6 Months at Meta: a learning memo

A memo on things I have been learnings as a software engineer at Meta 🪴 Main themes: How to operate well, how to be an independent and reliable teammate.

Background? I started my role around August 2022, and through the Meta team-match process, I joined a team that builds click-to-message (CTX) ad products.

Why did I choose to join an ads team? Compared to Meta’s VR area, I think ads org provides direct feedback on a widely adopted product.

What do I feel most of the time? I enjoy my time here so far and try to stay curious to focus on learning, while actively improving on my weaknesses.

With that, here’s a memo about 9 growth areas that I have been reflecting on:

1️⃣ Prioritization: What are the high-leverage things to be done?

At any certain time at work, I should know what my P0(high), P1(medium), and P2(low) priorities are. If I’m not clear, I should spend time thinking about it. Prioritization is a multiplayer on output - if I execute at 100% speed, being 20% prioritized or 80% prioritized makes a big difference.

How? It’s a great exercise where I share those with my mentor and manager. This helps me to catch a pseudo-productive thing I do - reading documents for the sake of “learning”. It felt productive when I consume new things. But it’s actually not the core of my job, but a cheery on the top. As of now, I try to accumulate depth over breadth and focus on execution.

If I have an idea, I try to test it and put it out as a draft code change, that’s

2️⃣ Intuition: Can you be a first principle thinker with intuition on stats and facts?

Back to my Netlify internship in 2019, the VP of finances has a strong intuition about product metrics. He was able to make quick judgments on the data, and that powers good decisions he makes. I aspired to be that, especially since my role was a growth engineer.

I didn’t start my onboarding like this, rather, I was adapting to the team norm. But gradually, I also want to build my own states and internalize important facts about the product - what’s our active advertiser's number? where do they come from? what’s the bigger opportunity for growth?

3️⃣ Narrative: Do you own a recommendation in decision-making processes?

I read this quote recently from an internal post - “PM deeply thinks why we build things and engineers figures out how to build it.

I aspired to: Offer recommendations in my decision process. The benefit is not just personal clarity — It’s easier for outsiders to quickly identify the direction of execution, in other words, my work can get more embedded in the team’s brains.

By offering a narrative, I reduce the cost of my team by adding comments on my direction, which helps to get calibrated quickly if I’m on the wrong path. As a natural result, the execution speed can be accelerated.

Owning opinions takes effort but is rewarding (and not just at work, right?)

4️⃣ Quality: Are you launching the rocket carefully, monitoring its trajectory, and making adjustments when needed?

At Meta, we refer to this as engineering quality - how could you minimize errors in the things you ship?

Hot take: I’m not clearly internalized this when I started. I focus on launching rockets, but when the rocket is launched and flying in the sky, I don’t look closely and make adjustments quickly.

My mindset shifted on this. Fixing issues sounds like negative engineering, but it’s actually not. It’s a core part of my job. And it’s a good practice if I have the diligence to actively catch those issues and fixed them. I know I didn’t do it because I felt psychologically down to look at the mistake, but zooming out, and adjusting quickly help me move faster.

Plus, I will trust an engineer who can fix issues autonomously rather than having someone else flag them. This is what motivates me to grow to become an engineer that has craftsmanship on executions I own.

In terms of the actual steps: Coming up with a quality assurance plan prior to launch and actively thinking about what would go wrong. Standardized operational metrics monitor with a table. When errors occur, be capable of running diagnoses. Lastly, update the action plan with the team.

5️⃣ Orientation - Did I fall into execution limbo?

At one of Lenny’s Podcasts, one manager mention people are stuck for two reasons — lack of actual skill to get the job done, or having a mental blocker. Often the latter is more common.

I certainly have moments that I fall into an execution limbo - happens when I have tasks that were hard to solve (memo to self: cluster, privacy tasks). Fixing this is surprisingly straightforward - don’t get grumpy or hide in the shadow. Define a boundary of how long a tricky task should take (and ask for help when it’s consuming more than that time), and break down the next step into small, concrete actions.

6️⃣ Baseline: Can I get more used to high-intensity mode?

I talked with Pedro, a uni friend who works at Applied Intuition, and wow, they work a lot. But from our conversion, I realized it’s the baseline intensity they adopted.

I was pondering this for a while. If I can push myself toward a more high-intensity baseline, it might feel normal to have regularly high output. I think this is a growth narrative to own - and I reduce the occasions where I was too tired the night before and not at an energetic level at work.

7️⃣ Motivation - When do I feel demotivated?

At some time I was feeling some growth projects I own is not a good bet and were not backed by the team. I noticed this motivation decrease is related to my belief, which when I talked to my manager, I find a new narrative in the value of doing it.

This is just one instance, but I think I can generalize the learning. When I feel demotivated, diving in and finding new fuel is very much an action I can own.

8️⃣ Strategy: Can you see the layer between day-to-day operation and bigger vision?

The last thing in my memo is about being more strategic.

I think this is currently missing in my execution habit. I do have attention to the daily operation details, I also get the big picture of why our org doing this. But I don’t have a strong half/quarter strategy that I follow, partially missing from the team and partially on myself. If I have that clarity, I can aim to fail faster on the projects that don’t tie to the strategy, and better focus on good bets.

👣

Credit and Thanks

Thank you for reading! This article is long despite I rewrite it a few times to get concise.

Its 80% purpose is for me to verbalize the thoughts, and 20% for people to be resonated. If you can be related, feel free to send me what you think via a DM message on Twitter.

Resources that inspired these ideas:

Special thanks to You Zhou who have been a really amazing manager and give me valuable feedback and care!