Tips for Meta EM Interviews
By Stefan Mai
Feb 12, 2024
To do well in Meta engineering manager (EM) interviews will require you to have considerable experience as a technical manager together with reasonable alignment with Meta’s leadership philosophies.
In the dozens of mock interviews I've conducted for managers, the most common pieces of information I offer are: (1) insights into how the candidate comes across in their presentation, (2) details about how the company operates in practice and how a candidates’ experience may or may not align, (3) general people management best practices. For this blog post we’ll keep ourselves to insights from (1) and (2) specifically for Meta.
Before we dive in, some quick words on the role itself.
Managers at Meta
Meta has two tracks for managers “Org Leader” and “TLM”. There are three levels of Manager (before Director): M0, M1, and M2.
Engineering manager tracks at Meta
An org leader is responsible for a reasonable number of reports (8-12) and, while highly technical, will spend most of their time growing their team, aligning, building relationships, coaching, performance managing, etc. Non-IC work. M0 is a transitionary role for new managers parallel to a senior engineer or IC5. It’s time-bound - M0’s are expected to get promoted to M1 within 1-2 years or transition back to IC - and almost never given to external hires. M1 managers are responsible for 1 to 3 teams (org size 8-40 is most common). M2 managers typically have org sizes in the 40-120 range.
A TLM or Tech-Lead manager is substantially less common and will have a smaller number (4-6) of reports usually of a more senior level. TLMs are parallel to and often evaluated alongside their IC counterparts (IC6 for M1 and IC7 for M2) with some difficult exchange rate calculations to compare strict people management activities with IC contributions. The TLM role internally is often debated and while considerable ink has been spilled on company-wide standards, as of my most recent experience the expectations of TLM role itself is wildly inconsistent across the company. There be demons.
External manager hires are often down-levelled on a strict org size -> org size comparison and external TLMs are substantially less common except for specialized roles (e.g. Machine Learning), even though many external managers operate like TLMs. Some of this is just hubris and some of it is true: Meta believes its talent is stronger than most of the industry and thus the experiences aren’t comparable.
The other factor which weighs heavily on interviewing practices is that explosive growth and recent layoffs have created a glut of management talent on the market and the company (like many) is trying to nab the top of the market.
Interview Presentation
Meta hiring managers are looking for a degree of authenticity in interviews that is uncommon in other companies. Being vulnerable, sharing mistakes and lessons learned, and seeming real or authentic is important. In my experience meta managers tend to be on the high side in terms of empathy so overly rehearsed presentations can be jarring and might be more damaging in the assessment than something that feels more natural.
Meta interviews are also not nearly as rigidly behavioral. You might be asked to describe your management philosophy, or to describe your personality or goals. If you’re used to a strict STAR schema for interviews this can be unexpected, but it’s particularly awkward for individuals who try to smash their responses through STAR and end up missing the point of the question. Fair warning.
While some of the discussion is an ice breaker, most interviewers are going to try to get a sense for your motivations and whether they’ll be compatible with the new environment, in the same way you might interview an IC who wants to transition to manager to make sure they’re not going to nope out in the role in the first few months.
Many candidates fail to take a step back and look at their accomplishments from a distance. It takes a special kind of framing to demonstrate how complex a deliverable was that is both (a) understandable with limited information, and (b) credible to a skeptical interviewer. You inherited a team and delivered against the goals to create a Widget Extruder for Midcorp. So what? I’ve been working on a graph database product - explain it to me in a way that I’ll understand and believe it was an accomplishment.
Early-career managers will sometimes trot out an answer that might have come out of the manager’s handbook. You get no special credit for these responses, since almost anyone can read the book and memorize the result. You will get penalized heavily for making 101-level mistakes but the key to demonstrating your mastery is bringing unique insights and awareness, not parrotting a leadership book.
Finally, Meta interviewers (and Meta directors, in performance evaluations) attempt to concern themselves with the incremental value that you generated as a manager. It’s theoretically not enough to have a great team who produces outsized results without your interventions. Being able to communicate how you unblocked, unlocked, facilitated, supercharged, whatever the impact that your teams have had is important - communicate how you were accretive.
Management Culture
Companies live or die by their culture. Some candidates will expect that researching the values on the company website will help them to understand how the company operates from within. I think this is generally false except for a company like Amazon which prides itself on its adherence to codified principles. Meta is no exception to this pattern - how the company really operates is just not formally written out in official channels (although this is a reasonably fair comparison between Google and Facebook). In my experience, three things stick out to me as pertinent aspects of Meta’s culture that are important to keep in mind while interviewing as an EM:
Bottoms-Up Culture
Meta cares a lot about elevating engineers in the company. Managers are paid the same as similarly levelled engineers, trained to say they “support” their team rather than manage them (and act commensurately!), and heavily encouraged to delegate out consequential technical decisions to their team. I don’t mean this to say that Meta managers are not technical, but the leadership culture is very much to elevate ICs (so much that managers transitioning back to ICs is far more common at the company than others I’ve been part of).
The easiest red flag you’ll earn is providing evidence that you’re treating employees like “resources”. There are companies where managers operate like project managers with special authority and meta desires very much to not be one.
A more subtle flag you can earn is being overly involved in your team’s technical decisions (exception for TLMs). It’s not that you can’t be involved, but what your interviewer desperately wants to hear is how you’re growing and elevating your team members to make those decisions. Your senior engineer doesn’t have enough context to make this decision? Talk about how you gave it to them. Your mid-level engineer doesn’t have the skills yet. Do they have a mentor in that area?
Strengths-Based Management
The Meta ideal is that leaders are identifying the strengths of individual team members and assembling them on projects where 1 team member’s weaknesses are covered by another team member’s strengths. Rather than trying to raise everyone to the same level on all dimensions, the company tries to accommodate uneven talent distributions in each individual. In some ways, you can think of this as optimizing for variance rather than averages.
At the highest levels of the company (IC7+), engineers attach themselves to “archetypes” (of which there are many) which are unique ways that high-level engineers can add value to a team/org beyond the industry-standard “architect”. One of my favorites is the “fixer” archetype which is an individual who can parachute into the gnarliest problems and get things unblocked. Other companies might care about how much organizational influence said engineer might have but Meta tries its hardest to accommodate them for the unique value they bring to the org, rather than homogenizing.
In interviews, successful managers provide unique insights into the specific strengths and weaknesses of their team members. Without these insights you cannot possibly be making good decisions in a company which prides itself on this, but following those observations with creative interventions is just as important. So you have a team member who is a genius architect but struggles mightily to influence others with their ideas because they’re deathly afraid of criticism. What’d you do about it?
Finally, and this is manager handbook material but important philosophically, Meta strives to stretch people to that uncomfortable position before floundering in order to facilitate growth. Promotion cycles in the company generally outpace nearby competitors and the justification (which I think is fairly valid) is that Meta managers are generally giving their team more scope and responsibility than they might get in a more risk-averse company - specifically with the goal to grow talent.
Unstructured Environment
For a company of Meta’s scale, there is (still) a lot of reliance on people’s judgment than on strict processes. Generally speaking, Meta recognizes the taxes that heavy processes can have on a large organization (one of my colleagues called the culture “process allergic”). This means that everything is very fluid in the company. This has some upside and downside. Pros: organizational baggage doesn’t get in the way of doing the most important thing. For a company originally built around social products, being able to move quickly and pivot according to a fickle end-user is a strategic advantage. Cons: the typical corporate structures that many individuals depend on to operate are not always there. Communication is a firehose and it’s easy for individuals to get overwhelmed or fail to plug in to the right areas.
Managers are hired to fill this gap: by internalizing significantly more context about the business, understanding their team members deeply, and making connections and interventions to support the broader team’s goals.
Some companies will have managers put in huge efforts to control communication, create narratives, and create deep alignment through all available mechanisms. Meta, partly because of its bottoms-up culture and partly because of the increased scope afforded to individuals, tolerates small misalignments and frowns upon aggressive measures to control communication.
Representative questions
- Tell me about a time you and a partner didn't see eye to eye.
- Give me an example of a piece of critical feedback you've received in the last year.
- Tell me the makeup of your team and what it'd ideally be.
- Explain to me the structure of your current org.
- How do you decide someone is ready to make the transition to manager?
- What's your secret to recruiting top talent?
- Give me an example of growing someone who would not have grown on their own without your intervention.
- What would be your strategy if you stay at X to grow your team? Grow yourself?
- Give me an example of the hardest management situation you've dealt with recently.
- What's your management philosophy?
Summary
Meta EM interviews are trying to get signals on your core capabilities as a manager, the alignment of your management philosophy and style to the company culture, and an assessment of how effective you might be in the new environment.
Preparing for this interview will require you to first understand your own motivations, style, and philosophy then delve into your experiences to come up with examples of you operating in an environment as close to Meta’s as possible. While interviewers are making allowances that you aren’t already working at Meta, the more you can match your experiences to what they expect, the lesser the risk and the more likely you’ll be successful.
About The Author
Stefan is one of the co-founders of HelloInterview, a platform to help software engineers and other tech professionals to prepare for their dream roles. He's conducted 1,000+ interviews and hired dozens of individuals at big companies and small startups.
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