I wonder if this is also to make it harder to recruit folks who work at Meta. If everyone’s title is the same external recruiters don’t know who to target by level.
I love the idea of compensation being decoupled from your level and tied directly to impact, and I also love levels being opaque (as if they're more of an administrative requirement). I wonder if there are IC5s that make more than IC10s for example.
It's the reverse at Meta: they reward you with more money more quickly than a promotion. This happens when you quickly have very high impact, but it's unclear if you can sustain it.
This similarly happens to more junior who seem to be on a steep upwards trajectory: the company tries to retain them with money (stock) before they actually get good enough to get promoted, because there's high confidence they'll grow fast.
Someone who earns into the next pay band is pretty likely to be promoted in the near future, once they've shown they can sustain it.
Also, I love the irony of a culture of secrecy at the company that's explicitly about incinerating all personal privacy.