it’s moving the needle on something measurable that was agreed on in advance.
Maybe it’s DAU. Maybe it’s engagement time. Maybe it’s revenue per user. Maybe it’s infrastructure cost reduction. But it’s something that someone at the top of the org cares about—and you need to know what that something is.
So here’s what to do:
Go find your org’s and your team’s recent planning documents. Maybe it’s organized by half, or by quarter, or whatever cadence your org uses, but there’s a plan somewhere that outlined what the team was going to invest in AND how they were going to measure success.
Now, look at your personal plan. You have a plan for what you’ll invest in, right? We just talked about that, lol.
Then ask yourself: “Where does my plan fit into this larger org plan? What metric is it moving? And does someone important actually care about that metric?”
If the answer is vague—”We’re not sure yet” or “It’s kind of exploratory”—be wary.
If there’s no way to measure the impact you’re making, then the only way for you to “exceed” or “greatly exceed” expectations on that project is if it’s really technically difficult or you’re really junior and the expectation is that you can’t do it at all. That’s not a great spot to be in.
You want to work on projects with measurable outcomes. That has two benefits: first, so you can know whether you’re making progress toward the goal. And second, so you have a way to justify a better-than-meets-expectations rating when review time comes.
If your project isn’t connected to a top-line metric, it’s at risk of being a nice-to-have. And when the company needs to do headcount reductions or reprioritize—and they will—nice-to-haves get cut first. The people working on them get reassigned at best, or managed out at worst.
You want to be clearly connected to something that matters to the business. That’s how you succeed...or even survive.
Meta is a Relationship Company
Meta has a lot of products, but almost all of them are relationship products. You might have noticed that it’s a social media company. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads—they’re all fundamentally about human connection.
Just as its products are social, the company is social too. There are two implications of this for a new joiner:
You’ve got to get to know people
You need to understand how communication works in your org
Let’s talk about building relationships
When you arrive at Meta, one of your first jobs—arguably more important than your actual project work in the early weeks—is building social capital by getting to know as many people as possible.
I’m not talking about going to a few happy hours and making small talk. I mean actually knowing people. Understanding who they are, what they care about, what they’re working on, what success looks like for them.
First, get to know everyone on your team. This sounds obvious, but I’m mentioning it because I’ve seen new hires skip it—especially junior folks who are heads-down trying to prove themselves technically. You should know your teammates’ names, their projects, their career goals. It shouldn’t take a month for people in your team meeting to know who you are.
Second, get to know your cross-functional partners. Your PM, your designer, your data scientist. Don’t neglect them. This might sound obvious to experienced people, but juniors need to hear that XFN partners are part of your team too.
Third, get to know the senior engineers on adjacent teams. They’re the ones your manager will ping when they’re gathering data about you. They’re the ones who’ll sit next to your manager at lunch and say, “Oh, that new engineer you hired? They’re solid. I’ve seen their code reviews and they really know their stuff.”
And finally, even meet with parallel managers. I mean the managers of adjacent teams. They’re the ones sitting in the same performance review meeting, the ones your manager needs to convince to give you a positive rating. If they know you, trust you, and respect your work, that counts for something when ratings are being decided.
Now let’s talk about communication culture
There’s another relationship aspect that’s crucial at Meta: learning the cultural expectations for communication in your part of the org.
Meta uses a version of its own Facebook product, called Workplace, to coordinate on and between teams. It’s pretty wild to have so much company context—posts, comments, discussions—available in a news feed for your career.
However it looks in your specific org, there’s some overlapping hierarchy of internal groups to understand and manage. Like one group for your immediate team, one for each project you work on, one for the broader org—maybe two or more levels up—and innumerable groups to facilitate communication between orgs.
I even set up 1-on-1 Workplace groups to manage personal relationships, like between me and my direct reports.
Figure out what these groups are as fast as possible. Honestly, your manager should tell you about them, but don’t wait for them to do so. Then learn what content goes where and at what cadence.
Participate in those groups. Ask questions. Answer questions. Be a voice people recognize.
Meta is a “Show Your Work” Company
Of course, Meta is like everywhere else: your work doesn’t exist if people don’t know about it.
You could ship something incredible, move a huge metric, solve a massive problem—and if nobody sees it, it doesn’t count as much during rating season.
This is where those Workplace groups come in.
Post about your wins. Share what you shipped, what you learned, what metrics improved. People scroll Workplace. Your peers scroll it. Your manager scrolls it. Your manager’s manager scrolls it. You want to be visible. It can feel like self-promotion and I guess it is a bit, but that’s just the game.
Post about progress too, not just wins. In the right group, of course. If it feels like you’re posting too much, you’re probably posting just enough. You should be creating some kind of content there at least a couple of times per week.
All this posting has an added benefit beyond the visibility it creates. When it comes to writing your self-review—something you’ll do every six months at Meta—you’ll have a rich archive of content to draw from. The internal AI system can pull from your posts when writing a summary of your half. If you haven’t been posting, you’ll be sitting there at 11pm the night before your self-review is due, trying to remember what you did four months ago.
Don’t be that person.
The Bottom Line
Those are the four keys: performance, metrics, relationships, and visibility.
You might not love all of these. Some might feel uncomfortable or contrary to how you think things “should” work. And that’s fine. There are unpleasant realities in every job.
Honestly, these dynamics are part of the tradeoff baked into the total comp you’re receiving, which is frankly unimaginable for a regular desk job compared to 30 years ago. Maybe that’s not a solace to you but I think it should be.
Meta can be a really fun company to work for. It’s a culture that still rewards impact over tenure, and execution over politics (for the most part). You can do genuinely meaningful work there, at a scale that most companies can only dream of.
If you just landed a job at Meta, congratulations! That was the hard part. Now take these four principles, internalize them, and go crush it.
This is good advice beyond Meta. One of the best things any new employee can do early is ask: What does success look like at this company, and how will it be evaluated? What kind of impact matters here? How can I make my work visible in the right way?
Build relationships. Ask questions. Get context. Understand how decisions are made and what strong performance actually looks like. Then do the work.
Performance reviews become much less stressful when expectations are discussed throughout the year, not discovered at the end.