Thoughts on Philip Su's Interview with Ryan Peterman

Watched the interview Philip Su gave about being a distinguished engineer at Meta. These are some of my raw notes taken from the interview:

• Growth
  • Very good managers and teammates
  • Admittedly worked very long hours, sleeping bag in the office, wake up at 3am etc
  • Luck is a big factor
  • Talent is necessary
  • Not recommended to work like this since WLB was out of whack, but “outworking” others does help
  • Working a lot has diminishing returns but there are still returns
• Transitioning from IC to manager
  • IC > Manager on a team w/o a good manager > Manager at will
  • Thinking of IC vs Manager
  • Be open to trying new things
  • Can’t hurt to try it
  • Be sensitive whether it locks you into a career you don’t want
  • “You are ready to lead a team if your team was already willing to elect you to lead them”
  • Growing lifestyle to fit the compensation
  • Skills are like a diamond (senior enough and the skillsets converge)
• E9 -> E7
  • It feels better to be performing well at a level than it is to be struggling at a level you don’t deserve to be at
• E7, E8, E9 expectations (senior staff engineer -> distinguished engineer)
  • Scope of the person’s influence
    • How big/how long/how valuable can you single-handedly guarantee the delivery of a project?
  • Driving technical direction for teams of sizes > N
  • No “bullet point list” for expectations
  • People at those levels excel at different things
  • Weak teams => over levelling relative to peers => cannot observe anyone better
  • Need a great coach (decision maker) to guide you from E8 -> E9
    • Qualitative feedback is important
• E8 -> E9
  • Site lead of London
  • Going from magnitudes of 12 engineers -> 400/500 engineers
  • Long term thinking: predicting intake 18 months in advance using H1B data
• Building stronger engineering culture in a new site
  • Observing growth from 4 -> 120
  • Interviewing others
  • Landing teams need to stick around for at least 2 years to grow the culture
    • No compensation to it, but had a serious conversation
  • Interviewed people, managers, peers for whether they are good culture carriers
    • Long enough
    • Bringing over a project they can lead
• Interactions with Mark Zuckerberg and CTO
  • Felt genuine
  • Focus on personal growth
    • Improving conversations
• John Carmack
  • Able to jump in to a new codebase and give critical feedback without much context
• PR reviews
  • Framed in a sensitive way without any shame
  • “Takes time out his day to make me great”
  • Good reviewers/engineers are a force multiplier for teams
• Buying everyone coffee in the office
  • Bought everyone’s coffee for Christmas
• Leaving Meta
  • Concerned about rising income gap in America
  • Felt like being an IC was better with smaller teams
  • Felt like a generalist was not as good as a specialist at a much larger team
  • Smaller companies tend to value generalists over specialists
• Joining OpenAI
  • Rather join the market leader or not join at all
  • Market leader can afford to fail a few things
  • Market followers must follow the leader with some small differentiating factor
  • Engineers had exceptional technical capabilities
  • Meta had a strong focus on product
• Writing well as a software engineer
  • Re-reading classics like Hemingway and The Great Gatsby
  • “To write well, you need to read well”
  • Re-write multiple times
  • Don’t disrespect the skill of writing
  • Moment of inspiration
• Growing older
  • Everyone has an asymptotic growth
  • But growth is still growth
  • Jogging in a straight line
    • Sense that things will not go well and stop people from making the same mistakes
  • Get stronger in other things beyond raw technical ability
• Qualities of a manager
  • Motivating action
  • Managing people above you