Engineering Excellence: Balancing Specialization and Collaboration

Michael Novati got promoted to Senior Staff (IC7) Eng at Facebook by the age of 27. He did it while the company was still called Facebook so he had a bunch of interesting pre-IPO stories. In our conversation, we discussed:

• Growth to Senior Staff (IC7) by 27

• Being the #1 code committer at Meta

• Volunteering to resign if his code broke prod

• Stories of working with Zuck pre-IPO

• What was common among IC7+ engineers

• How LLMs will affect the code machine archetype

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:46) Joining Facebook

(10:26) Facebook IPO experience

(16:30) His internal newsletter

(24:26) Working with Zuck

(29:50) Engs that impressed him

(36:20) Will LLMs kill coding machines?

(47:20) Operating as an IC7

(1:10:30) IC7+ only group

(1:12:55) Landing code faster

(1:18:29) Why he left Meta

(1:20:52) IC7+ talent

(1:24:28) Advice for younger self

(1:25:58) Outro

Where to find Michael:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelnovati/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman