Ryan Peterman · Ryan Peterman · Transcript & summary by WhipScribe
A compact, ratings-by-rating account of what Meta actually rewards at each engineering level from IC3 to IC6.
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“Ratings is more so about what you achieved and promos are more so about how you achieved it.” Simon Kindström · at 4:05 — open in the transcript →
“I probably shaved off at least four to eight weeks of ramp-up.” Simon Kindström · at 0:58 — open in the transcript →
Simon Kindström joined Meta as a new graduate at IC3 and was promoted three times in three years to IC6, staff engineer. In this short interview, Ryan Peterman takes him through each step and the ratings behind it, including two Redefines Expectations ratings, a grade most Meta engineers never receive once in a career.
The early lift came from the setting as much as the work. Kindström had interned at Meta, so he already knew internal tools such as Fabricator and skipped weeks of ramp-up. He was the second engineer on a new ads payments team, which meant plenty of time with his manager and projects tied directly to revenue. Those projects beat the team's half-year goals by a wide margin, and he argues that at junior levels the rating follows impact. Promotion is a separate question at Meta: it rewards how the work was done and lags behind behaviour, which is why a top rating at IC4 still did not make him IC5.
Each later step meant owning more than his own output. Reaching IC5 meant answering for a sub-team of three or four people, and handling a project that fell short through escalations up to director level. Reaching IC6 meant scaling himself across two pods and then a 13-person cross-stack payments project, while still proving deep technical skill by debugging it personally from the mobile apps down to a C++ payments backend. The habit he names as the turning point is accountability. He moved from trusting that delegated work would land to weekly check-ins that verify progress without micromanaging.
Software engineer at Meta who joined as a new graduate IC3 after a Meta internship and reached staff engineer (IC6) in three years, working on ads payments and leading payments product teams.
Simon Kindström told Ryan Peterman he was promoted three times in three years: IC3 to IC4 in one half with a Greatly Exceeds rating, IC4 to IC5 over three halves including a COVID half with no formal promotions, and IC5 to IC6 in two halves. Each step came from taking on the behaviours of the next level, first owning whole projects, then owning other people's success, then scaling himself across several teams.
Simon Kindström said ratings at Meta mainly reflect what you achieved, especially impact at early levels, while promotions reflect how you achieved it and whether you already show the behaviours of the next level. That is why he received a Redefines Expectations rating as an IC4 without being promoted: his revenue impact was exceptional, but he was not yet responsible for other engineers' success, which IC5 requires.
Redefines Expectations is the top performance rating at Meta, above Meets All, Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds; Ryan Peterman noted most engineers never get it even once. Simon Kindström earned it twice as an IC4. He said the first came mainly from impact: his team had a half-year goal worth many dozens of millions of dollars in added revenue, and the project he drove beat that goal on its own, alongside his work recruiting and onboarding new teammates.
Simon Kindström said having interned at Meta meant he already knew its custom internal tools, such as the Fabricator task tool, so he skipped the ramp-up that slows most new hires at a company where everything is built in-house. He estimated that saved four to eight weeks, which mattered because a promotion from IC3 to IC4 in one half requires performing at IC4 level almost from day one.
Simon Kindström said the jump to IC6 needed two things. The first was scaling himself: he led two pods of seven people, then an eight-person team plus a separate 13-person project, handing sprint planning to pod leads while he coached. The second was a deep technical contribution: when a payments product crossing Instagram, Meta's main backend, a C++ payments backend and a third-party partner stalled near its milestone, he debugged it himself across every layer.
Simon Kindström said his manager taught him that you can delegate any work you like but remain responsible for the outcome. Earlier he assumed people would get delegated work done and hoped they would. As he grew toward IC6 he set up processes such as weekly sprint meetings to check whether work was progressing, because at that level he could no longer do everything himself or even review all the code. Ryan Peterman summed it up as verifying through people without micromanaging.
Simon Kindström said that in his IC5 promotion half he led one of two sub-teams after his team moved into a new product area, taking an unscoped idea through to delivery with three or four engineers. The project was not as successful as hoped, but he said the team handled it well, and as an IC4 he got credit for communicating through leadership escalations that reached director level and IC8 engineers.
Our own transcript of the public episode, with a timestamp about every 90 seconds. Tap a timestamp or the link button on a paragraph to copy a link that opens this page there.
0:00Let's talk about the promo. So three promos in three years, and this is including the promo block with COVID that we can talk about in a bit. You know, let's be super transparent about all the ratings and everything, if you're willing. The first promo from three to four, that was in one half, and that was a GE rating, right? Correct. Yeah, it was a GE. I mean, for that to happen, you basically needed to start immediately as an IC4 because you need at least six months of trailing performance before you can get promoted. How did you start as an IC4 on that team? I was a previous intern at Meta, which meant that I didn't have to go through the ramp-up of learning the tools. And I often see that that is one of the biggest hurdles as people join a big company like Meta, where everything's custom.
0:53I'd kind of already learned how to use Fabricator, the internal tasks tool, etc. So I probably shaved off at least four to eight weeks of ramp-up. One thing that really set me up for success is that I actually ended up joining a very new team. So I was the second engineer, which did mean that I did get a lot of one-on-one time with our manager. So he helped me a lot throughout that to ensure that I got that early momentum and had impactful projects, et cetera. I would say the rating was actually primarily due to my impact right so we were uh an ads payments team that was focusing primarily on revenue right as our goal i was just a second engineer we didn't have a lot of engineers right and the projects that i worked on right
1:38these were the ones that brought in more than three times of our half goal and one important thing to note about promos at meta is is that they're lagging, right? So you really do need to show that the behaviors of the next level. One big difference between IC3 and IC4 is taking ownership of the completion of a project rather than like smaller tasks. And if something didn't go right and like the results weren't there, then, you know, taking ownership of figuring out why it didn't go well. And obviously, I'm new. I'm seeking a lot of assistance from others. But the willingness and the kind of pushing that forward is the behavior that likely got me to IC4. When it comes to IC4 to IC5, this was interesting because this took three halves, but there was the COVID half, which may or may not have blocked a promo.
2:30And you had two RE ratings, which most people would never achieve that rating in their career even once. It's a very rare rating. And RE stands for redefines expectations, which for reference, there's meets all, which is great. There's exceeds, even better. There's greatly exceeding expectations, which is pretty much the upper bound of doing well. And then there's redefines. So the first half you got an RE rating as an IC4. Not only is that impressive because it's an RE rating, but you had just gotten promoted. So it's almost like you you leapfrogged ic4 almost you were you know doing like ic5 ic6 stuff maybe immediately what drove that re rating that first one there's one primary thing that drove it uh which is impact right of
3:20course ratings overall especially at early levels is primarily about how much impact you can achieve. Yeah. Right. So our second half in the team, we've actually recruited a few people, which I was a big part of recruiting them and onboarding them, which is part of the rating. But our second half, we had a goal of, let's just say, many, many dozens of millions of dollars that we had to increase the revenue amount for. Right. The project I drove and worked on overachieved even that half goal. That had a very heavy lean as to why the redefines. So you mentioned no promo. How's that possible? You get the absolute highest rating that almost no one gets, that you don't get promoted. Why is that?
4:05There's a difference between promo and ratings, where ratings is more so about what you achieved and promos are more so about how you achieved it. As a four, right, the expectation is that you can drive your projects forward, right? That's kind of it. But as a five, you need to take more ownership of other people. And I was starting to touch on that a little bit, right, in terms like onboarding others, but I wasn't responsible for their success or the success of their projects. My behaviors didn't align with those of IC5 because I didn't take that larger responsibility in scope. I see. So then, and then in the next half, that was the COVID half, right? Correct, yeah. So during that half, there was kind of like a star, I guess.
4:50You could get like an annotation in your performance review that said like the first half of COVID, you were significantly above, which is practically equating to a GE rating because we didn't do any official ratings, we didn't do any promos that have. So I got the RE, my third half is IC4 plus the IC4 to IC5 promo. And I think the important thing here is that my behaviors actually started to change. So the team, like I mentioned at the start, we were kind of pivoting between different responsibilities, right? Now we've switched from being a bit more of an infra team back onto product, and we took on a new product space, right? We ended up splitting the team into two virtual teams or two teams, and I took responsibility of one half of it right so for four people plus me or three people plus me um i was not responsible for going from idea completely unscoped space to completed projects and that was the first for me
5:56that required a lot of growth in terms like how i operated but this was that big step change in terms like my scope and responsibilities, where now I'm no longer responsible for my own output and my own success. I'm now responsible for the project success and the people within it. In the end, the project wasn't actually as successful, but we dealt with it really well in terms of how we behaved. We ended up having a bunch of leadership escalations up to director level, you know, with IC8s and stuff. And me being an IC4 at the time, I was getting a lot of credit for that communication. And then the last thing is, you know, growing from five to six, you did that very quickly two halves so it took me two halves um and if we look at just like
6:47some of the behavior issues that i had kind of like um ask got promoted to five and kind of looking forward it's like what was missing for for six right it's like while i was responsible for others um i had like fully grok that, right? I wasn't very good at like holding them accountable in return, right? To ensure that like things are on track. And like I wasn't very good at just like tracking things, knowing where things were, etc. Right? So I was still operating a lot on like a trust model and just like hoping that everything works out. So that was a big gap in general. Given more responsibility, I'm now leading two pods with seven people in total. So the scope is increasing for me as a result, which means that I need to learn how to scale
7:37myself, which is another important skill set to learn as you're growing from being responsible for a small amount of people to a large amount of people you know maybe as we're doing sprint planning now previously i did it now instead i you know assign um pod leads that do it for me right or like for for the team right where i am involved guiding coaching but i let others take that, which is another beautiful thing because now they are growing in return, right? Now they're successful and they can make it towards whatever goals they have. We, the two pods I had before, right, about seven people, we had recruited some more. We ended up splitting the team officially into two parts, right, so I now was responsible for one part of the team,
8:21which was eight people, right, so responsible for ensuring that, you know, they hit their goals, and we we did we exceeded those goals but at the same time we spun up a separate project which ended up including 13 people so I was kind of like tealing both of these at the same time so that really stress tested my ability to to scale myself yeah right specifically in that five to six Journey right It's the scaling yourself, but something that is often discussed during someone preparing their problem packet for five to six is, what's the deep technical contribution? During my second half here, I think I was able to balance these two quite well, where the high level stuff of setting the roadmap of this project, right?
9:08Ensuring that like we have clear milestones. Same thing with the other team where, you know, we have set the goals. We have hypotheses for how we might hit those goals. And then coaching the people to move in that direction on the big project that we had we were getting really close to the um the milestone but we were really struggling to kind of get it over the that line right it was a payments product um that crossed between ig to meta's main backend stack onto the payments backend, which is in C++, onto a third-party payments partner. And we just couldn't make it all happen. So I went in as a TL. I spent many, many hours just digging deep into the code, which meant that I had to go from the Android iOS code onto the ID server's backend,
10:07onto the meta main backend, onto C++. And I had breakpoints all over these code bases. It would just show that I was able to work at a very wide span, but also just very detailed and go deep and solve the hairiest problems that we had. You were able to hand off things, but maybe not assure their success. What was the one thing that you switched in that half that really made the big difference and closed that gap? My manager used to say, delegation is not abdication. It means that you may delegate whatever you want, but in the end you're responsible for the outcome. I assumed that this person would get it done and I hoped they would. But as I grew, I internalized this more and also set up processes that helped me catch these issues.
10:59Whether it's like a weekly sprint meeting or something where you catch up with people and see, oh, are they progressing? You can no longer achieve everything yourself, even more so five to six, where now you need to, you might not even be able to review all the code anymore. You need to trust that the other people in your team can support the different projects. But you still verify through them, just maybe not micromanage. Exactly.