I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

The difference between 6 and 7 is a big one. When I left about 15% of all engineers were E6 and around 1% were E7. At E6, you are basically doing an incredible job across the board. You are working on important projects, writing a lot of code, reviewing a lot of code, interviewing others, setting team goals, generally setting an example for a department. To get to E7, you need to have a "superpower" that makes you unique and have a org/company wide impact. Facebook has created something called "archetypes" to summarize those superpowers. I was the "coding machine" archetype, which was created for me actually, and is a rarer one. Other ones included Generalist, Specialist, Fixer, PM/Eng Hybrid. I commented below about E3, E4, E5: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ui98mg/comment/i7btvqe/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3