Meta Promotion Packet: How to Navigate the PSC and Get Promoted

Meta's promotion bar got higher after 2023. The "Year of Efficiency" was not just a slogan - it fundamentally changed the internal culture around promotions. Fewer slots. More scrutiny. Managers under pressure to limit nominations. And a PSC process that now directly determines your compensation with no room for manager overrides.

In January 2025, Meta terminated approximately 5% of employees rated as low performers. The message is clear: the bar has moved up across the board. Getting promoted at Meta today requires more than doing good work. It requires presenting that work in the exact format the PSC process demands, with evidence so specific that your manager can advocate for you against every other candidate competing for the same limited promotion slots.

This guide breaks down how Meta's PSC actually works, what each IC level requires, how the process has changed since the layoffs, and how to build a promotion case that survives the calibration session.

How Meta's PSC (Performance Summary Cycle) Works

The PSC is Meta's formal performance review process. Until 2022, it ran twice a year. Meta then transitioned to annual reviews, with promotion opportunities still available twice a year. More recently, some teams have reintroduced six-month check-ins for employees with a "Meets Most" rating - essentially a midpoint review to prevent surprises.

Here is the full process, step by step:

Step 1: Self-Assessment (You)

You write a self-review of 500 to 1,500 words covering four areas:

• Project Impact - What outcomes did your work produce?
• Direction - Did you set or influence the direction for your team or org?
• Engineering Excellence - What was the technical quality and depth of your work?
• People - How did you grow, support, and collaborate with others?

This self-assessment is one of the first documents your manager and peer reviewers read. It frames everything that follows. If your self-assessment is vague, every subsequent step starts from a weaker position. For examples of strong vs. weak self-evaluations, read our self-evaluation examples guide.

Step 2: Peer Feedback (3-5 Peers)

You and your manager collaboratively choose 3-5 peers to provide feedback. These can be engineers, designers, PMs, or anyone you worked closely with. Peer reviewers assess your strengths, areas for development, and contributions to specific projects.

Strategic tip: Choose peers who can speak to different dimensions of your work. One who saw your technical depth, one who saw your cross-team influence, one who saw your mentoring. Do not pick five people who all worked on the same project.

Step 3: Manager Evaluation

Your manager writes their own assessment of your performance and determines your rating. At Meta, your manager is the primary advocate for your promotion - they build your case and present it at calibration. This makes manager alignment critical: if your manager does not deeply understand your work, they cannot argue effectively on your behalf.

Step 4: Calibration

Managers from across the organization come together to calibrate ratings. Your manager presents your case alongside every other candidate at your level. The calibration session ensures consistency: an IC5 on one team should be performing comparably to an IC5 on another.

This is where promotions live or die. Your manager is arguing for your case in a room full of other managers arguing for their own reports. The strength of your written materials - self-assessment, peer feedback, and the packet your manager presents - determines whether your case survives this process.

Step 5: Ratings and Compensation

Meta uses a formulaic approach to compensation. Once your PSC rating is established, your manager has no direct ability to change your pay. Ratings influence salary multipliers ranging from 0x to 2.5x, affecting salary, bonus, and RSU refreshers. This means your PSC rating is not just feedback - it is literally your paycheck.

Meta IC Levels: What Each Promotion Actually Requires

Meta uses the IC (Individual Contributor) numbering system. Engineers also use the E (Engineer) prefix interchangeably - IC4 and E4 are the same level. Here is what each transition requires:

IC3 to IC4: Executing to Owning

IC3 is the entry level for engineers at Meta. The promotion to IC4 is the most straightforward - your manager's perspective largely determines the outcome.

What the PSC evaluates:

• Can you complete well-defined tasks independently?
• Are you writing production-quality code that does not require extensive rework?
• Do you respond well to code review feedback and apply learnings going forward?
• Are you beginning to take initiative beyond assigned work?

Typical timeline: 1-2 years. Meta has an "up or out" expectation for IC3 - you are expected to reach IC4 relatively quickly.

IC4 to IC5: Owning to Leading

IC5 (Senior Engineer) is Meta's "core level" - the level the company expects every engineer to eventually reach. This promotion requires demonstrating team-level impact and the ability to drive projects autonomously.

What the PSC evaluates:

• Are you driving projects from ambiguous requirements to shipped outcomes?
• Are you mentoring IC3s and IC4s with measurable results?
• Do you influence technical decisions beyond your own code (design reviews, architecture)?
• Is your impact visible at the team level, not just the task level?

Typical timeline: 2-3 years at IC4. Meta expects engineers to grow to IC5 within roughly 4-5 years of joining. IC3 and IC4 engineers face strict expectations to be promoted to the next level.

IC5 to IC6: Leading to Defining Direction

This is widely considered the hardest promotion at Meta. IC5 is a "terminal" level - only about 15% of engineers advance beyond it. The jump to IC6 (Staff Engineer) requires a fundamentally different type of impact.

What the PSC evaluates:

• Are you solving problems that span multiple teams, not just your own?
• Did you identify and drive a technical direction that was not on anyone's roadmap?
• Are other engineers and teams changing their approach based on your work?
• Are you growing mid-level engineers into senior engineers?
• Can you influence outcomes without having authority over the people involved?

Typical timeline: Often 8-15+ years of experience. Some engineers describe the IC5 to IC6 jump as harder than IC6 to IC7 because it requires the most significant behavior change - from leading within your team to leading across teams.

Critical nuance: Many teams do not need someone operating at Staff level. If your current team does not have problems that require cross-team technical leadership, you may need to switch teams to find the scope that makes IC6 promotion possible. Your situation and your team's business scope play a much larger role in IC6 promotions than in any previous level.

IC6 to IC7: Defining to Transforming

Only about 3% of Meta engineers reach IC7 (Senior Staff Engineer). At this level, the expectation is org-wide or company-wide impact.

What the PSC evaluates:

• Have you fundamentally changed how a significant part of Meta operates?
• Are you setting the technical strategy for a product area or infrastructure domain?
• Are you developing other Staff engineers?
• Does executive leadership seek your input on strategic decisions?

Typical timeline: Highly variable. The difference between IC6 and IC7 is less about behavior change and more about the scale and significance of your impact.

What Changed After 2023: The New Promotion Reality

If you joined Meta before the layoffs or if you are using advice from 2021-era Blind posts, you need to recalibrate. Here is what specifically changed:

1. Managers Face Pressure to Limit Nominations

The Year of Efficiency created a culture where managers are pushed to only nominate their strongest 1-2 candidates for promotion. Even if your manager believes you deserve it, they may push back because they are receiving pressure from above to keep nomination numbers down.

What this means for you: You need to make your case so overwhelming that your manager sees you as their top candidate. Your packet needs to be the strongest document in their stack.

2. Rating Distributions Have Tightened

Managers must now place 10-12.5% of their reports in lower performance categories, up from 7-10.5% previously. This creates downward pressure throughout the rating distribution. Even "Meets Expectations" ratings are contested, with managers sometimes fighting to keep employees from being pushed down to "Meets Most."

3. Compensation Multipliers Are Lower

Company bonus multipliers dropped to 0.85x during the efficiency push. RSU refreshers have been cut by 10% or more across the board. This means each promotion is worth relatively more in compensation terms - and the competition for those promotions is fiercer.

4. Leverage Matters More

Internal and external leverage have become increasingly important in the promotion process. Whether it is an offer from another team within Meta at a higher level, or interest from an outside company, these signals can influence whether your manager prioritizes your nomination. This is not a comfortable reality, but it is the current one.

The 4 PSC Evaluation Pillars: How to Build Evidence for Each

Every piece of your self-assessment and every peer review should map to one of Meta's four evaluation pillars. Here is how to build evidence for each:

Pillar 1: Project Impact

This is the most heavily weighted pillar. The calibration session starts with impact.

• Quantify outcomes: revenue impact, user metrics, cost savings, latency improvements
• Show the scale: how many users, how many services, how much traffic
• Demonstrate ownership: did you identify the problem, or just execute on someone else's plan?
• Connect to business goals: how does your work tie to your team's or org's OKRs?

Pillar 2: Direction

Direction evaluates whether you are shaping what your team works on, not just executing the existing plan.

• Did you propose a project or technical direction that was adopted?
• Did you identify a problem nobody else was looking at?
• Did you influence the roadmap based on technical insights?
• For IC6+: did you set the technical strategy for a multi-team effort?

Pillar 3: Engineering Excellence

This pillar evaluates the quality and depth of your technical work.

• Design decisions: what trade-offs did you evaluate and why?
• Code quality: are you raising the bar through reviews, standards, and tooling?
• Reliability: did you improve system uptime, reduce incidents, or strengthen monitoring?
• Innovation: did you introduce new approaches or technologies that improved outcomes?

Pillar 4: People

The People pillar matters more than many engineers realize, especially for IC5+ promotions.

• Mentoring: who did you help grow, and what did they achieve?
• Collaboration: how effectively did you work with PMs, designers, and other teams?
• Knowledge sharing: did you write docs, give talks, or create onboarding materials?
• For IC6+: are you developing mid-level engineers into senior contributors?

Structure of a Winning Meta Promotion Packet

Your manager presents your case at calibration. The better the materials you give them, the stronger their argument. Here is the structure that works:

1. Executive Summary (3-5 sentences). Current level, target level, your strongest proof point, and a one-line thesis for why you are ready.
2. Impact Story (top 3-5 accomplishments). Each structured as: outcome with metric, context, your specific role, and the actions you took. Lead with the number.
3. Pillar Mapping. Explicitly map your work to Project Impact, Direction, Engineering Excellence, and People. Do the reviewer's job for them.
4. Peer Evidence. Before PSC, align with your chosen peer reviewers on which aspects of your work you want them to highlight. You are not telling them what to write - you are helping them remember the specific projects where they saw your impact.
5. Growth Narrative. What changed about your scope, complexity, or influence from the beginning of the review period to the end? Committees want to see trajectory, not just a snapshot.

5 Meta-Specific Mistakes That Kill Promotion Cases

Mistake 1: Relying on Your Manager to Know Everything

Your manager may oversee 6-10 reports. They cannot track every detail of your work. If you do not document your impact clearly, your manager will present a weaker case at calibration. Not because they do not support you, but because they do not have the raw materials.

Fix: Share a draft packet with your manager 4-6 weeks before PSC. Walk them through your top accomplishments. Ask: "What would make this case stronger in calibration?"

Mistake 2: Optimizing for the Wrong Project

Picking the right projects is one of the most important decisions for your promotion. A perfectly executed project that is low-priority or low-visibility will not carry the same weight as a high-priority initiative where contributions are quantifiable.

Fix: Right after PSC ends, have a conversation with your manager about which projects in the upcoming half will give you the best opportunity to demonstrate next-level impact.

Mistake 3: Waiting Until PSC to Identify Gaps

If you learn about a gap in your promotion case during the PSC self-assessment, it is too late to fix it. The work needed to close that gap takes months.

Fix: Have a promotion-focused conversation with your manager every two weeks. Not just a status update - a specific discussion about what next-level performance looks like and where you currently stand against those criteria.

Mistake 4: Writing a Journal Instead of a Business Case

Your PSC self-assessment has a 1,500-word limit. Do not spend those words describing your day-to-day activities. Every sentence should contain either a quantified outcome, evidence of next-level behavior, or a specific example of impact.

Fix: After writing your self-assessment, go through every sentence and ask: "Does this sentence help the calibration committee say yes?" Delete anything that does not.

Mistake 5: Ignoring the People Pillar

Many engineers treat the People pillar as an afterthought. At IC4 and below, you can sometimes get away with this. At IC5 and above, the committee explicitly looks for evidence of mentoring, collaboration, and growing others. A packet with strong Impact and weak People will not clear the IC5 to IC6 bar.

Fix: Start mentoring someone formally. Track the outcomes. Document what they achieved and how you contributed to their growth. This is evidence that takes months to build - start now.

Meta PSC Timeline: When to Start Preparing

Meta's PSC typically runs annually with promotion opportunities twice a year. Here is the preparation timeline:

• Immediately after last PSC: Identify gaps from your last review. Discuss with your manager which projects will help close them.
• 6 months before PSC: Have the explicit promotion conversation. "Am I on track? What specific evidence do I need?"
• 3 months before: Start collecting evidence. Metrics, design docs, peer feedback, mentoring outcomes. Do not trust your memory.
• 6 weeks before: Write your first draft self-assessment. Share it with your manager.
• 4 weeks before: Align with your peer reviewers on what you want them to highlight.
• 2 weeks before: Finalize self-assessment. Ask a trusted peer to read it for clarity and specificity.

What to Do If You Were Passed Over

If your promotion was not approved in the last cycle, your manager should have shared feedback on what the calibration committee wanted to see. This feedback is the most valuable input you will receive all year. Treat it as a specific checklist.

Common PSC feedback and what it means:

• "Impact not at next level yet" - Your work was strong for your current level, but the committee did not see evidence that you are operating at the scope of the next level. You need bigger projects or broader influence. Read our guide on what to do after being passed over.
• "Need more sustained demonstration" - One strong quarter is not enough. The committee wants 2-3 quarters of consistent next-level performance.
• "Direction signal was weak" - You executed well on what was asked, but the committee did not see you shaping what your team works on. For IC5+, you need to be proposing and driving, not just delivering.
• "People contribution was insufficient" - Especially for IC5 to IC6, the committee needs evidence that you are multiplying others. Start mentoring now.

Putting It Together

Meta's promotion process is harder than it was before 2023. But harder does not mean opaque. The PSC evaluates you on four clear pillars. The calibration session is where decisions are made. Your manager is your advocate but can only argue with the evidence you provide.

The engineers who get promoted at Meta today are the ones who treat their promotion case like a project: they identify the requirements early, build the evidence systematically, align stakeholders, and deliver a document that leaves no gaps for the committee to question.

For the general promotion packet framework that works at any company, read our complete guide to writing a promotion packet. For level comparisons across Meta, Google, Amazon, and others, check the tech promotion levels guide. And if you are at Meta and ready to build your case now, visit the Meta promotion packet page for a guided walkthrough.