Junior (IC3) to Staff (IC6) via Job Hopping

Learnings from Zach Wilson

Zach Wilson went from Junior (IC3) to Staff (IC6) in 5 years through several successful job hops (Meta → Netflix → Airbnb). He’s one of the first people I wanted to have on the podcast I am starting because I was curious how he got promoted to Staff through interviewing with only a few years of experience.

Here’s a brief, bulleted summary of his career story with some takeaways:

• Meta: Junior (IC3) → Mid-level (IC4)

  • Promoted in one half due to excellent execution; speed of promotion likely because they determined he was hired at the wrong level.

  • Got two “Greatly Exceeds Expectations” ratings (second highest rating you can achieve) yet wasn’t promoted to Senior (IC5).

  • He lost the trust he built with his manager because his manager kept switching. Promotion didn’t go through because they thought his impact wasn’t sustainable (wrote about how this can happen here).

• Netflix: Senior (IC5) → Burnout

  • His previous manager at Meta recruited him to join Netflix which only hired Senior engineers at the time. Zach interviewed well and was able to secure the job-hop promotion.

  • He performed well to the point where his manager gave him some Staff-level scope. He didn’t scale himself well and burned out. Ended up quitting his job to take a break from tech for 9 months.

• Airbnb: Staff (IC6)

  • He started interviewing again and was in discussions with Google, Meta, and Airbnb. He negotiated well with Airbnb and received a Staff interview loop and offer. This was only possible because he had interest from many top companies at the same time.

In our conversation, he shared more details about how he did this. Two perspectives I thought were interesting:

1. Your “internal brand” affects what opportunities come to you on the job. Reminds me of the post I wrote just last week.

2. Even though he hopped around a few times, he was thoughtful to land impact wherever he was so he had something to sell during interviews. He mentioned a few times how “selling your story” mattered a lot for his job-hop promotions.

If the above sounds interesting to you, stay tuned for the podcast. I’ll be releasing the full version after I record a few more episodes.

I’m excited to start dabbling with audio/video content. I realize there’s a lot of room for improvement after recording the first episode. Looking forward to iterating and improving so the content can be more helpful for you all.

Out of curiosity, do you listen to podcasts and if so, which platform do you prefer?

For more from Zach, you can follow him on LinkedIn and Substack. And as always, if you liked the content, you can find more of my stuff here:

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

• Threads

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman