Meta Distinguished Eng (IC9) On Influencing Engs, Failures, and Learnings
Article Summary
Adam Ernst, Meta's IC9 Distinguished Engineer, spent two years building a framework that completely failed. His brutally honest postmortem reveals more about reaching the highest IC levels than most success stories ever could.
Ernst has been at Meta since 2012, building iOS infrastructure that shaped how the entire company writes mobile code. In this podcast interview, he walks through his career from middle school entrepreneur to IC9, including the Component Kit success story and the Component Script failure that taught him his most valuable lessons.
Key Takeaways
- Technical excellence alone doesn't win: Component Script checked every box but failed
- Code review is undervalued: 14 diffs reviewed daily built organic influence
- Deep debugging beats escalation: dive 8 layers into systems you don't own
- Kill failed projects responsibly: delete all code, migrate users, write the postmortem
- IC9 expectations: stop worrying about level-appropriate work, just solve important problems
Ernst's path to IC9 came from writing massive amounts of code, learning failures publicly, and building deep knowledge by debugging other teams' systems instead of escalating.
About This Article
Facebook's iOS app kept crashing with layout bugs as the engineering team scaled from 15-20 people to 100-200. Core Data just couldn't handle the growing native codebase.
Adam Ernst and his team ditched Core Data for MEM models, an immutable model system that made thread safety and mutations much easier to work with. This also let them migrate incrementally across different product teams.
The feed and core features got noticeably faster. Ernst was able to push adoption across the groups, events, and pages teams, even though some engineers pushed back and wanted to stick with Apple's standard frameworks instead.
