Novati on Leveling
Levels at Facebook are not about raw skills (be it technical or behavioral) but rather they are about your scope of responsibility.
- E3: Entry Level. day to day work at the task level. Receiving tasks from your manager and team, completing them independently with no help.
- E4: Mid Level. day to day work at the feature level. Receiving feature level goals from manager and PM and independently breaking it up into tasks. Being the go to person for that feature and maintaining it in production proactively.
- E5: Senior Level. day to day work at the team level. Helping prioritize features for the team, helping breaking up larger goals into features. Reviewing code and mentoring others. Interviewing and hiring. etc… (Novati 2022, “https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ui98mg/comment/i7btvqe/”)
The difference between 6 and 7 is a big one. When I left about 15% of all engineers were E6 and around 1% were E7.
At E6, you are basically doing an incredible job across the board. You are working on important projects, writing a lot of code, reviewing a lot of code, interviewing others, setting team goals, generally setting an example for a department.
To get to E7, you need to have a “superpower” that makes you unique and have a org/company wide impact. Facebook has created something called “archetypes” to summarize those superpowers. I was the “coding machine” archetype, which was created for me actually, and is a rarer one. Other ones included Generalist, Specialist, Fixer, PM/Eng Hybrid. (Novati 2022, “https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ui98mg/comment/i7by08x/”)