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
- 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