Insights From an L7 Meta Manager: Interviews, Onboarding, and Building Trust

Thanks for the interview! Excellent material as usual!

stefan the goat. jordy get ur commits up

Awesome vid. Stefan is legit. Love the system design stuff but this content is super valuable too! More please Jordan!

Two interviewing🐐's. Wouldn't have gotten a Meta offer without either of y'all!

This is above my iq, but solid video 😂

Thanks SO much, Jordan!

Brutal Mog

For more senior level interviews it should just be talking through your resume and getting more details on your experience. You as a company are trying to hire this person because they have conveyed in their resume they have the skillset to take on the challenge you are facing in your company. Asking the potential candidate to come up with some novel approach to a problem they weren't even prepared to be asked on the fly is an awful interview approach.

Hello Interview was easily the best $200 I've ever spent.

2 legends ❤ 🎉

Is Meta cutthroat

Recently screwed up behavioural interviews with Amazon . To be fair I don't consider myself a leader , I just wonder if all SDEs at Amazon are at that level of leadership they're assessing new hires ..

Good interview! Would be nice if you face the camera when asking questions

Time and again I hear "put yourself in the shoes of your manager". This is poor advice with even worse consequences. You can't do that in a psychologically safe manner. If you do put yourself in your manager's shoes, you eventually create a persona and expectation of how to approach the activity/responsibility from "your experience" and not your manager's. This is critical because if the manager approach deviates from your expectations that were created by your act of thinking on behalf of your manager, those expectations are going down the drain majority of the time. And you eventually lead to disconnecting with your manager, for no fault of theirs. So, lesson learned: don't put yourself in your manager's shoes. Ask them instead. Frame better questions to get good answers.

Waste of time

I disagree with modt of this and I've been in engineering for 30 years. These types of interviews that emphasize soft skills put the wrong type of people in leadership.

Huge fan of hellointerview! I clicked on this video because I thought I recognized Stefan's face! Hi Stefan!!

This was a great interview that gave a bit of insight in a few areas:
- The mentality and required ramp-up time required when switching companies
- It is better to generalize your skills, build relationships, and adapt rather than trying to mutate the company into a format you have expertise in. I feel that the expectations of a senior/staff/principal is to deliver large, high value changes quickly, when it takes time to have a fundamental understanding first before implementing large changes.
- Need to insert yourself into projects that are at or above your level.
- The 1-on-1 with manager approach from an engineer and empathizing with the manager. Especially, considering your manager a partner and a peer rather a "force" in most situations.


The frustrating part (for me) in this interview is that Stefan echoes the perceptions that I (and I am assuming others) have about management and how it works today.
- For the performance review process, the 'highly technical project evaluation being expensive' comment makes sense from an evaluation standpoint, in that it can be cost-prohibitive to learn and understand importance or delivery in these subject areas.
- In the calibration/scoring of said project, the "begging for people to make mistakes" comment is forcing people to make scoring judgements on your work without knowing or understanding it while scoring 10s to 100s of other engineers (typically) in a short timeframe. The scoring is based on their incomplete knowledge, and it sounds like the default is to assume a low score due to failure to socialize and influence on said project's value. That would, to an engineer, appear that the scoring process is "broken". In reality, it sounds like it works as intended. It is instead centered on your socialization and influence of others to believe that your work is important, rather than actually doing important work.
- The (paraphrasing) "Your peers should be talking about you and your ideas" is again echoing the sentiment that influence and socialization is again more important than having good ideas.
- There are literally no comments during the entire performance review question regarding any alignment or performance with the organization or company objectives. From an interviewing standpoint you have to

Again, I think Stefan has great insight into this and the advice appears to be both concrete and based on evidence. But, for me, the disappointment is that in reality politicking and influence matter substantially more than I originally thought.

Great one with great info. I feel the lines at higher levels get so subjective, that a particular mindset can do wonders in some team while being disastrous in others. Totally depends on the team culture. For eg : A senior person doing these social stunts will never be accepted in some teams where you can’t wow everyone with your tech skills so much so that people wish they learn a lot and step up to your level. While doing the social skills thing can give you an image as someone who knows nothing but just keeps doing show off.

This guy look and speak super weird

you guys look like you’d introduce yourselves as “fire and ice” and compete for zendayas heart

It's been one of the most meaningful talks I have watched this year sofar! thank you

This was perfect timing!

Okay jordan has no life, subscribed! Lol

How to become an IC, when does one become an IC. Seriously speaking, is it like, You don't happen to become an IC, IC has to find you? Does it depend on like if you take lead from design to implementation, to collaborating with devops and QAs vs you are always working in team

"if you can't code, forget it"

it would be nice if interviews measured whether you can code or not. instead, they measure whether you can leetcode.

thanks for great videos bro

Inspiring discussion, thanks for putting this together, I learned and reflected a lot.

The meta manager sounds like a true asshole. You, the peasants, brainstorm product improvements while I hold the PIP hammer.

Great insights, this is pure gold! You both have by far the best System Design content. I'm glad I found your channels, it's been exhausting having to navigate the big ocean of noise in the internet. I also bought the Grokking subscription and had some progress but I'm just too lazy to read all that text.
I have been postponing for a while reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications, do you think its worth it?

Ok Stefan has been working for 15 yrs and has done north of 2k interviews. Now that's BS. 15 x 52 x 5 = 3900. 3900 / 2k, he needs to be doing an interview roughly every two working day, no matter what. Whether he just started working fresh of college, whether he has an important deadline, whether he's out for vacation, whether his company is in hiring freeze, doesn't matter. He needs to uphold this 1 interview per 2 days on average. That's impossible. I know because I've done my fair share of interviews in my 20yr career and it is nowhere near his number even though I was pressured a lot to do interviews and that I never shied away from it. My stat should be around 500.

Mind you that interviewing a candidate is not just appearing for the interview. You gotta be prepared before the interview which means you need to read their resume, the instructions from the HR and their past interviews with your company at the very least. Then you need to choose a level appropriate question that your company hasn't asked the candidate yet, and then check if this question is banned by your company. If it has been banned you gotta choose another one. Sometimes you run out of questions as they have been repeated by others too much so you need to find new ones which itself is a work because not all problems are appropriate to ask due to various reasons. Some companies have a live DB of questions to choose from but then you gotta study the question so that you can judge the candidate properly.

After the interview you gotta fill out lots of forms about the interview. It is not just a single opinion to hire or not. You gotta justify each rubric score you provided whether it is high or low with the exchanges you had in the interview. Then some companies require you to appear in the debriefing, some companies offload that to a separate committee so whether you appear in that meeting or sit in that committee your commitments don't end. So you spend 1.5-2hrs per candidate. So that means Stephan spent 2hr x 2.5 = 5 hr each week. Note that these are productive hours not clock hours. Let's be generous and assign 40 productive hours per week to Stephan. So then he spent 5 / 40 ~ 13% of his whole career in interview related duties in the best case. It must be more like 20% or so if you really consider all the other aforementioned factors.

So let's cut the BS shall we? You did not conduct 2k interviews, Stefan. If you were working for 30yrs and never lost your appetite for it then yeah maybe but not in a 15yr career, no way.

Hey Bro, I'm a big fan of Stefan and their channel. However, your channel actually complements his a lot. He has good depth but doesn't cover all aspect of SD, your videos is very easy to watch and beginner friendly. So don't get discouraged. Hey you have way more followers than his. He said that because he wants bring his value proposition so that he can charge. You're the true philanthropist. Something for you to learn is how he market himself and monetize his channel. Love you bro!

Amazing advice especially targeted at Staff / E6+. I fully agree that nearly all of the prep content online is targeted at E3-5 and completely misses the Staff mark.

incredible video. very smart and sorted engineering leader.

Hands down blown away by this session. Very illuminating... and you can tell that he know what he is talking about