jiahao.blog

08 Jun 2025

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

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