This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Krishna Ganeriwal, a senior engineer at Meta in California.
Meta dubbed 2023 its “year of efficiency” and made several changes to the company’s structure, including flattening management layers and laying off about 10,000 employees. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified Ganeriwal’s employment history and compensation.
I moved to the US in 2021 for my master’s, after working for four years as a software engineer at Texas Instruments in India.
In the summer before I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had the opportunity to intern with Meta. I loved the scale of the projects the company worked on, and I returned to the company full time as a software engineer in 2023 — Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
Here are four strategies I used to get promoted and grow my salary from $200,000 to about $500,000 in the 18 months since I joined full time.
1. Swim with the tide
When company management is working toward a theme, which was efficiency in the case of Meta, I see it as a direct hint for what my priorities need to be. I tried to align myself with the same idea of efficiency over scaling and growth at all costs, which was the mindset many tech companies had previously.
That meant taking note of my knowledge gaps and upskilling so that I can help build more cost-aware infrastructure. Reorganizations and layoffs are times of major cost cutting, and it would be swimming against the tide to insist on working on time-consuming or expensive projects.
I’ve found it helpful to have an open ear to what company leaders are talking about at quarterly meetings and constantly ensure that I am in the middle of —or at least the periphery of — those priorities.
2. Get ready to reprioritize
Just because you’ve been fortunate to survive a round of layoffs, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing for you to change.
I tell myself that a layoff means I have to be ready to be thrown into ambiguous areas and solve problems, despite constraints such as fewer colleagues and fewer resources.
It also means I have to be open to pivoting and reprioritizing — dropping what I’m working on at the moment and switching priorities, even if it’s temporarily.
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3. Don’t put your growth in the backseat
I’ve found it helpful to separate conversations about layoffs and the company’s performance from those about my career growth.
Despite multiple rounds of layoffs at the company, I kept having conversations with my manager about setting new goals for myself and working toward them. I also took steps to overcommunicate and remain visible to my manager and others in my team because it plays an important role during performance reviews.
4. Be open to ‘underdog’ problems
One underrated strategy that helped me land promotions was looking out for problems and tasks no one was willing to work on, because they were likely busy chasing a piece of a big, exciting project.
In the past year, I’ve been open to being loaned out to other teams or working alone on some projects. I’ve found that these underdog projects pay back in the long run because they gave me expertise that very few people have.
For example, when everyone at the company was working on efficiency and AI models, I focused on neglected engineering problems that leveraged both these areas.
