Interview with a Meta EM: AI Impact on SWEs, Team Match, Ramp-Up, How to Learn

Very insightful! Thanks!

A different perspective on what AI can do and cannot do to replace SWE. As a SWE, made me feel less anxious about the future.

200 years estimate for AI to take over software engineers? Are you kidding me lol?

helpful insight, thanks for sharing!

This was awesome to watch! So insightful as an early engineer - learned a ton.

200 years before AI replaces SWE is ridiculous. Order of magnitude off of a reasonable estimate at the current ROC

Awesome interview! I wish I had watched this interview a few months ago when it first came out because I definitely had a situation where I passed a system design interview but the interviewer didn’t get L6 signals and it was kind of weird where we just weren’t on the same page and weren’t hearing each other. I wish I had reached out and seen if I could get a do-over because that interview prevented me from getting hired at L6.

I like the notion of absorption rate! I do believe that you can create breadth with studying text or even leet code. But the depth is not going to be there without the "struggle" in trying to implement real life solutions with the things you have learned.

200 years??? This guy

Great interview, Stefan! Christian seems like an amazing manager and I'd love to connect with him being an EM myself.

Very informative conversation! One day I hope to have this degree of institutional knowledge of the big tech work environment. For now, just leetcode and system design practice. Thank you!

I had a couple senior engineers I worked with early in my career who ripped apart my PRs and my designs, which helped me learn a ton. At some point after sitting through a bunch of design reviews (most of which I didn't author) and listening to the senior/team lead ask all these questions, suggest we stick a queue instead of something and make it async, talk about fan-out strategies, the simplicity of immutable data vs. mutable, etc. I really learned a ton and took those lessons with me.

I still had to study a lot for design interviews because I never actually worked with web sockets and so on. I can't imagine that many people, even at FAANG companies, have created systems from the ground up (instead of coming in and building on top of what exists) that serviced millions or hundreds of millions of users. My first couple rounds of design interviews I messed up for sure.

Artisan code 🤣🤣 That was a great one

Always enjoy your insights. Thanks for hosting the interview!

I wonder how much OpenSource Development would help in team-matching or interviews

Probably best interview from a Meta EM I’ve seen. Very insightful. Thanks for this. Please keep them coming ❤🔥

Has anyone told you, you look like Homelander

What is a EM?

I will say the personal interaction I had with Meta recruiters (especially the initial technical sourcer) and interviewers in general was the best I've ever had with any company.

Great interview, what was the name of that "how to learn" book that stefan was talking about?

Such a fun listen. Looking forward to more of these!

So many candidates are in team match for months...

But…but there are a lot of times recruiter himself/herself is the biggest uncertain factor… variations are huge.

Makes me wish I knew C++ and could work for Christian's team! I'm a frontend JS developer, very excited about the future of AI (especially the UI that will arise), and talking with Meta recruiters as well. Keep up the great content, this channel has already been super helpful!