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> One year to become a good engineer and another to become a tech lead. Seriously?

We don't know what the OP did before. They possibly had significant industry experience from before, and just had to figure out how to apply that at Facebook.

I worked for FB (left in 2018), and you are right. He started as E4, which means that he was not new grad (new grads starts as E3). So he was either phd, or had industry experience before.

His first year: "Because of the 3 launches and building a 4 people team, I was promoted to E5" -- looks like he should have been E5 when started (given that he was able to build team in the first year), and they quickly corrected for that.

In the uk a year or two ago there was an ad showing an eager young guy, in his very early 20s if that, and the text that thanks to this course, this guy was training to become a software project manager.

I almost started laughing. There's no way a green youth can manage a software project without being a decent software dev first. Not happening.

It is possible to have a non-dev be one if they are very experienced and have the right soft skills, I knew one and he was good, but straight out of uni to manage a project, no way at all.

Project management is a different career from development, not a progression.

You can't be a SPM without having some solid understanding of dev. Without that you can't make good decisions. It's like saying a person can become the captain of a ship without sailing experience.

The one good project managers I've had that didn't have a dev background instead put in a lot of time to understand dev and was an at-home hobby programmer so he had a large clue.

How does lateral movement work in these companies? If you were an individual researcher (with promotions corresponding to 10 years of experience, let us say) in a prior organization?

Depends on how her/his skills apply to such company / role.

I.e. at FB, you could be E7 by just technical work, but you had to be really good and be able to pick important problems and solve them (say that you are able to design and implement core systems for example). But it's easier to get above E5 by going TL way.

Yeah sure, if you have significant experience before, but then E4 would be a total mis-hire.

Then E5 or E6. But E6 would already mean you were essentially a team lead before you even started. Will they mis-hire you two levels apart? Maybe, rarely, if you really screwed up that interview?

But the OP also says he "became a good engineer" and he "became a team lead". And that is simply not possible. We do not talk about people who "were" a team lead and didn't know it. We are talking about people legitimately hired at E4.

PHD? Perhaps you can do it in two years, but a PHD very likely has a lot of the skills you need already, so it's not a fair basis to start from and they studied up to 6 years longer than a normal Master.

What bothers me more is the E6 -> E7 -> E8 promotion with the associated salary. That is just legitimately NOT possible at Amazon. This would mean you went from junior engineer to Senior Principal Engineer in 8 years. Well good luck with that. Maybe if you were the next Steve Wozniak, you could pull that off. I know A LOT of very smart people, people from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, etc. and they are challenged by just being a Senior Engineer at Amazon. Principal and Senior Principal just requires a skillset most people will never develop and according to the OP, that is not required by Facebook. In which case I consider it possible to get promoted to E8 within 8 years. This just means Facebook levels mean literally "I was successful", not "I am a competent leader". Which is fine and I will keep that in mind for the leveling discussion should I ever be on the lookout for a job there...

If you are smart (and I think the OP is very smart, don't get me wrong), and you have a good portion of luck to be in the right place at the right time, I imagine the OP's path to be possible if levels are handed out by "success". But this isn't meaningful to anyone else. The OP may have had a very different experience without a good portion of luck. Or at a different company, like Amazon.

To prove my point, I would encourage E8's at Facebook to try to apply as (Senior) Principal Engineer at Amazon and see how it goes.

What exactly do you need to learn to be a tech lead? Why couldn't you become one if you had significant experience coming in the door?

I think there's a disconnect between what people expect from those job titles especially (L.E. from many US and most SV companies) if you come from companies structured differently or from across the pond. Also the language barrier maybe.

Being used to European style job titles of the time (some decades ago), imagine my surprise when I met with some vice-presidents from a big US company who turned out to be among the dozens glorified product managers the company had.

Same with tech leads where the expectation is that you are either just tech focused (best tech resource, authority on that tech in the team, still under a team lead), or less likely both team/people and tech focused (so among the best techs, and proven leadership skills).

> Given the importance of the product [...] the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became the Tech Lead for the product. [...] I was not even in top 3 of the team of 10 based on engineering skills

Being the first assigned to a product because nobody else was around and having your product draw the more qualified techs to you doesn't make you a lead of either kind.

A job title is relevant if it's assigned to people who proved their worth with those particular skills needed for the position (evidently not the case here). So a tech lead in FB basically means you're the first and do a decent job. In many companies this wouldn't fly because being better than your lead but not having the spot because you were not there first is a recipe for high turnover, or at least people dashing between teams and products hoping to catch that spot. But FB and other SV tech giants are juicy enough targets that rely on product attractiveness (success with users) * rather than product quality that this wouldn't be a problem. Hence they can afford to have such tech leads.

* > E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted.

The problem with job titles is that they are brag-tags in most companies. At the very low and very high ends they're used instead of a monetary compensation because the company can't afford to raise the salaries for all those people (poor company or very high salaries already), or because money stops mattering after a point and a pat on the back is worth more to the employee.

The post feels like an ad for "you can do it too, apply now". There's enough info there to make the person uniquely identifiable which is perhaps not the best position for our anonymous engineer.

To me if felt that the structure is similar to Google's. If you are assigned crap maintenance task, you may stay on the same level longer than you'd want. Come up with new great projects that may affect the bottom line and suddenly people throw money and resources at you.

It's not only possible, but it happened to me. I've also seen other talented engineers ascend the ladder rapidly. Of course, anyone who pulls that off is a very small minority.