Ex-Meta engineer says he asked for a demotion — but that was easier said than done

• Igor Tsvetkov entered Meta as a senior staff engineer, a role that required skills and connections.
• Ramping up caused Tsvetkov a "lot of stress," he wrote in a LinkedIn post. So he asked for a demotion.
• In a recent podcast interview, Tsvetkov talked about being denied — and returning to Google.

There are dozens and dozens of guides on how to ask for a promotion. What about a demotion?

Igor Tsvetkov spent over a year as a senior staff software engineer at Meta, coming from a background at Google and Cruise. Then he posted on LinkedIn, describing how difficult he found it to try to blend into Meta's culture — and why he decided to ask for a downward shift in title.

"I did not fit in perfectly," Tsvetkov wrote in the December post, describing the need for intimate systems knowledge and credibility among leaders at his rank. "It is very hard to achieve all of that when you join as a new hire from another company and work from a remote office."

His slow ramp-up caused a "lot of stress," he wrote, and he eventually wished for a demotion — before jumping back to Google.

On "The Peterman Pod," Tsvetkov recently described his Meta story in more detail. During performance reviews, Tsvetkov said he knew he was being judged against other senior staff engineers. He also knew that Meta laid off low performers.

"What it means is: you have at most one year to ramp up to be comparable in performance to other old-timers at the company," Tsvetkov said.

Tsvetkov needed to "start from zero," he said. On day one, he said he knew less than the intern sitting next to him. Within the year and two months that he spent at Meta, Tsvetkov guessed that he had reached the performance of an E6 software engineer — if he was "generous" — but not the E7 he was hired to be.

He also learned he didn't want to be an E7. Coding and debugging were what Tsvetkov loved about his job, he said, but those skills are rarely practiced at that high a level.

While Tsvetkov's experience is not necessarily representative of what other Meta engineers experience, it captures how difficult it can be to make career moves at the senior level, across tech and beyond. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Tsvetkov eventually said he asked management: "Can I actually drop a level?"

That's difficult for Meta, he recognized. His stock grants and compensation were already determined. There is a demotion process at Meta — like when a director wants to become an individual contributor — but dropping a single level on the same team was more challenging, Tsvetkov said.

Tsvetkov said he was told no. Maybe if he pushed harder, or went to a vice president, the answer would have been different, he said.

"I also felt like I was too far outside my comfort zone," he added. "I worked at Google for 14 and a half years. That was my comfort zone."

A Google recruiter had been contacting Tsvetkov periodically, asking whether he was ready to return. He finally said yes.