This issue is part 2 of “Inside Facebook’s engineering culture.” Check out last week’s article for Part 1 and for the updated vocabulary section.

This two-part series is about “things software engineers and engineering managers should know about Facebook’s engineering culture.” While the information is especially useful for anyone planning to join the company, the utility of these details goes well beyond that workplace. Facebook has grown blazingly fast to achieve global dominance, meaning many of its unconventional methods might serve other tech companies hoping to grow with similar speed, too.

As a reminder, I am referring to Meta as “Facebook” throughout.

This two-part series contains more information about Facebook’s engineering culture than any publication has revealed before. In writing this series, I talked with more than a dozen current and former Facebook software engineers, engineering managers, and engineering directors in verifying the details that follow. The majority of people I talked with had several years’ tenure at Facebook.

Still, it’s not possible to capture every single detail about an organization with tens of thousands of software engineers. Facebook gives high autonomy to both individuals and teams to decide how they work and I can’t cover all that variety, but I do try to provide a useful and comprehensive overview.

In this issue, we continue from Part 1, and go into:

1. Overview - covered in Part 1

• Vocabulary

• Core values

• Standout differences between Facebook and other Big Tech companies

• On the engineering-centric culture

• On the individualistic culture

2. Hiring - covered in Part 1

• Hiring processes

• Hiring support

• Software engineer hiring

• Engineering manager hiring

• Compensation: structure and examples

• Internal mobility

• Perks

• Alumni and boomerangs

3. Career

• Engineering and product roles

• Career ladders

• Competencies (axes)

• Engineering management

• Performance reviews, bonuses and equity refreshers 

  • With numbers on cash bonus targets, equity refresher dollar values for the US, personal performance multipliers and example compensation outcomes.

• COVID and the adjusted expectations program

• The calibration process 

• Promotions

• Archetypes

4. Engineering processes

• Bootcamp & onboarding

• Hackathons

• How teams and projects operate

• Documentation

• Testing

• The tech stack

• Notable internal systems and tools

• Open source

• Company divisions

• Company-wide processes

• Changes at the company over time

5. Advice

• Advice to succeed as an engineer

• Advice to succeed as an engineering manager

• Advice when leaving the company

• Advice and inspiration for founders and managers to take from Facebook

Let’s dive in:

3. Career