Staff Engineer @ Meta by Age 25 | Evan King

Evan King went from Junior (IC3) to Staff (IC6) at Meta 3 years out of college. After that he quit FAANG to start a few companies that were each acquired. In this conversation we go over his career growth, his transition to startups and what he learned along the way. We discuss: • What got him promoted to Staff in 3 years • What stands out in Meta’s culture • Creating and leading a new team at IC5 • Differences between big tech and startups • Regrets looking back • Advice for his younger self Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:28) Getting into programming (09:34) Leetcode (15:45) Picking his first team (22:00) P*nis story (25:13) Mid-level promo (29:03) How to ship code fast (35:28) Senior promo (52:45) Staff promo (1:12:02) Meta impact culture (1:13:16) On being a tech lead (1:16:46) Influence without authority (1:19:29) Management vs Eng (1:26:46) Why leave Meta (1:36:25) Technical learning (big tech vs startups) (1:40:26) When to build a startup (1:44:27) How much he worked (1:49:02) Biggest career regret (1:51:54) Advice for new grads & past self Where to find Evan: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-king-40072280/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-king-40072280/•• https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-king-40072280/• His Company: https://www.hellointerview.com/ Where to find Ryan: • Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/ • X: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ • Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ryanlpeterman • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman Referenced: • Evan's post on Substack: https://www.developing.dev/p/new-grad-to-staff-at-meta-in-3-years • Ryan’s eng blog for Meta (part of IC6 promo): https://engineering.fb.com/2022/11/04/video-engineering/instagram-video-processing-encoding-reduction/ • Meta’s graph database, Tao: https://engineering.fb.com/2013/06/25/core-infra/tao-the-power-of-the-graph/ To hear more, visit www.developing.dev https://www.developing.dev?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-spotify-open-access

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When you're a new grad, I don't know, it's just you don't expect to see like enus is at work or any nudity at work. Leading all these cool things, whatever. And I leave all of that to realize I don't know a damn thing.

• 0:09Ryan Peterman?

  Today's conversation is with Evan King. He's a software engineer who grew to staff by the age of 25. He had a lot of things to share when it came to growing your career quickly. We also thought it'd be interesting to interview both ways because his career growth matches mine very closely. And so for each leg of the career, not only does he go over what he learned, but also I provide context on my path as well. I hope this conversation is helpful. Let's get into it. Today's interview is going to be a little bit different from the ones that I normally do. We have Evan on the podcast. I actually don't know of anyone who's gotten promoted to staff faster than Evan. Absolute rocket ship trajectory. Got to Meta, got promoted to staff in three years, which just means he got a promo every single year. So he has a lot to say. I'm really looking for the conversation.

• 0:54Ryan Peterman?

  And one thing that we're going to do today that is different from a normal podcast is because his trajectory is similar to mine as well. We both grew very quickly, very lucky in our trajectories. We will do kind of a back and forth where every time Evan answers, I'll also kind of give my perspective on how it was for me.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I'm really looking forward to this, Ryan. This is going to be a lot of fun. And I'm especially excited to hear about your journey because that's something that even offline, you and I haven't chatted about yet. So.

• 1:21Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's some stuff in here I haven't said anywhere before, so we can see where it goes.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Nice. Oh, exciting.

• 1:28Ryan Peterman?

  So, okay, let's, let's get into the first thing. First thing is like the beginnings of your career, even before you got into the industry. When we put out that content showing how quickly you grew, there was conversation about, are you this brilliant person who's been coding since you were five years old? Or were you someone who started studying at a normal time? So I'm kind of curious, how did you get into studying computer science?

• 1:53Speaker 00

  I had computer science offered in my high school, AP computer science, which compared to most, this is certainly early, but I felt late. Like most of the people in that AP computer science class, I grew up in the Seattle area. Around the Seattle area, most people in that class had a dad or a mom that worked at Microsoft. And so they had all been programming since they were super, super young. And I was horrible. Like, I knew nothing and it was incredibly complex and I was like, I was so down on myself. And up until that point, I'd been a straight A student. So it really stressed me out. It made me feel like this wasn't something that actually clicked for me. But, you know, I was resilient enough to make sure that I didn't lose that A streak and worked really hard in order to do well enough in that, in that course. But then, when we got to college, I didn't think I was gonna do computer science. I just joined the engineering school. And you have an intro to computer science class.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  And because I had more of a background than the majority of others who had no CS background. Now, all of a sudden, I was good and better than other people. And it's like that human nature that when you're good at something, it's exciting and, and you wanna keep going. That, that was the beginning.

• 2:51Ryan Peterman?

  My high school, so I grew up in Orange County in Southern California. We actually didn't even have APCS. I actually didn't even know what CS was until I got to college. So, yeah, I guess it shows you don't really need to be like a prodigy to succeed in, in industry. Cause you said you weren't like naturally, um, you know, super into CS from a, from a young age. I didn't know what CS was until I got to UCLA. And even there, I started as an undeclared engineer. Just cause I knew I liked math and science, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. And then when I took our, our intro CS classes, I thought it was fun, but I still actually, I declared as an electrical engineer. I didn't go into CS.

• 3:35Ryan Peterman?

  And my reasoning was that I liked video games and I liked computers and I just thought that was, you know, how I'm gonna get into that. Later, when I got into like, you know, finding internships and things, I realized actually, electrical engineering is maybe not the way to set myself up for career success. So then I ended up switching into CS, which there's a lot of overlap between EE and CS. So I, it didn't need to take any more time.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  What year was that switch?

• 4:01Ryan Peterman?

  That was actually in junior of college, so pretty late.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  That's surprisingly late, yeah.

• 4:06Ryan Peterman?

  But I switched into, um, computer science and engineering, so I, all those EE upper divs I had taken kinda like got reused and I can go into CS with the last two years of my college. But yeah, so I switched into it. Pretty late, don't have like a storied, long tenure in CS prior to getting into it in college.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess we're both proof of the contrary of what most people expect there.

• 4:30Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't think you need to be like a programming prodigy for most stuff in industry. And so I saw you, you know, once you got into CS, you started getting really involved, like you did the Cornell Hacking Club. What made you want to start that?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  So actually, I played soccer at Cornell in college. And then my junior year, I came to the realization that like, you know, when you're playing a division one sport, you're spending a ton of time on it. So you're up early, you're working out, you're training, you're on the bus on weekends, you're traveling, whatever. And I finally came to this realization as I was like landing internships that I'm not going to be a professional soccer player. I have no aspirations to be, but I am going to be a professional software engineer. And so why am I dedicating so much time to the soccer stuff as opposed to the thing that's actually going to be fruitful for the rest of my life? So I quit soccer my junior year and then all of a sudden I had so much time. And so like, at least in a relative sense, I had so much time compared to what I was used to. And so I had been doing a lot of hacking on the side, just building things that I thought was fun. And I decided this could be a cool thing to try to expand.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  And so I had done a couple of capture the flag competitions myself and like entered teams through Reddit. And I figured Cornell's got a bunch of smart people. This could probably be something that we could do. So I set up a handful of flyers around the engineering quad. And next thing you know, I had calls, conversations with about 25 people, grabbed a couple of them to kind of be like the founding, quote unquote, officers. And then from there, we really scaled it up and had a core team of like 25 people that competed in CTFs. But then had at some points as many as 200 people who showed up to weekly, like call it lectures to talk about hacking stuff. That was a ton of fun. And I guess as we see and we might get into later, like with the Hello Interview stuff, I've always just really loved teaching. So that was a maybe a genesis for that as well.

• 6:10Ryan Peterman?

  You know, when I was in college or just in general in my education, I feel like people always told me this advice of, you should get into these leadership opportunities. And oftentimes in high school, it was to just make your college application look better.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 6:26Ryan Peterman?

  But I think actually looking back, if you If I look through all the behaviors that you had to do to start that club, get all the alignment with all the people, communicate and market it and et cetera, and kind of be a leader in that space. That's actually a lot of what I think, you know, more senior engineers need to do, like those, all those soft skills. So I feel like actually it is a good thing to do i- in the long term. And I, I did some leadership stuff as well in, in college because I thought it was good for, for interviews. But also because I, I enjoyed meeting all the other officers in those clubs and getting involved, so.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  And I think in that experience too, beyond all the leadership stuff, which was super important, most of the kids in the club with me were technically brilliant, more so than me, like significantly more so than me. But like, we spent all day hacking and writing code and building things that, that were pretty sophisticated. And like even to this day, like, you know, pretty awesome. I look back at some of those repos and, and find it pretty amazing. But you always hear people recommend doing side projects. And I guess that was my example of that, where it's like, I was just working on something that was fun with friends who were brilliant. And I feel like that set me up pretty well eventually going in, into meta. Did you have a side project experiences much going into?

• 7:39Ryan Peterman?

  I had a few side projects. They were like little things though. For instance, there was this one thing that I built. I was in this EE club called IEEE and the club's lab is only open when an officer is present. And how do you know if it's open? Well, like maybe you ping people, you have group chats or something and you see if it's open. But that was kind of unreliable and slow. I wanted there to be like this status indicator. And so I built this occupancy sensor, which was basically just, it was like a Raspberry Pi connected to the wifi of that lab.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 8:16Ryan Peterman?

  If any of the officer's devices, I had like a manual mapping of the MAC addresses of all their devices. If any of them connected to the wifi, that bot knew that someone's in the lab. And so you could just ping that Slack bot, say, hey, I think the command was like, who is or something? And it'll just give you like all the officers that are there. And so like, yeah, that is something that I did build that I felt like was useful and it was like a nice side project. And I did remember talking about it in interview conversations.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  And I feel like that's such a perfect example because my suggestion to especially like new grads nowadays, as it pertains to doing a side project, like choosing from some of those random lists which you see always going around is like, cool, but you're not nearly going to have like, you're not going to be as passionate about it or want to be working on it late as you would be something like what you just described. And so maybe that would be the concrete advice to anybody listening in that phase is like, just observe the problems around you and then build some software to solve it. That's the side project you should be working on.

• 9:09Ryan Peterman?

  Hundred percent agree. I think there's all this advice on doing side projects. And if you just build one that's like Redis clone or something like that, but no one uses it. I guess it's better than nothing, but it's not letting you do that full end to end path of learning. And it's essentially the same as like a college class project or something that you put on your resume. You're not going to get nearly as much out of it. Highly agree with what you're saying. You did CTF. When I think of really, really good, technically brilliant engineers, I think of CTF. I think of like top coder and these competitive coding. I feel like that probably helped you with leaked code. What was your experience when you were interviewing? Did you feel like it was pretty smooth and you interviewed to get your Meta job?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Honestly, not in the beginning anyway. Like everybody knows that you have to leak code. At school, I was surrounded by a bunch of computer science majors. We all knew that we had to leak code. But like, I found it really hard. I felt like people around me found it easier. That might have just been projecting some insecurities there. It might not have actually been the case, but it felt like that. And we would just spend so many hours every single day in the library, just practicing different problems. And eventually I felt like I got in the groove, but actually maybe funny story. And this is where the first tick of luck pops in, and I'm sure that'll be a reoccurring theme throughout. But Meta came to my campus to interview. I think this still happens periodically, but it certainly happened more than. And so they came to campus. I showed up to do my interviews. And the first question that I got was one that I really would never have been able to do, really struggled with.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  It was a leaked code hard. It was super difficult, but the night before when I was studying, I was like, let me just look at one more. And I looked at that one and I skimmed it. I didn't do it. I just skimmed it, but like I knew the trick. And so that question popped up and had I not skimmed it, I certainly wouldn't have passed. Certainly wouldn't have gone onsite, wouldn't work at Meta. You and I probably wouldn't be having this conversation. So certainly a factor of luck there.

• 10:56Ryan Peterman?

  It's crazy how much luck can make a difference. There's, there's so many little things that were just opportunities that happen. I'm sure like the team that you picked or this, for instance, just completely changed your trajectory. So yeah, that resonates. And I think for me, for, for Elite Code, I was kind of mid at Elite Code, not very good. I remember my interview season for junior year. I didn't have a great resume, so I, I had like one or two companies, I think. And the one I ended up getting was Bloomberg, which was in New York.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:28Ryan Peterman?

  And.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  That's probably a fun experience.

• 11:30Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, it was, it was pretty fun, although at that time I was really young. So you can't do a whole lot if you're like a 19 year old and.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:37Ryan Peterman?

  I got through Elite Code, survived, but I remember that internship, the project was really easy. And I don't mean that as a bragging thing, but it was like a, I don't know, only like two weeks of work, even for someone who didn't have context on the code base. So I got it done really quick and I spent the rest of the time just grinding Elite Code. I was thinking, okay, I'm going to make sure that, that return, that full-time offer that I get is going to get this amazing company. And be so satisfied with it. I'd been practicing Elite Code aggressively all day, every day for that entire summer. And then I go into the interviews and I was able to get interview opportunities with all the biggest companies. Cause at that point Bloomberg was a decent name to have.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And UCLA, yeah.

• 12:18Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, and UCLA. So I was able to get my foot in the door everywhere, but I failed every single onsite that I got. Like, I think, like when I, when I look back, I, at the end of the day, it's just a wasteland. I had two offers. One was the Bloomberg return offer, which I didn't need to interview for. And then the other one was Amazon. And that interview loop was not an interview loop. It was some weird SAT.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Oh, did, did you have the online like simulation thing? I did that for Amazon where you're in a whole simulation portal with like a person telling you to check your email kind of thing.

• 12:53Ryan Peterman?

  I remember that. I don't remember if that was the year after the one I did. The one that I remember is like. They came to our school and they had a, they booked out a room that could fit hundreds of people. And they all gave us essentially an SAT, like it was just logic puzzles, you know, that'd be like, it would be like A, B, C, D, colon, blank. And then the multiple choice would be like, is it E, F, G, H? Or is it, like, you just like, complete the pattern, kind of stuff. Anyway, so I, I got the offer through that, like, weird logic puzzle thing. And anyway, at the end of the day, I completely failed all my weed code, even though I was grinding and really trying. Still not sure what happened in that, in that case.

• 13:38Ryan Peterman?

  But yeah, ended up accepting Amazon because I wanted to stay on the West Coast in that case.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  That's so funny. I had a bunch of the interview rounds too, maybe slightly different. The majority went well, but there's one that I failed miserably and I still remember it to this day because of kind of how much it shook me up. And it was the one I wanted more than anything. It was Palantir, which at the time in particular, like Palantir was so cool. For whatever reason, maybe it was just a Cornell thing, or maybe it, this is true.

• 14:00Ryan Peterman?

  UCLA.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Palantir was so cool. And I went in the interview loop and they say you do a first loop for the onsite. And then they regroup and they call some names to either like go to the next round or be released. And what they say is that if your name is called to be released, either you crushed it and you're just hired, or you know, you failed. Obviously, it's probably only true that you failed, but I was convinced by that. I thought I crushed my interview. I was in the first group of names.

• 14:23Ryan Peterman?

  Oh no.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  I was like, I nailed it. And then I just waited for the call. I was so confident. And then two weeks later it told me I didn't get it and I was so heartbroken, but.

• 14:31Ryan Peterman?

  Oh God, the difference in expectations must have been crazy.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. And now in hindsight, it's like, oh man, I must have totally just blown it. And they were nice to me, making me think I did well.

• 14:41Ryan Peterman?

  So what you're saying about Palantir, absolutely S tier company to go to at the time. This was, you were 2017 for Cornell?

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:49Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah. So I was 2017 for UCLA. And yeah, I remember Palantir was one company that was absolutely S tier, which I feel like people, it's no longer that prestigious. And another one that I remember was Quora. Quora was like, oh, that one was really good. You should go to that one.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  That's funny. I didn't hear much about Quora. I don't think that was told by my. Mine for me.

• 15:10Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, maybe it was like a California thing.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  The Jane Street.

• 15:13Ryan Peterman?

  Jane Street, yeah. Jane Street's always been.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  All the, all of the quant firms were really, really big. I'm sure that probably still true where you were too, but especially the proximity to, to New York. That was really true at Cornell.

• 15:23Ryan Peterman?

  At UCLA as well. And when I, I've looked at some recent day tier lists and aside from the AI companies coming in, those finance companies are, are still, you know.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, they still pay handsomely in cash from what I understand.

• 15:35Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, yeah. Yep. I remember it was like, uh, OCamel was like the thing for Jane Street, like a little bit.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. We had an OCamel class in school.

• 15:43Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Probably just for that reason.

• 15:45Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, so you got the Meta job and you graduated and, you know, so you started as a new grad in IC3. You know, I think one of the first things that you're faced with is what team do you pick? How'd you pick the team that you ended up going with?

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Meta used to have bootcamp. They don't have this anymore. Now it's team match, which is a shame. I, I understand why they would have gotten rid of it. Maybe logistically, there's a lot of overhead that you know this well.

• 16:07Ryan Peterman?

  I love bootcamp.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Both iterations of it. But for those who don't know, bootcamp was that you entered kind of undeclared, if you will, to use like college terminology, and you just started by doing a bunch of tasks. And then you eventually started to whittle down to a handful of teams that were hiring that you were interested in. You would do some tasks for each of them respectively, and then you got to make the decision. Obviously, they needed to also want you. It was a bit two-way, but it really felt like you were in control. You got to try a bunch of things, determine which one you preferred, and then, and then join that team. And so that was the case with me. And I thought that I would go the cybersecurity route. Certainly with the, the hacking club, I guess what I was passionate about, that's what I was excited about. I spent all summer hacking, doing all these things. I thought for sure, one of the reasons I chose Meta was bootcamp would allow me to choose a cybersecurity team. And so I thought I would go that route. I was bootcamping with those sorts of teams and like, it just didn't, it, it didn't feel right.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Cybersecurity is really low in the stack. You get a different type of folk on the teams in those areas. They felt less welcoming to me. It felt all a little bit like more stoic, less friendly. I don't know. It, it didn't resonate. And then I came across a team that was nothing I had ever considered before, but was working on things that I found so interesting. And this was, the general org was called Content Integrity. And the org's mission was to build machine learning models to identify and take action on violating content. And so this goes from everything from like hate speech to graphic violence to to you name it. At the time, the team that I joined and was bootcamping with was terrible. And it was a new team. It was being moved from the London office, but at least to the Seattle office where I was. It was a brand new team. It didn't have any engineers yet. It had one manager and they were the manager of a different team as well.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  So they were kind of just standing it up until they hired a real manager, our full-time manager. And then there was one engineer who was like half tech leading it while also working on another, another team. I thought, who doesn't want to fight terrorists? That sounds, that sounds pretty awesome. Machine learning, cutting edge, cool. Content integrity had a bunch of young people that I felt like I could really relate to. Made the decision to go that way.

• 17:55Ryan Peterman?

  Was your bootcamp in MPK, Menlo Park, or was it in Seattle?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  So the way that we did it, because I was out of the Seattle office, we did two, two-week stints in MPK. And then the rest of it was out of Seattle. So I guess half and half.

• 18:08Ryan Peterman?

  How did you go about? Because I remember at the time, they gave us a few different things you could choose from in terms of you could be an Android engineer. You could be iOS. You could be systems, which is just generic term for backend. There's also the other distinction of like, do you want to work on product? Or do you want to work on, I guess, more infrastructure stuff? So were you thinking about where you wanted to place yourself in terms of tech stack?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  I think not beyond, I came in just like thinking of myself as a backend engineer. And so I just sort of gravitated to the problems that were like that. And I know that now Meta draws the distinction between when you interview even, sweet products, sweet general list. Obviously, there's always been the frontend iOS versions as well, or categories as well. Yeah, I don't know. It wasn't a conscious decision for me. Was that something that, that you thought a lot about?

• 18:52Ryan Peterman?

  I think yes. So my team matching situation, I mean, I went through, through bootcamp as well because I was also at Meta. I remember thinking of a few things. One was like the product versus infrastructure decision. And at the time, as a new grad, I didn't really know what type of work to expect or what it even meant down the road. I was just kind of making decisions without a whole lot of context, based on what I thought sounded cool. So I was thinking, oh, okay, product is. It's like fun and it's like, it's like front end was my understanding and front end did not appeal to me. I was wrong. I mean, product can be very deeply technical and interesting. I was wrong, but I ended up choosing infrastructure. Even the word itself sounds technical and cool.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there is that stigma.

• 19:39Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, I'm going towards infrastructure teams. You know, when you think about infrastructure, you also think about systems a lot of times. And then the other distinction that kind of like led me to where I was was what organization did I want to be a part of? So, you know, there's WhatsApp teams, you could work on the Blue app, that's Facebook, you could work on Instagram. And Instagram at the time was the relatively new acquisition. The founders were still there. Yeah. And it was, it was hot. It was this cool product. You know, people, people generally liked Instagram then. And the Facebook app was kind of this bloated thing that old people use. I don't know. I was thinking, oh yeah, I want to go to Instagram. And so that's how I ended up picking an Instagram infra team.

• 20:22Ryan Peterman?

  And I remember at the time, the manager that I reached out to actually didn't have headcount for me. But I begged him because I said, I really want to go to an infrastructure team. I really want to work at Instagram. I promise you, I'm going to really work as hard as I can. Please, please, please. And he had some flexibility. He was able to, I guess, borrow a headcount from someone or something. Because when I met with him, he really felt how earnest I was there. I think that's one thing that I learned in my career journey is oftentimes the best opportunities are not the ones that seek you out, but the ones that you seek out. Because the ones that are seeking you out, oftentimes they're in a, you know, position of less strength.

• 21:05Ryan Peterman?

  They just need someone. And the ones that are really great, they have all these people coming to them. So you really got to like battle your way into them. But it was totally worth it and I absolutely loved that team and I stayed at it the whole time.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  And that, that moments of agency, I'm sure like translated throughout your, your whole career and that definitely resonated with me. It's, it's sort of this aspect of like, you gotta go take it. It's not necessarily going to fall on your lap. And so if that seemed like the right fit for you, then you went in and you sort of demanded. That you take it and it worked out, which is huge.

• 21:32Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Agency is a huge part of actually capitalizing on opportunity. So much of this stuff is luck and opportunity. And if you have that extra agency to go and take initiative and seek things out, you can turn things that were no's into yeses. In this case, yeah, someone might not have, you know, might have politely said, oh, okay, you don't have headcount and like search somewhere else. But I was, I was aggressive. Starting at Meta, you're, you're on the team. I think you mentioned to me something, all it says in our outline is penis story. I literally, I laughed when I saw that. What, what is this? And how is this relevant to, to your onboarding at Meta?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  So when I, when I first joined the team, one of the largest portions of content integrity was pornography. This was the main thing that, that started.

• 22:21Ryan Peterman?

  Makes sense though.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Right? Making sure the site didn't have any pornography. And so like, when you're a new, new grad, I don't know. It's just, you don't expect to see like, penises at work or any nudity at work. And I have this distinct memory of the first time where I had just joined the team. I was trying to get up to speed and I went up to one of my colleagues who worked on the porn team. Again, I was the only one at this point on the terrorism team. So I was kind of relying on them for expertise. And I went over there and sat next to him to try to ask some questions and he's got his two big monitors. And one of them's got all the code that he's been working on. And the other one is just the entire screen. Filling the entire screen. And I'm like trying not to look. It's incredibly shocking and like jarring to me. But this is his every day, you know? So to him, he didn't even think twice or notice it.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  I don't know, but there was something about it that was just like, I loved that story afterwards. I went home. I told all my friends. I thought it was, you know, so hysterical. And then it kind of became, I don't know, indicative of like the organization and the team as a, as a whole that like, you become desensitized to that stuff. You're doing your job. It's, it's no longer silly. It's no longer funny. But it was a, it was a shocking and memorable moment from my first days there. That's for sure.

• 23:29Ryan Peterman?

  That's hilarious. Just seeing that on the screen in like a work environment is kind of crazy.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was really funny. And they, they hide us in that Seattle office. They hid us in the second floor in the corner.

• 23:39Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, really? You think that was intentional?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. At least that's what the people before me said was the case. So that nobody ever had to walk past those desks.

• 23:46Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, that's so funny.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And just be shocked because the nudity is, the nudity is, you know, silly and largely funny, but you know, there are plenty of things that are much more jarring.

• 23:55Ryan Peterman?

  That's hilarious. Okay. So it sounds like your team had a pretty good like social vibe on it.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 24:00Ryan Peterman?

  When you got there, you mentioned that you were working on the terrorist side of things. Can you tell a little bit about like the technical side, just in case someone's curious in the audience? Like what, what exactly you were working on as like some backend system or?

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So it was backend system. This was mostly hacks, you know, Facebook's types of PHP. Maybe not directly my first project, but like my first substantial project was to work on this thing that we, we named estuary. And estuary is the point where multiple rivers kind of come and join together. And ultimately what it was, was the infrastructure in order to detect terrorist content. And so it's this multi-staged funnel. You initially run some kind of crude checks on content that are really quick in order to determine whether they're worth further considering and running your expensive models on. Some photo matching happens. At that point, you can make a determination based on the scores of the models, the photo matching. If you need to take any given actions, if something needs to go to human review, how many human reviews?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  You know, a combination of those reviews ultimately lead to an action as well. And so this was the infrastructure to facilitate that process and try to make it as easy as possible for us as the team to experiment, plugging in, playing different models, changing thresholds, running A B tests, all of these things.

• 25:12Ryan Peterman?

  Kind of getting into the promos, like your first promo was super fast. I think one thing that's interesting though to, to think about is, was that something that you asked your manager about? And you were in touch the whole way or did it kind of just happen?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  It definitely just happened and that wouldn't be my advice to people normally. But like, looking back at that point in my career, I was still, I was new and I was like shy and had my insecurities like everybody else. And that was a, a big moment that stuck with me. There were a couple of moments of like confidence building that happened early in my career, which I think were super necessary for me to go on and, and maybe kind of achieve the promotions that they were ultimately achieved. And at least in this case, that promo happened my first half, you know, six months or so after, after being at the company. I'd never talked about promo. I didn't know how well I was doing. I thought I was doing a good job, but like I don't know relative to everybody else. I figure everyone around me is really smart and they certainly were. And then I got pulled into a room with my manager. He gave me a bunch of compliments, telling me I was doing great.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  I felt really good. And then he said, you're promoted. And it's nothing I'd even considered. He showed me the new salary, the new equity. And I was like, oh my gosh, holy smokes. What just happened? Like this is insane. I was like shaking with giddiness. It was, it was a, it was a pretty cool experience, but. It was a, as I said, it was a huge confidence gaining moment because from that moment on, I had the assurance that I was good and I was capable. And then now I was like sort of freed of that anxiety, questioning whether or not I was good enough and was free to just kind of continue to to grow at that pace.

• 26:42Ryan Peterman?

  And did you intern at Facebook beforehand?

• 26:45Speaker 00

  No, so I interned at Zillow beforehand.

• 26:47Ryan Peterman?

  Okay.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  The other confidence gaining moment that really comes to my mind was actually at Zillow. And so that I entered Zillow, now it's even before Meta, so I'm like maybe more insecure, working on on what I need to work on. Got my project done quickly, like you said you did with yours at Bloomberg. Worked on a bunch of things that had nothing to do with my products, but were really fun. And then I remembered distinctly my manager at the end of, you know, at the end of the internship, both getting the return offer and then him, who had worked at Google for a long time and then now was at Zillow, saying that I was the the best intern he had ever worked with.

• 27:19Ryan Peterman?

  Wow.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  And that was just like the, I think to this day, probably the biggest, one of the biggest compliments I ever got. Like I was just beaming and I felt like, I felt so good and so confident coming out of that. And so I was able to ride that confidence into Meta. And then, of course, you still have a bit of the insecurity. And then this moment with my manager really kind of solidified that confidence.

• 27:35Ryan Peterman?

  So what is the thing that you were doing so early in your career that made both of these managers, you know, say you were the best intern or best, you know, or one of the best early people they were working with?

• 27:49Speaker 00

  I think the biggest thing was that I was just like inquisitive and didn't feel bounded by what I was told to do. And so at least at Zillow, I finished my project pretty quickly. And then I was working on the rentals team. It had nothing to do with security, but security stuff was interesting to me. And I saw all these posters around the office about how people shouldn't leave their computers unlocked when they go to the bathroom or go to lunch or anything like this. People would leave their screens open, security concern. And so I threw together a fun game where if somebody's screen was open, then you could go to a certain website hosted internally and then like kind of get them, if you will. And so then you had like a leaderboard and you had like cute graphs about who left their screen open and who had been got more than anyone else and who was getting people. And it like became this fun little thing in the office. And that's what I spent most of my time doing.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  And then I would hang out a bunch with the cybersecurity folks and like they took me to DEF CON in Las Vegas. Vegas, totally not my team, nothing to do with rentals or anything. But like I was just looking for other opportunities to seek out stuff that was fun to me. And the same was true when first joining Meta. I think actually the article that you published on your Substack, I'm sure we'll link that below or something. Talked to my very first project at Meta. Again, I finished it just pretty quickly and then had all this time to improve it. Do things that I thought were fun and outside of the scope of the original task.

• 29:03Ryan Peterman?

  You know, when we published that article, there was, that was probably the thing people asked the most about, which was, you said, hey, do your work fast and that gives you this budget of time to excel and do all these other things which will lead to the career growth. But that was the big thing that people wanted to know more about, which was, how do you get through your assigned projects and your initial code and all the things that's expected of you so fast? Is there anything that you might say to the audience for that?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I understand where the question is coming from. I hate it. Largely because like, I don't know, and it almost makes me feel like held up in this status that I, I don't know. It doesn't, doesn't feel all that deserved. I feel like it just happened. I'm interested to hear your thoughts because I know this was true for you as well. And then maybe as you're answering it, I'll, I'll come up with something that, that could be useful. But I know you had the same experience.

• 29:55Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. So I definitely had a similar experience when I joined Instagram. I was an absolute workhorse and I was just churning out anything that anyone gave me. There's two aspects to this. One is doing the work quickly. And I think to some extent, you know, having all my key bindings be super fast and, you know, making sure my workflows is really dialed in. Like I have everything memorized and I can, you know, fire off a diff in like 10 minutes or something. And really know where everything is in the code base. And that comes with just spending a lot of time and like really knowing your area and becoming kind of like the go-to person there. You know, when you first start, someone tells you something, you don't know where it is and you're kind of just trying to figure out what's going on.

• 30:40Ryan Peterman?

  But at some point you get so dialed in that someone says, we need to make that tweak and you know exactly where it is. Exact line of code and you just, you can just fire it off. So at some point I got that so dialed in that I was, I looked at my old diff count and it was like 10 diffs a day at some point. Cause I had a very coding heavy project at some point. I think it's like the second half of my junior engineer stint. So there's that aspect, but the other thing too is like, if you want an extra 30% of time, you can also just work an extra 30%.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  That's the answer. Nobody ever wants to hear it.

• 31:16Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. You don't need to be brilliant. I'll say, and I definitely did that. I was an absolute monster. I would get in, not too early. I don't know, like 10am or something, but I leave on the absolute latest shuttle, which I still remember to this day. It was like 9:27pm.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  But the important thing there must've been that you were enjoying it, right? Cause I think that's the fun line and that's where the advice becomes kind of dangerous, maybe.

• 31:37Ryan Peterman?

  For sure. I think like, cause everything was so new and you're in like this big area and it's, you're, it's just fun. Kind of like getting really dialed in and firing out all that code, you know, as a byproduct, whether you enjoyed it or not, if you do spend an extra 30% of time, yeah, you can use that to grow. It's almost like this budget of extra stuff that you can do. Yeah. I guess there's two ways to it. You can, you can really dial in and like, you know, submit code more quickly, which comes with time and like really thinking critically about your workflow. But the other thing too is you can, you know, work, work extra and it's, it's way better working extra when you enjoy it. Yeah. You're gonna hate your life if you hate submitting the code, but you're doing it anyways.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. I think the, the two things that came to mind for me there as you were sharing all that was the first one, the workflow is so important. And for me, it was a memory thing. I actually don't, I don't have the best memory, but I'm good at using resources in order to tell me, remember things. So at my time at Zillow and at school, like I had a, I built a fun little project. I think it was a variant of Lucene at the time. I'm not sure, but it was my own like little personal hosted search engine. And I would just put markdown stuff in there that I need to remember. And then I could like quickly search it and, and find it. Fun enough, right? You can't use that at Meta, but it's not all too difficult to like recreate some variation of that, even with just like a Ctrl F in, in some markdown files. Anytime I solved a problem, I would write it down. And then I never needed to struggle to solve a problem twice,

• 33:01Speaker 00

  which was really important, and that speeds things up significantly. And then the other thing that stood out, and this I'm more observed with mentees that I had or other folks in the team, was that I guess naturally I just, I had the ability to not let things stop me. And so I'm sure this will resonate with you too, but there's plenty of times for which I would see a mentee and they got stuck and they'd like try to research it. They would be a little nervous, like, do I ask the senior engineer now or are they busy? Do I do this? Do I do that? And I felt pretty comfortable just spending like an hour trying to answer the question and then asking someone. You don't want to be that annoying guy that's always asking things, but like the ability to find the person at the company that knows and get the answer from them. And this isn't just true at junior, this is true staff and beyond, I'm sure, is a super powerful skill. And that's just like kind of having the confidence to know

• 33:46Speaker 00

  it's reasonable. I don't know this. Let me ask someone who does. And let me write it down and keep moving.

• 33:51Ryan Peterman?

  That second one is, is huge. It can be so impactful because if you get blocked, it could take you days to do something that someone else can do in an hour or something. You know, if you go to the senior person that really already knows the code base, you have the exact code pointer, tell you exactly what to change. Instead of you doing like a blind brute force search, you can speed up by days. And that is actually way more impactful than small workflow improvements and things like that. So, and yeah, that is kind of like a soft skill thing where knowing that it's reasonable to ask, knowing how to ask in a way that is welcomed. I think that's, that's huge, especially for, for the early levels.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  And then maybe the last one here, not to kind of beat a dead horse on this topic, but being able to search the code base, I think that was something that I was maybe uniquely adept at early too. You know, Meta, it's monolith. We have the entire code base at your fingertips and the chances that you're solving something for the first time is almost none. Somebody has almost certainly done it or done something similar. And so knowing what to be able to search for, and sometimes this is just like guessing as to what people might have named functions or variables and you're hunting for just that piece of code that resembles a similar challenge to what you have in front of you. And being good at that searching process is, is honestly a huge accelerant.

• 35:08Ryan Peterman?

  Hundred percent. And if you're really good at code search, it is so impactful for the later levels too. Because oftentimes, the later levels, you're just trying to figure out where to make changes and how to make changes and figure out ambiguity and like, where's the problem?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Understanding code base quickly.

• 35:22Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, exactly. And code search is like one of the absolute peak skills to to really dial in. So yeah, that was pretty good for for the junior side of things. Moving on to the next one, in terms of promo from mid-level to senior. I'm curious, what is the, what were the main differences in this one? And what is the story behind that promotion?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  I guess the first place that I would start is that the team had grown now. So we were talking about how I was the first engineer on the team. It only took a week or two until we hired the first senior engineer on the team. Couple of weeks later, we had another one. Now the team's eight, nine. It's got the full-time manager that came in. I think because even though like, you know, the team at one point was three senior engineers and me as the junior engineer. Because I was there first, even if it was just a couple of weeks, I felt like I had the context. And I was like helping them ramp up, sort of. It was probably more in my head than anything else, but at least helping them with with context. And that was super valuable, like both in terms of having the confidence and just like really understanding the the code base more than more than most people. And so the team had continued to grow and content integrity was growing like crazy.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  And we have more and more violation types that we needed to support. The terrorism team had been morphed and changed and now like split into at the time, three teams. Terrorism, child exploitation, imagery, the really bad stuff, and then graphic violence. And graphic violence was sort of like the lowest priority of the group. And so it kind of got carved off. And my manager asked me if I wanted to be the tech lead for the graphic violence team. And I didn't know what tech lead was. I didn't know what that meant. It sounded cool. It sounded fancy. It turns out it's not actually even a real thing at Meta. Like it's a, it's not a title that shows up anywhere. It's not formal. It's a, you know, it's largely made up in optics, but like, to me, it felt so big and cool and and. Powerful, I don't love saying that word, but you know, it felt that way.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And so the team had three engineers, myself, a junior engineer, and a mid-level PhD research scientist. And it was the three of us tasked with solving quote-unquote "graphic violence" problems at Meta. And this was the process of detecting if things were graphic. In most cases, putting a warning screen or an interstitial over it. In the extreme cases, deleting the content. And so like, I really took to this leadership role. So I got to kind of lean on some of those skills learned during the hacking club days. And now I'm proactively setting up weekly meetings for the team, helping management with laying out our roadmap, even having one-on-ones with both of my teammates weekly, which was a cool and new experience for me. And like, this was really the transformative moment in my career where I grew more of those leadership skills. And if not grow, I was able to at least express those leadership skills.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  And of course, there was a ton of growth in here as well. And then graphic violence continued to do pretty well. Our stats looked good. And so we took a project that was like, it wasn't dying, it was just under-invested in. And we increased our precision and recall numbers to something I wouldn't be able to quote now because I don't remember well enough, but we did a great job. And I think that it was on account of my leadership there and the fact that I was directly leading other engineers, doing one-on-ones, setting team directions, roadmap. These are all qualities of senior engineers. I can't remember well enough if we expanded as well at this point to have more than just two engineers before the promotion. It's quite possible that was the case, but I can't remember. Yeah, I think that's the TLDR of the promo path there.

• 38:28Ryan Peterman?

  That's an absolute no-brainer IC5 promo, or senior promo. And that is really interesting because you were just a year out of college at that point. To be able to step into a leadership role like that is pretty extraordinary. One thing that I'm curious about is your manager gave you the opportunity. So it's not like you found this new thing and said, "Hey, we gotta do graphic violence stuff." Your manager said, "Hey, I got this thing. I'm gonna trust this guy with leading this." What did you do to get someone to trust you so early in your career with, you know, a more senior leadership role?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Good question. I'm not sure. What I can say is that it was incredible management and my manager was exactly that. He was an incredible leader. His path kind of up the chain was fast as well. His influence was fantastic. And I think this was a moment of him identifying somebody who had capabilities and giving them the encouragement and the space to be able to grow into a more full form. And there was plenty of like hands-on management as well. Of course, each one-on-one with him, I was getting plenty of tips on how to become this leader. But at least for me, having someone recognize an ability and then giving me something that at the time was outside of my scope and felt grand

• 39:47Speaker 00

  was like a challenge that I felt I needed to repay them and I needed to kind of go into that role and be successful. I think this is really just like a lesson in fantastic textbook management of identify people who maybe have the capabilities. Give them more than they can chew. Maybe I wouldn't say it that way, but give them a larger scope. Make them feel empowered and then support them while empowering them.

• 40:09Ryan Peterman?

  This manager must have seen something in you that let him think that you could handle it prior to that. There's something that you did when you were junior. I guess maybe that's also why you got promoted so quickly to even the mid-levels.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, the stepping stone was probably that we onboarded so many people and like I was the authority. I'd been on the team the longest. And so every person that we onboarded, like I was significant in their onboarding regardless of their level. And then even beyond their onboarding, you know, like I had the context. So I was the person that people would come to with questions in order to help. And to one of the things that was in the article on your Substack, like I was never shy with favors and helping people. And so if anyone came to my desk with a problem or they needed help with something, then I was eager and willing to help out. And I'm sure that like some of these qualities are what kind of led to him feeling like he could put that faith in me.

• 40:59Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And because I've seen people who have the exact same opportunity. They were early on a team and they even told me, they said, this is a good opportunity for me. All the new people coming in, I'm going to onboard them and this is going to help. I'll be in a good position. And rather than them riding the wave with the Growing, you know, the team goes over them, you know, they're kind of, they're just junior engineer that knew where some of the code was, but that's it. But in this case, you had the leadership ability to remain a leader. And naturally too, it doesn't sound like you were really like power hungry and saying, I gotta, I gotta stay on top. And you know, you kind of just helped people. You knew everything and you naturally were put in a leadership positions.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  There were, as you were saying, that one thing came to mind, which might be interesting to folks. And that was that there were tensions there. The one tension that I remember was a senior engineer who joined the team, who actually ended up being to this day, one of my, my best friends in any relative professional context. He was a senior engineer, incredibly brilliant guy, a current manager at Meta still. And I felt a little like territorial. I was like, this is like my project and my things. And like, I'm the little junior engineer. And he's a sophisticated senior engineer at Time coming from Microsoft. It didn't last long. And I remember, I think I had one conversation with my manager about it, but like I, I needed to slap myself across the face and like be humbled a little bit. And he was teaching me so much, so much about like in all of my code reviews and all of my, you know, design meetings, design reviews.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Like he helped me grow so significantly technically. And if I wasn't open to that, I, my career likely would have gone in a different direction. And it very well could have if I didn't kind of A, self-realize that I was having that kind of negative, negative feeling. And then two, I'm sure get a, a slight slapping across the face in a polite way from my manager as well.

• 42:48Ryan Peterman?

  So you felt territorial, but rather than like going and clawing for and saying, this is mine. You shared the scope and actually you two combined, it was like one plus one equals, you know, three or something more than.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that we had like such an amazing relationship and he helped me grow.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  I won't speak for him to any extent that, that, that I helped him. I think that might be too large to say, but like, yeah. Well, one plus one equaled, equaled three and we were able to go on and accomplish great things over the next couple of years.

• 43:17Ryan Peterman?

  I would also agree. I mean, in my career as well, I had people who were working with me that were more senior, they knew.

• 43:27Ryan Peterman?

  Way more than me and those relationships, I feel like I owe everything to those relationships. I was so lucky that these people would spend the time to work closely with me. I would go and put all this work into the docs. They would eat it alive and you know, the end result is so much better and I learned so much from them. I didn't really think too much about this is my thing or whatever. And I don't know exactly what was in each of our performance reviews. Like, you know, did they get credit for leading it and I just got credit for execution? I don't, I don't even know. I just put my head down and said, I love working with this guy. I'm learning so much from them and this project is going amazingly. I could point to a specific person at each promo and say, this person, I couldn't have done it without them.

• 44:12Ryan Peterman?

  And they're, they're so impactful in my growth, but also we just did so much more as a result. So, and that makes a lot of sense. I think whenever it's getting territorial, I think, you know, you can think more about how it's not a zero sum game. And you can actually create way more by not caring about who does the work, but that the work gets done. And it's amazingly high quality.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. And it's all through a lens of like self-growth. You have to be able to realize that there's so many things that you don't know. And all of these people can teach you these things and you have to be eager to do so, as he just said.

• 44:43Ryan Peterman?

  Absolutely. One last thing that you said in this area, you talked a little bit about tech leading and how that was like a critical part. And you define tech leading as kind of driving the roadmap, uh, you know, coordinating with everyone, having one-on-ones and working through others. It sounds like, I'll just say that that was also a huge part in my promotion to senior as well. I was not given, it sounds like in your case, you had your manager said, hey, this scope, go for it. And here's people working with you on it. In my case, I got a taste of it with, there was some work stream that we're working on, which I kind of became the backend lead on it naturally. It was just something that was coming together and there was client, we needed client engineers, we need backend engineers.

• 45:26Ryan Peterman?

  And I was there first and then as it grew in importance, I was a guy that knew everything on the backend. So there were, you know, other teams getting involved and I was the go-to person. I was leading, being a tech lead in that that space. Even though I felt it was kind of stretching my leadership capabilities, I remember a few core memories of certain meetings where I was leading it, but I didn't feel like a leader. And yeah, I was just doing it though, because I knew what I had to do and I just kind of buckled down and did it. But there's definitely some, you know, growing pains, but uh, growing into that role, being a tech lead was a huge part of it. And also I had a intern at some point, which honestly, this intern was amazing. I got super lucky.

• 46:10Ryan Peterman?

  This intern basically showed me the power of, I guess, like leverage or working through others. Cause I, I was always a workhorse and I was taking on, you know, three work streams at the same time. And then this guy came along and I realized, oh, I can entrust him with some of this. And I can go take on more stuff. And so now I felt like I was two people at once and I was shipping twice as much impact. And I was kind of getting the credit for all of it too, because he was like an intern and, you know, he'd just be there for a little bit of time. So that kind of got me a, a little taste of, of like leverage and I, I, something that I, I liked a lot for the rest of my career.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Two things that really stood out there for me was that, the first one was the power of context. That seems to be a through line in, in both of ours. And there's like that classic advice of become an expert in something, um, so that you're that go-to person in something. And I think that that's, that's great advice for anyone in, in their career. If you're the go-to person on something, ideally something valuable and something growing, then that context is going to be worth so much. And then to, to the delegation aspect, that's something that honestly was probably the first point in my career where things stopped coming naturally. And I remember many conversations with my manager about like, you need to be able to delegate. Cause I was just like you, where like, I could just do it and I could do it quickly. So like, why do I need anyone else around to, to help? And it was at this moment, kind of around that five promotion, just before, just after, where that was really getting beaten into me.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  And similarly to you, that was kind of a huge. Eye opening, learning when I finally was able to get that to click. Like you don't have to do everything yourself. In fact, at the higher levels, you can't do everything yourself. And you need to figure out how to empower people. You need to figure out how to delegate and you need to figure out how to kind of increase your scope through others.

• 47:53Ryan Peterman?

  Definitely. I think that was the biggest feedback that I got. Once I was senior on how do I get to staff?

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:00Ryan Peterman?

  It was like the buzzword was scaling yourself. Like you gotta scale yourself. I'm really thankful that I had that experience with the intern as a senior or growing into senior. Because that was like the name of the game to kind of be able to take on more scope than I could physically deliver. Okay, before we go to the staff stuff, I guess last thing on the five stuff. At this point, you're kind of more plugged into the industry. Did you start talking to your manager about promo this time or?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Now, like I had a great relationship with my manager. He was always looking out for me and trying to push me to move as quickly as possible. But similarly, like we'd have those open conversations. You know, like we're looking for a promotion by this date. Let's make it happen. Here's what has to happen in order to accomplish it. And so it was like a much more honest and open conversation at that point. I talked to a lot of my friends when I was at Meta in my bootcamp class. So didn't have the same experience. They didn't have the same promotion growth. And largely they didn't have a manager that was advocating for them to the same degree that I had. And so my advice to them, which was maybe a little bit silly, because I don't know that I even did all this all that much. Certainly not in the beginning, but it was like that they really needed to self advocate. And like you have to have those conversations with your managers. This is when I want to be promoted to five by, and this is what I think I need to do. Do you agree? Where are the gaps?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  And it's like an awkward conversation because it's setting yourself up. It's vulnerable, like, but you have to have it. You have to have that conversation and you want to hear the bad news. If there is bad news, you'd rather hear it now than come promo day when you're expecting something.

• 49:23Ryan Peterman?

  Hundred percent. My manager at this point was, you know, one of my absolute favorite managers. Love him and learned so much from him. He was never pushing me hard for promo, but he was very supportive when I asked for it. And so I guess in my experience, I was more of like the, I advocated for myself pretty aggressively. And it definitely made a difference. And it's not that my manager was ever not. Supportive, it's just that he wasn't coming to me and saying, hey, let's, let's do the promo. Here's the date. I would come into the conversation and say, hey, what do I have to do to get promoted? I'm super motivated. I'm loving this work. What does it even look like at the next level?

• 50:04Ryan Peterman?

  And me just constantly going in. And because I was a high performer, I think that also helped me a lot because my manager had strong reason to kind of, you know, make sure that I was happy with my growth and everything. And, you know, as I'm growing too, I'm, I'm helping them get way more stuff done. So there's just like a lot of alignment and incentive there.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Totally. I, I think that your experience there is definitely the one that most people can try to, to learn from there. And what you just described, I didn't put into action until later on. It wasn't until I have a different manager, when I was like shooting for the, the seven path that we were really, that I was more advocating for myself as opposed to, and my manager was still great and, and on my team, of course, but it wasn't being as led by our manager at that point.

• 50:48Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, definitely. And also I think the, you know, some managers are just more, they have more things on their plates. It's not like they don't want you to, they just aren't focused on it potentially. It just makes you get a lot more lucky with your promos if you're, you're focused on it. Yeah. And by the way, to luck, I think that manager that you had, that was also like opportunity and luck to some extent, right? Like you could have had a manager that actively disliked you. And even though you're killing it, you might've been delayed on the promos or might not have got the opportunity to begin with. So.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. Yeah, that's it. That's a huge portion of it. Having the right manager is, is, is huge. And I think there's, there's probably, there's two pieces there. You certainly need to have the right manager. It's also true that managers are taught to like invest in their high performers. Both of those things need to be true. You need to be a high performer so that your manager wants to invest in you. And then your manager needs to be fantastic in order to kind of push that rate of acceleration. If you're finding that you're not performing high and you're not getting attention from your manager, that's probably why, as maybe hurtful as that is to say, and it's like, you need that self-recognition to realize the first thing I need to fix is to become a high performer. In order to kind of deserve that that attention and then, you know, then you can be a little bit more forceful with them about their about the next steps.

• 52:04Ryan Peterman?

  I don't know too many people who are high performers that are having, maybe not getting a whole lot of attention. Unless there's some crazy thrash situation where people keep leaving.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:17Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, which which also does happen. So.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  But like managers are incentivized to grow their team. If the more promotions they give that are warranted, obviously, and at Meta, they have to be warranted. They go through a pretty rigorous process, but like they're rewarded for growth within their team and how many higher levels are within their team. And so like they're looking for the ones that are excelling so they can invest their resources in those in order to also help themselves. Like it's the reality and it's a right incentive structure too. I don't think that it's devious.

• 52:44Ryan Peterman?

  So talking about staff promotions, and I think this is the part that I think a lot of people are most interested in because it's ambiguous. I guess the thing that I'm curious about to start is what kept you at the company on the same team? Because when I think to my peers, a lot of them had left their initial team within two years or they switched companies. Uh, so what kept you there?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess the short of it was that I just really loved it. Actually, I wasn't hyper optimizing for growth. The growth stuff was happening and it was fun and it was great and I loved it and I was trying to push for promotions. But like, I was just really enjoying what I was doing. We were working on really cool things and I felt like deeply like I was having an impact in the world. Whether it was terrorism, graphic violence, I worked for a smaller stint on the CEI stuff like it was deeply fulfilling and it was exciting. And then at least the fact that the team was growing so quickly and that content integrity, the organization kept growing. And it meant that despite the fact that I never switched teams, I went from working on terrorism to CEI to graphic violence. So we'll talk about here in six, some other stuff. And so I never made a conscious change, but I had three managers, I had different teams. The engineers around me were all coming and going like there was enough dynamacy to keep me interested.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  I think that started to fade towards towards the end of my career in Meta and then obviously a change was made. But at this point, I was just loving what I was doing. So there was no, there's no consideration.

• 54:00Ryan Peterman?

  I think for me, you know, I stayed much longer than all of my friends. I think a lot of my. Friends, they went off to do startups or whatever.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  I'm I'm curious to hear from you and I don't know if it's now or if you want to talk about this later, but at least fairly recently, you made the change.

• 54:15Ryan Peterman?

  I did.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  I wonder how you reflect on that, if if you wish you made it earlier, kind of how the change, how the change went in terms of your growth, not just in your career growth, your technical growth, all those things.

• 54:24Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, and we can definitely talk about that. I think up until the staff point, I was hyper optimizing for for career growth. And I I loved my work at the same time, too, don't get me wrong. But I was always thinking, you know, how how can I grow faster? I think I was pretty ambitious when it comes to to that sort of thing. Every year I would think, you know, what can I do to grow faster? What is the next thing? And the answer was always, well, stay here, that there's another promo right on the table.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  All right, the opportunity is clear.

• 54:53Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, the opportunity was clear and I was loving the people I was working with and the work. So I actively thought about it and decided to stay. And I felt like that was also powerful in making me feel satisfied and fulfilled in my work was that every time I consider, I was thinking, yeah, this is I'm doing the right thing in the right place. And so that's kind of what kept me working on the same team for so long.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  It makes sense. And I think that that's actually, it's like I was the same way and it's and it's a blessing and it was right and it was great for our careers. But in hindsight, like there is a slight negative to it. It's almost like this trap of that next thing is so close, so keep going to it. And I wonder if at least like as a meta point, that's meta, not as in the company, but you don't know what I'm saying. It's better to switch like a little bit sooner for for technical growth. I don't know, it's a balance, it's trade offs, at least reflecting on myself.

• 55:45Ryan Peterman?

  There is a lot of trade offs that come with it. I will say staying until I see six, especially with the trajectory I have. I I don't have a whole lot of regret with it. I look back and I I absolutely loved being plugged into this. I maybe it's just my personality, but knowing that there's something right in front of me, grinding towards it. There's all these things I'm growing towards.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Have the next ring in the ladder.

• 56:06Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I felt like I was playing a video game or something and it was just so, you know, you talked about that first promo you got and you felt so giddy. Yeah, I was I was chasing that high. All the time.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  No, totally.

• 56:18Ryan Peterman?

  I definitely think like the IC six was a no brainer, especially with the trajectory. I think it would be different if it was grueling and there was a lot of uncertainty and things. But I do feel like locking in the IC six growth so quickly. Well, it definitely helped financially, there's no doubt. But also I think a lot of the higher level behaviors are the most satisfying for me personally. Like I, I enjoy working through others and leverage. And as an IC six, you define the direction and that's very satisfying to me rather than taking direction. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the IC six promo for you. I'm curious, what was the anchor project that got you promoted? Maybe you can tell us a little about the story at the time.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  I guess the turning point was, so I'm still the, the tech lead of the graphic violence team. So I guess timing wise, let's see, the first promotion was a half from four to five, then was two halves a year. And then this one was three halves. So it went one, two, three. And so we're probably halfway through at this point, maybe a little bit before halfway. So maybe the first of those three halves. And the tragic incidents in New Zealand, the Christchurch shooting. I don't know if this is something that you remember from the news at all, but it was March 19th or March 15th, 2019. And somebody livestreamed the shooting of a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killed 51 people on livestream. And as the tech lead for the graphic violence team, I was heavily involved in, in Facebook's technical response to this. It was all over the news. It was a horrible atrocity and we blew it. We missed it.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Like we allowed this to be live on the platform for nine and a half minutes as opposed to detecting it much sooner. And then beyond that, copies of it kept spreading like crazy. So people would download the full video. I think he also streamed, was it Twitch, something else? Um, anyway, you know, the videos just continued to be spread around our platform. And this was bad. And so I think that this happened, if my memory serves me correctly, sometime in, in the evening, five or six P M. I think I'd already gone home at this point. And I got the phone call that it was an emergency, probably from my P M at that time. And like we were in the war room and so I'm sitting in the war room with the, the VP of integrity, with head of content policy at Facebook and like I was the technical head here. At the time, if I remember correctly, was on paternity leave.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  So it was like, you know, there were plenty of people around to support. Don't get me wrong, but I kind of had a significant role to play there. And so there were many nights staying up through most of them, figuring out what to do, training models kind of overnight on the spot in order to detect different variations of these things, making adjustments to our content detection algorithms and our photo banks, video banks respectively. And like that was, that was significant. It gave me a lot of visibility. And I wasn't thinking about promotions, obviously, at the time. I was thinking about like the families of the people who had this video being circulated and the atrocity that it was. And everybody that we were working with was thinking about, you know, that context, just how awful the situation was and that we wanted to be a part of the solution. So I spent a lot of time on that.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  And then ultimately, we came to the conclusion as a company, and my manager is now back from paternity leave. And I, I only learned how strongly he petitioned for this afterwards. At the time, I thought I had a larger role in this, had a nine side I did. But regardless, the recognition from the company was that we were under invested in our ability to detect these sorts of worst of the worst atrocities in real time on live video. And so my team in graphic violence put most of our resources onto photos and videos that were not live. And this is just that it's a different fundamental challenge. So we decided to create a new team. And this team was called Real Time Integrity. And its goal was to detect in real time, things like murders and suicides on live video, which is a horrible thing that you even need to do in the first place, but unfortunately, it was necessary. And so the team was created.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  And at the time of creation, it was me and the PM. And they basically said, this is your guys' problem. Figure out the scope, figure out how many engineers you need, figure out what you need to do, figure out the roadmap and like have at it. And so this was totally green field and it was a super fun, challenging thing to work on. It was super fulfilling. It was super exciting. We started to hire up slowly. Uh, for the first half or so, we only had two other engineers other than me, so three engineers in total. And our progress was really slow, actually. Like, we were having a really hard time detecting any of this content. It's, it happened so infrequently. And so, you know, you're caught in these terrible situations of what do you do? You train on the couple of examples that you have. And then obviously they were in your training data, so you're overfitting to them. So the fact that you detect them now is not representative of anything.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  But we don't have any other examples to evaluate ourselves on. So like, it's a measurement nightmare. And then the only way that we can know if we're doing a good job or not is that the next atrocity happens and we get the phone call that we blew it again. So it was like, it was stressful and progress wasn't being made at the pace that we wanted it to be made at. But then two large things came that changed that. The first was the need to solve the measurement problem. And so in order to do this, this was sort of my largest project at the time. And it grew even to an organization-wide project later on, integrity-wide project later on. And we called it Golden Set Recall. And it was basically the idea that like we, we went through a bunch of effort in order to curate a set, a golden set of content that we needed to be able to evaluate ourselves on.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  This was all of the past atrocities that have happened since live video went live in 2007, or whatever it was, 2011, uh, 12, maybe? Anyway, all of those. And then like, this is the set that we're going to evaluate ourselves on by way of actually restreaming content. So we'll have holdout content that needs to, uh, that we need to evaluate against. And we're going to set up the infrastructure since that, such that bots will legitimately restream this content in order to test holistically our infrastructure, not just our models. We'll legitimately restream this content on Facebook. Comments will come in at the right time, all of these different things. And then importantly, this needs to be like fully isolated. It needs to be on real Facebook so that it tests our real infrastructure. But obviously, if anybody saw any of this, it would be an absolute nightmare.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  And so that, that was the challenge. And once we had eyes, we knew how we were doing. And what we learned was that like our recall at the time was 9%. This was for suicides specifically, for which we had more data for. And so we had 9% recall on live suicides on Facebook. This is, this is bad. This is, this is not good at all. So we continued to iterate from a modeling perspective. And we're doing like fancy things from modeling perspectives. There's a lot of assistance from the AI org as well. Like they're doing a lot of the core embeddings and then, you know, we're doing the applied ML on top of it. You know, we're doing sophisticated sequencing, temporal modeling, and nothing's really happening. And then I had the idea, which is so obvious in hindsight, but I looked at enough of these examples that we were missing as they were coming in every day. And I realized that you look at the comments and the comments read, "Don't do it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Your family loves you. Like, please, no." These comments are indicative and the people who are posting the comments know of the atrocity long before our sophisticated models are able to figure it out. And at the time, we were so focused on pinching pixels and audio waves that we weren't focused on the thing that was obvious and right there, kind of beneath our nose the entire time. And so we updated the models to take into consideration these kind of temporal comment signals. And it was a revelation. Like we went from nine to 50, 55% recall almost overnight. And then now we had a feedback loop. Now the model's better and it's actually detecting these things far more than than you would ever imagine would actually be on these platforms. And now we have more training data and now we can continue to iterate and we have a foothold.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  And by the time I left, we were into the mid 90% on recall, which was, which was a huge success. And so to tie it all back to the, to the promo, the promo came kind of maybe halfway through that story. Where we were just starting to see progress, we had a metric, we had a way to evaluate, comments were successful. And so I think my promo packet was something on the back of was able to step up in a time of need for the company. Do all of these fantastic things to help us when we were in crisis. And then created largely and led a new team in order to solve this problem moving forward. And has up until this point, the point of the promotion made significant progress. And I think at that point it was, you know, like the 9% to 60% or something.

• 1:04:09Ryan Peterman?

  I mean, that's huge impact. So the IC6 scope in terms of the impact side of things was absolutely clear. You said something there about you were just given the opportunity to create a team from scratch as an IC. How big did that team end up being and how is that process?

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  By the time I left, the team had just recently split into two, two of eight each, so 16 total. At the, at its, at its peak, real time integrity was something around 12 to 14 engineers. At this point, I, you know, I was two years into being staff or so, so this isn't as close to the promo path. By promo time, maybe the team was four or five engineers, but it continued to grow. And at first, well, we weren't sure if it was going to be like a dud project, you know, for through the first six to eight months, six months maybe. But then once we started to get that acceleration, then it was something that the company and leadership wanted to invest resources in. And fortunately, it was sort of a pet project of like the VP and director of the org because of, you know, Mark was breathing down their neck about how horrible this was that we allowed this to happen.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  We can't allow it to happen again. So we were getting resources accordingly.

• 1:05:14Ryan Peterman?

  Man, for an IC5 to just be trusted with this blue ocean of build this team for like a top priority for the org. Or like that a director is paying attention to is definitely a huge, a huge opportunity.

• 1:05:30Ryan Peterman?

  Who was the decision maker that gave you that opportunity? Was that the director or was that your direct manager?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  To be honest, I don't know. So there's like the visibility that I had into which this felt so cool. I felt like I was just given so much scope. I felt like I advocated for it based on what happened during the incident. And I think all of this was true in part. But as I said, I learned that behind the scenes, my manager was doing a ton of advocating for this new team. And my guess would be that in part of his advocating or advocacy, it was let's kind of let Evan and the PM at the time like have a shot at this. And of course, he's there and close by and helping. It's not like, you know, your manager is certainly involved. Yeah, like I said, I think he did far more behind the scenes than I appreciated at the time. But it felt to me, and as it was written in my promo packet, like this was a moment of proactivity.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  For me, it's like kind of largely suggests the creation of a team and lead its inception.

• 1:06:24Ryan Peterman?

  Got it. Okay. And so that would have been a case of, I guess, creating this scope then as the IC tech lead involved. When you look back on that, I guess, what was like the most important behavior that kind of got you promoted? Cause I think you've laid out the facts of what happened, but you know, what was like the skill that you kind of needed? That maybe made it the biggest difference?

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  The biggest thing was the not being afraid to try the simple and obvious thing. This org in general and all the teams that I was on, and certainly real time integrity, like I was surrounded by ML PhDs. And it was interesting on these teams in that there was like a ton of ambiguity. You know, like I largely did a lot of the infrastructure, but I spent a lot of time training models too. And fine tuning hyper parameters and doing feature engineering just alongside and them. And they would do infrastructure things too. Like when you were on the team, your title didn't really matter. We all did things, you know, you lean towards your expertise, but nonetheless. And so I just had this really unique opportunity where I was surrounded by brilliant people who they absolutely were brilliant. But they sort of had like horse blinders to the effect of focusing on how to optimize the model in the most sophisticated

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  technical means possible, so that they could write a research paper and make progress in that way. And this was like really fun, cutting edge modeling that we were doing. It was interesting, but I obviously. By the nature of having less expertise there was less focused on those things. And I had only one thing on my mind. Get this number from nine to something higher. And what is it going to take to do that? And while most people were focused narrowly on the model improvements, I was focused on the holistic problem. And this allowed me to see those simple solutions like, for example, the comments. And so in hindsight, it's a no brainer. But I think this is kind of representative of much of big tech at times. That the people that are there are brilliant and want to solve hard, complex, technical challenges.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  And those who are able to take a step back, view the problem more holistically, and then propose the solutions that regardless of their technical sophistication, are going to make the largest progress on the goal, oftentimes excel. And I think that was true, not just in this moment, but throughout much of my career. Is that, is that something that resonates with you at all?

• 1:08:31Ryan Peterman?

  Yes, that definitely resonates. And when I think about my staff promotion, I ended up writing a blog post about it, which I can kind of link in the show notes about the optimization. But the TLDR is, on a high level, the optimization that I actually did was trivial. It was, I was kind of, I guess, maybe, you know, in a tech lead role, trying to figure out what's the best way to optimize our compute efficiency for, for everything, for all the workloads that were being spent on processing Instagram video encodings. That was an area where we didn't look for a long time because as a growing small company, it's like Instagram, you just throw more machines at it and it's usually fine.

• 1:09:16Ryan Peterman?

  But at some point, I think this was around COVID, there was too much demand for our platforms because people were using it so much while they were all sheltering in place. And so actually it became critical that we needed to improve our compute efficiency. And I got lucky because I was looking into that when it became business critical. And I was kind of already there and kind of playing around tinkering in an area where no one had looked at it, just because I thought it'd be fun. I, it just sounds cool, you know, compute efficiency. I was like, yeah, this is awesome. Let's make it better. And then so.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  And there's so much money to be saved there.

• 1:09:55Ryan Peterman?

  Exactly. I just thought, oh, there's this big opportunity and this work is going to be so cool. And so I just started looking into the area and kind of digging into like, what, what would it look like to make this efficient? Cause this is something that we've never really looked at. And I, you know, listed out all the ideas and I booked meetings with the most brilliant engineers that I was working with that also contributed to these brainstorms as well. And when we put everything out, the, the most impactful idea was the most obvious, easy thing to do. It was absolutely trivial. It was like, on a high level, I could just explain it as we just didn't do some redundant work that we were already doing.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  And it probably wasn't the first thing people considered.

• 1:10:41Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of other things we could definitely be doing. Yeah. This, this project didn't seem that cool. Yeah, it definitely resonates that, you know, as an IC6 engineer, or just generally as an engineer, you focusing on actually what matters and what's impactful is absolute number one thing that's going to grow your career. And it's not always the technically complex solution that is the shortest path to having impact. And the people who have the initiative to drive the impact, regardless of what it takes to do it, are going to be the people who are rewarded because everything is proportional to your impact. So yeah, that definitely resonates to me in terms of doing the simple thing. It's, it's actually, it's, it's a benefit, the simpler the optimization is.

• 1:11:25Ryan Peterman?

  The way that I look at prioritization is, it's kind of like the, the impact throughput that you're having, where you can think of this as like a fraction and the, the numerator is like, how much impact is there? But obviously the denominator is like, how much effort and time and complexity is this thing going to be? And actually, if someone tells me this is, I'm going to have the biggest impact with like a one line change that is just not doing some additional work.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:11:55Ryan Peterman?

  I prefer that to the crazy, you know, year-long project that's like super complex and adds all this maintenance.

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  That, that was one place, that was one place where Meta's culture excelled. And I don't know to the extent that this has changed since I've left. Of course, you're still there, so you can speak to this. But I know at other companies, if you're the guy who made the one line change and it had huge impact, you're going to be rewarded proportional to the difficulty, the one line change, right? Whereas at Meta, that wasn't the case. Like it was like you had huge impact and nobody else thought to change that one line, but you did. And so you're rewarded for it. And that creates this culture that's so important of go find the impact. It doesn't have to be the hard crazy thing. It doesn't have to be a lot of work. Find the impact and have positive impact for the company and you're rewarded. And so that's always been a fantastic thing about Meta culture.

• 1:12:41Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's the number one thing that I enjoy about Meta's culture. And I think no matter where I'm working, I'm always going to take that with me for the rest of my career. Just that impact is everything. I don't care how it happens, who does it? It's just, let's just get the job done and make things better. And in that case, it sounds like you, you were trusted with the scope. The team grew to something where it's, you're basically doing an IC six's job and you delivered massively, more than anyone expected. So I think the IC six promo made a lot of sense. One thing that I think is unique about your career path is especially starting from four and onward

• 1:13:22Ryan Peterman?

  or mid-level to staff is it seems like your management chain was trusting you almost as a manager. They were telling you to give us how many headcount you need and you're having one-on-ones with people and you are growing people in that sense. Did that come naturally to you and am I seeing that right? Like that you were not purely doing IC stuff. You were also kind of an extension of your manager and doing some management stuff.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's fair. And actually I wanted to jump in and mention this, so I'm glad that you brought it back. Like technically, when defining, well, I guess you can't say technically because tech lead isn't a defined role. But traditionally tech lead is that you're setting the technical direction for the team. And so as you just described, my role had like a lot more of a people aspect maybe than was traditionally the case. And of course, these engineers were still having one-on-ones with their real manager. Their real manager was determining their promos and whatnot. But certainly when I was senior and absolutely when I was at staff. Absolutely. When I was at staff, I was like kind of explicitly in those conversations to help my manager have visibility and make determinations about the given engineers on the team's performance reviews.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Even to the point where at least we attempted to have me attend a calibrations and then ultimately ended up getting shut down for whatever reason from the director.

• 1:14:35Ryan Peterman?

  As an IC five or as an IC six?

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  As an IC six.

• 1:14:38Ryan Peterman?

  Okay.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  As an IC six. But yeah, why that ended up happening, I'm not sure. I think I really enjoyed it and like I took it so seriously. Like I really wanted to be good at it. And so I was really observing what my manager was doing. I read the making of a manager when I became. When I became the tech leader of graphic violence, I read that book thinking like, I really got to learn how to kind of lead, right? And it was a great book. And yeah, I don't know. I just, I took it seriously. And I think the fact that I excelled at it, and importantly, I don't want to speak for any of the engineers that I worked with. But I was never aware of any time where people felt uneasy with my leadership or like I wasn't on their team and supporting them.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  And I think that's where those things will typically go wrong, is there's either like components of competitiveness, jealousy, aggression, whatever it is where it's like, why are you in between me and my manager? And why do you say what is going on? And do you have my best interests? Like, why am I navigating with this person now? And I think probably subconsciously, because I didn't do this explicitly necessarily, but I just understood the value of being on everyone's team and on everyone's side. And so to the favor stuff that we were talking about, to just generally being nice and wanting to come to work, like I thought. And some people listening to this, there were my old colleagues may disagree with some of these statements, but I don't know of any that would like, I was everyone's best friend.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  And I was trying to help everyone and they knew that I had their best intentions in mind. And that was genuinely true. There was nobody that I felt kind of sour about in any way. And I think that allowed me to continue to have that role without there being any significant tension. Cause I could imagine any engineer feeling uncomfortable with it would raise that to a manager and then the manager would recognize that and kind of pull back that responsibility. I guess was able to navigate it cautiously enough.

• 1:16:15Ryan Peterman?

  They all had trusted you, it sounds like, because, I mean, not only were you genuinely caring and thinking about their growth, but also you were someone who was very technically competent. And I'm sure they had seen that you had demonstrated yourself repeatedly. So because I've seen the case where someone who doesn't do all that soft skill stuff or the behind the scenes stuff. And they have trouble with the transition into a more leadership role. And so I think that's something that you did that was outstanding. And I think it was a large part of your success in these leadership roles.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe the last thing on this point that's really interesting that just came to mind. For those listening, at Meta, your level isn't public. And so oftentimes it's known within teams and on different teams, it's known to varying degrees. At my team at least, like it wasn't, it wasn't really talked about. Of course, you knew the levels of the people. Like I knew the levels of the people on my team, for example, because I was involved in their promo packets or whatever else it may be, of course. But like, I at least was under the impression oftentimes that those that I was leading or those on my teams did not know my level. And so there's no fallback of like, I'm IC6, you, you should listen to me. It needed to be earned every day, right? Like

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  they didn't know what I was and they could guess or not guess, but like they're probably doing the math. And at times I had my own insecurity of like, people are looking at my profile and seeing that I've been at the company three years, like, and I have all of this responsibility. They're probably writing me off or feeling some type of way about it or whatever else. And it kind of kept me hungry because I couldn't rely on this, like, oh, just look at my title and see that I have a bigger title than you. So now listen. And I think that's another thing that, that is fantastic within Metaculture.

• 1:17:53Ryan Peterman?

  I agree a hundred percent. And I think prior to me transitioning to management and actually knowing everyone's levels. You just have this gauge, this, this high level thinking of like, you know, let's say I had joined your team and you're just outspoken in all the meetings. You just get a sense of, okay, this person knows what they're doing. And I start to get credibility. If you say things that are right all the time, like, okay, this guy, you know, I, I trust this guy. This is good. And if he has proposed an idea, I'm more likely to believe it and that sort of thing. When I became a manager and I knew everyone's levels afterwards.

• 1:18:28Ryan Peterman?

  There was no surprises on my end, even though I didn't know anyone's level. I think if you asked me to guess it, I might have been off by plus or minus a level. But when I became that, I was thinking, that makes sense. This guy is amazing. He deserves that level. And, you know, these people, yeah, so I kinda, I like that. And I think one large part of growing to IC6 too, is also being able to influence without authority. You know, people don't know your level, so that's one thing. But also, they don't report to you. You're not their manager directly in any way. You know, to get five people to go in your direction, you gotta convince them that you know what you're doing, that you have a good idea, that they can trust you.

• 1:19:07Ryan Peterman?

  And you have to do all of that without relying on some contrived thing that's like, hey, I'm a higher level than you. You need to do what I say. You just need to be right a lot. And that's how you build trust.

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.

• 1:19:22Ryan Peterman?

  About management, by the way, so it sounds like you were considering IC7. I guess before we talk about you leaving Meta, did at any point you consider going to management?

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  So I actually thought that's what I would do. I thought I would go to six and then switch over to management. And then for whatever reason, maybe similar to what you were describing before, like the opportunity to seven seems clear enough. And there's a lot of work that comes from being a manager. I talked to a lot of my friends who had recently made that transition. Actually, that first engineer that I had described earlier, the senior engineer, uh, who I had built a, built a good relationship with after kind of our initial competitiveness, or my perceived competitiveness. Uh, he certainly did not have the competitiveness. He had recently transitioned to be a manager and I was hearing from him. And like, there's stresses that come with the manager, you know, like you're, you're directly responsible for people. You have to take care of their issues and the BS that comes up and it's a large weight. And I all of a sudden found myself in this like amazing place where my organization had grown tremendously.

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  I was sort of like the entry point of knowledge in many ways to the organization. I had VP and Director Visibility and all these cool projects that I could work on across not just content integrity in my org, but integrity, the, the larger org of several thousand people. Yeah, I decided that let me get to seven and then I'll think about switching maybe over to, to M2. Because then I would avoid the petty problems. Cause M1s who are reporting to you typically have. Less small problems than, you know, junior and mid-level folk reporting to you.

• 1:20:48Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, for me, I was faced with a similar decision. I think I got to six and I was thinking, okay, do I do seven or do I go to management? And my manager told me, and he was absolutely right in that. He said, if you stay as IC, there's a path for IC seven. I can see it. It's not that ambiguous. You just, it's a continuation of your existing role and we need it. If you become a manager, it's a lot more based on opportunity. And I just don't know, like there's a, you may get promoted, you may not, like there's just no, not a whole lot of deterministic control in your promo. That being said, I've splint to management anyways because.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  You stated IC six for a bit, right? You didn't immediately make the change.

• 1:21:37Ryan Peterman?

  For a bit, not immediately, but I also, after some time, I switched to TLM, which was still kind of, you know, IC for a bit. And I had a small team of maybe a few people, maybe four or five.

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  And what, maybe for people who don't know, define TLM.

• 1:21:52Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, TLM is a tech lead manager, which is a role that some companies have where you are, I'll describe it on a high level, you're 70% IC, 30% manager, where your contributions are still carried as being an IC, but you have a small team of people that report to you. Often they're a team of specialists or something like that, where everyone's like kind of focused on like a very narrow, technically challenging problem. And so that's kind of like what I was doing. And then I told my manager that, you know, I kind of want to grow more as a manager and eventually pivoted a little more into an org leader, which is just a traditional manager.

• 1:22:33Ryan Peterman?

  But yeah, I switched to manager, well, one, because my intrinsic desire was, let's learn this new set of behaviors. I feel like this will be cool. Learn a lot. But the other thing is, I felt like if I grew to IC seven, I would become a snowflake or like I've become this, this very unique tool for very.

• 1:22:53Ryan Peterman?

  Very big companies and I'm always thinking about the long term and I just thought that, okay, I go to seven and then what? Now I kind of like narrowed the opportunities that I can fit into. And I'm only useful in a handful of very, very big companies. And even more so if I were to grow to IC eight and at that point, you kind of, the, the show ends there. Some people get to IC nine, but it's for the most part, that's the end of your, your growth.

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  And at a certain point, you handcuffed yourself to that given company.

• 1:23:25Ryan Peterman?

  Yes.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Like in Meta's case, if you make it to IC eight, not only do you have so much equity that to leave would be crazy, but you're not going to get hired, especially, you know, at our trajectories, let's just say hypothetically, I don't know the number of years, but eight, eight years or something to, to IC eight. To be eight years into your career and go over to Google or whomever else and say, I'd like an IC eight, they'd, laugh at you, right? So, and you wouldn't want to go take the, the huge decrease in pay and lose all that equity. So you're just like, you're kind of stuck as an IC eight at Meta forever.

• 1:23:56Ryan Peterman?

  Yep, definitely. And because a lot of your impact is coming from your credibility within this org. You go to Google, you don't necessarily have that. And so I just felt like although I might've been happier in the short term, going to IC seven and all of that, I decided, let's try out this new path and let's learn management. And I felt like I had a unique opportunity to do so. Not always easy to transition to management, especially as such a young IC at the time. So I felt like, okay, let's, let's go for it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  And what, what, what stands out as the kind of single biggest learning so far?

• 1:24:30Ryan Peterman?

  Well, first thing I'll say is for the people out there who are thinking about career growth and all of that. What my manager said was right. My career, like your career as a manager is kind of proportional to the number of recursive reports you have. And, you know, unless your team is growing quickly, you're not going to get to that next thing. And so you kind of couple yourself to the growth of your org, which can be a good or a bad thing.

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  Especially now at Meta and across all the big tech companies with the age of efficiency.

• 1:24:55Ryan Peterman?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  The org chart's got squeezed.

• 1:24:58Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  The opportunity there, five years ago, the trees were just growing and growing and growing.

• 1:25:03Ryan Peterman?

  Yep, yep, yep. Exactly. So I've gotten very lucky in my career. I can say this is me giving back a little bit. I switched to management at the time where it was maybe an unlucky time to do so. But yeah, other than that, I mean, a lot of the things that you hear stereotypically are also true. I think what you mentioned about dealing with people problems, like a lot of the, I guess, sevs or like major incidents that I think about now are this person is, you know, has some issue with that team and he's unhappy or something like that. And then another interesting thing is your, your work hours become like a solid block of meetings from like nine to five. As a, as a tech leader, as an IC, I would, you know, have like dis- fragmented meetings along the day.

• 1:25:47Ryan Peterman?

  And then I would work like kind of later into the night on my IC stuff. So maybe I worked a larger number of total hours, but I had more flexibility and control. As a manager, it's just, you know, you, you log in, you attend those meetings, you log out. Cause I can't really do a whole lot without people. And so I kind of, you know, it's not like I can just grind into the night, get things done. So.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  And if you are doing that, you're filling out performance reviews or something, which isn't exactly fun to be doing.

• 1:26:15Ryan Peterman?

  Oh yeah, yeah. That's, that's coming up soon. Performance review season.

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  That's the chore that you find yourself.

• 1:26:21Ryan Peterman?

  Maybe the grindiest time of my careers is when there's performance reviews. You just non-stop meetings all day, writing all night, meetings all day, writing all night.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  Brutal.

• 1:26:33Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. So there's the manager.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't envy you, sir.

• 1:26:38Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I'll say, uh, being an IC does give you that flexibility that makes life a little more, you have more control of your own stuff. Okay. So you, you got to staff and then you left. What, uh, what made you want to leave Meta?

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  So I stayed for another little year and a half, which felt significant. Like I feel like, I mean, almost half of my time, not quite, but a third of my time was spent there. And like the team continued to grow, was doing all of that cross-work stuff that I had mentioned. As I said, the team split into two, a new manager had come in. That was a really cool relationship because he came in and immediately it was like. You know, and he said this in his quotes, like, this is, this is your team. I'm not here to take it. You know, you and I are partners. Let's figure out how we can grow this and do all of this together. And that was like a really cool opportunity where I saw more of that management angle in particular. And we were shooting, we were shooting for seven. Like, I really wanted to continue at this point, the one half, two half, three halves, and then now four halves. Right. Seven.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  And that was, that was like our plan, you know, we were gonna try to go up for it. And who knows if we'd come up just shy or not, you know? And if we did, we'd go the next half. So I thought that was gonna be it. Like, you make a ton of money at seven, life's great. You make a ton of money, of course, at six and all these things. That's what I thought the path was. But that first manager, who I had mentioned, have mentioned a number of times now, who I massively respected, had the biggest influence in my career, most brilliant person I've ever worked with, respected infinitely. He started messaging me. He had moved to a different team at this point, and he was in M2 elsewhere. And this was when Web3 was becoming all the rage. Which is crypto, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So people who bought into it, as I did at the time, this was like, and it may still happen,

• 1:28:20Speaker 00

  but like the next iteration of the internet, a decentralized, better internet, right? With all of the benefits that come from it. And so in college, I really liked crypto. Evan Gunseer was my advisor of our hacking club. I was also a TA for him, and he's really influential in the crypto community. He's the current CEO and founder of Avalanche, one of the larger blockchains as well now. And at the time, he was working a lot on Bitcoin and other similar projects. And he had research assistants in there working on it. So I was kind of privy to all of that. I was excited by it. I was close to him while he was doing it. I was investing, all of those things. And so when I joined Meta, I was like, kind of the crypto guy. Sounds funny now.

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  And so my manager, at that time, now fast forward back to when he was on the different team, he started messaging me about crypto stuff and about Web3, because he knew that I had interests there. And so him and I were just talking a little bit on Messenger outside of a professional context. And we were brainstorming ideas. And eventually it got to a point where we've, we built something for fun, just the two of us outside of work. And we launched it, and it got a, you know, 10,000 users or so in relatively quick order. And then we found ourselves in a position where he was ready. He was ready to do startups. He always wanted to. I never thought that was going to be something that I was going to do. And I saw my path to promotion. I was like, why would I ever leave this? This place is great. I'm going to stay here and tell them a VP and just like retire into the sunset.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  But ultimately, there was this opportunity where I had the person who I respected more than anybody in the world professionally. And we could go leave and try to do something. And we had something that had some traction. I initially said like, I'm not going to leave until we get funding. Ultimately, I don't know. It was just, it was too fun and too big of an opportunity to give up. And so I left. I left all the equity. I left all the opportunities and all of these things in order to start a startup. And there were certainly regrets throughout the last, it's now been over two years. I think it's going to be three years in March. Sheesh. But in hindsight now, I don't regret it for a moment.

• 1:30:20Ryan Peterman?

  So what is the thing that made you want to leave? Cause you had this, this golden ticket to probably seven figure plus earnings.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, even thinking back to it in hindsight, it was kind of crazy. But there was no convincing from my manager and now co-founder at that time. He was super respectful of kind of my needs and my decisions and all of that. Ultimately, it was that the things that we were talking about after hours, the things that we were tinkering with after hours, ended up becoming more fun than my day to day job. And ultimately, I would wake up in the morning and I would, I would go to Meta, work from, you know, my seven to five, seven to four, whatever it was. And I would be thinking about when work ended, being able to think about those different problems. And so it got to a point where I would have rather been doing that and I wanted to spend my time doing that. And so without funding, without any of these things, just a little bit of traction, we took the leap.

• 1:31:08Ryan Peterman?

  You left and then you went and you said you worked on startups for, for two years now. What, what's the high level roadmap so far?

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the really high level TLDR is that we left with this web three company. We don't need to get into too much detail. At a high level, it was like, we called it a social intelligence layer. So combining activities that people were doing in quote unquote web two, largely on Twitter, where people interact with crypto, NFTs, et cetera, with what was happening on chain and then being able to do like some rankings and predictions and whatnot, based on those combined movements. That was the, the first company and it went well enough. Like it, it grew significantly, got to, I guess significantly. A hundred thousand users, which is like a significant portion of the active space at that time. We raised money, we were growing, great things. And then there was a lot of interest in acquisition and we entertained that interest in acquisition. And fortunately for us, it ended up being about the time when the market took a downturn.

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Ironically, now here we are having this conversation and Bitcoin and crypto is back up to the moon. But there was kind of a lull there, right? And so we ended up, we ended up selling, selling that company. And then we found ourselves in this awkward position where it's like, we left our jobs for this like big web three vision thing. That's not working out. What do we do now? We, we have each other. I had my questions of like, should I just go back to big tech? I think that was never really in the cards for him. He was ready to continue to move on. And I figured, whatever, like here we are, two people, I trust him, I trust us. We have some money from the sale, let's, let's shoot. And so we ended up in this period of just trying so many different things. And this was probably like a six, eight month period of just like trying ideas.

• 1:32:38Speaker 00

  And these were ideas from like truck factoring and invoicing, uh, to things in the design space, to things literally all over the map. And nothing was totally clicking. And then throughout that journey, we built another product, which was pretty fun. It allowed you to go to any website, you click one button to copy that website and directly paste it, control V into Figma. And you would have fully editable Figma frames that you can move around and edit and whatnot. So a great tool for designers to do that. And this is cool. There's a lot of technical sophistication to it. We had to reverse engineer. And then my co-founder, to his credit, did the majority of this reverse engineering. The ability to paste things in in the first place, because that was encrypted. And so that was hugely valuable and there were other companies in the space that wanted that technology. And so after only a couple of months, they came knocking on the door and then they ended up buying that technology.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  Call it two acquisitions, hand wavy, a little bit loose. And then we find ourselves in that same position again. Okay, we have a little bit more money now in each other, but no ideas. And we tried a bunch more things. And ultimately what we wanted to do was like, let's just do something that A, we know really, really well. And B, that we're passionate about. And ultimately what that was, was interviewing and hiring and helping candidates prepare for interviews. And so this is like now the beginning of kind of chat GPT wave. And so we're like, can we make AI mock interviews? Like, why do people have to practice with a human? Why can't they just practice with an AI? Let's make this good. And so we tried and it wasn't very good. Some people paid for it, but not many. And so we started to do in-person mock interviews in order to get training data.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  And we would do these for free with our paying users in order to get training data. And after every single one of them, they would look at us and they would be like, please let me pay you to do more of that. Like, that was huge for me. And we would say, no, no, no, we're not an in-person mock interview business. That's crazy. Like, we're technologists, we're building cool AI mock interviews, whatever. And then eventually, after the two-dozenth person has asked that, you learn as a startup founder that you have to do what people are willing to pay for. And so we put on the side of the website, in small, in-person mock interviews, and big was AI interviews. And then quickly, it was just Stefan and I, that's my co-founder's name. It was just Stefan and I, and we were booked, like, three, four, five, soon six, seven mocks a day. And we were like, oh, smokes, people want this and people want to pay for this.

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  And so that continued to grow. TLDR, Hello Interview is the current company. We do in-person mock interviews with current senior engineers and managers from your target company, as well as now we've brought back some of the AI-guided learning stuff in a much improved capacity that people are really enjoying, as well as a lot of free and paid resources from an educational perspective, content.

• 1:35:14Ryan Peterman?

  So when you look back on your startups, or your current leg in startups, from a financial perspective, did you out-earn what you would have earned in big tech?

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:35:26Ryan Peterman?

  Okay.

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  Not yet, anyway. I mean, there's time still yet, right?

• 1:35:30Ryan Peterman?

  Right, right.

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  Not yet. But what I will say, and this might have been your next question, but I'll beat you to the punch. It's been far worth it. The value in terms of the monetary compensation has not equated yet, certainly not. But the value in terms of experiences and purely technical knowledge has far outpaced that of what I would have learned at Meta. And so when I think about my projected earnings over the lifetime of my career, I think that my projected earnings will be significantly higher than if I had even stayed and gone to seven, eight, et cetera. And the reason for this is that Now I've learned a ton of things that I otherwise wouldn't have known. I've learned how to learn and I've learned all sorts of these skills outside of technology about how to build a company. And these things are invaluable. It hasn't gotten there yet. It's also ways to go until it gets there.

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

  But I'm optimistic that the compensation will catch up to the value of increased learning.

• 1:36:21Ryan Peterman?

  When you mention the stuff that you don't learn in big tech, that you only learn in startups that are going to pay dividends, can you talk a little bit about that?

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. This is one that I'm pretty passionate about. So this is at least true in my experience. This doesn't extrapolate to everybody, of course, but like in starting startups, I realized that I was an idiot. Like I left big tech with a relative ego, all these fast promotions. I'm the man. I'm good. I'm good on my team. My team's grown 16 people, leading all these cool things, whatever. And I leave all of that to realize I don't know a damn thing. At Meta, you work on the narrowest. Not only had I not really coded significantly in a year and a half at this point, because it was mostly ideation and leadership at this point, but to the extent that I was coding and I was the quote unquote, quote unquote code machine, it was narrowly on this small thing. And so I work on my small thing and then I hit go. And then within six hours, that is affecting 3 billion people and every single post that

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  comes into Facebook, right? But I didn't figure out how to make that happen. I figured out how to do my little thing, but everyone else did everything else around me. And so like I had never set up a simple caching layer. I'd never configured my own database. I had never stood up my own. I suppose I had done some of these things at a small capacity in college, but by and large. And now I have to do it. We have to do it, Stefan and I. And so at first, like it was super humbling. It was like, crap, this is really hard. I don't know any of this. And like we're doing a lot of front end stuff. I'd never written a line of front end code and I have to learn all of a sudden at the time, like we were slinging raw jQuery. We've now evolved dinner, you know, using React. But like I didn't know any of these things and it was incredibly stressful, incredibly overwhelming.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  And now here I am on the other side of it and I feel like I now have practical skills. You can drop me into any situation and I can figure it out. I can go to any other big tech company. I can go to any other startup. I can do whatever else and like I have the Experiences that are transferable to our point about the IC eight at Meta not being particularly transferable. I think that's exactly the point here.

• 1:38:20Ryan Peterman?

  I've heard very similar opinion from most people that go to startups. I've only heard one person that told me that they felt like the technical learning was not as fast at a startup. Because they felt like the problems that they were dealing with were smaller trivial. You know, like just setting things up, you know, you're going through tutorials, getting the database up. That's a solved problem that at Meta, which and it's a good thing that it's a solved problem. Because the fun and the deeply technical stuff is when you kind of are digging into the specialist problems that are on the higher level.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  I think probably the right thing is to do it in the inverse order than I did it.

• 1:38:59Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, so start at a startup and then go into big tech.

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  I wouldn't recommend that for someone from a career perspective, but I would recommend it from a learning perspective. Cause then you get the breadth, you understand how to do all of these things. And then the optimizations that you're doing in big tech are within context. And I think that that's, that would be valuable.

• 1:39:14Ryan Peterman?

  I think, yeah, to generalize it, I think big tech absolutely gets you the depth and startups absolutely gets you the breadth. You gotta do everything, even outside of the technical, you gotta do all this random stuff that you might not.

• 1:39:26Speaker 00

  And, and, and maybe the last point there is that what I wish I had done while I was at Meta is been a bit more inquisitive about how things worked. And so it was easy to focus on my day job and the reality is like you only have so much time in the day. So I don't know if I would have been able to pull this off, but like Tao, Facebook's caching layer, to those who weren't familiar, like. I used it every day as an abstraction, right? I, I called into it every single day by many layers of abstraction, but didn't care to or know significantly about how it actually worked. That's not what I worked on and it didn't matter to me. In hindsight, maybe even out of hours, I wish I had been a bit more inquisitive there. Like Facebook publishes all of these different blogs and now that I do so much time. You know, learning system design, both to teach it for our YouTube channel,

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  for the content that we write. I read all of these blogs now. And I wish I had done some of that while I was actually at Meta.

• 1:40:18Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I mean, curiosity is probably the biggest tool for actually driving learning, technical learning. So totally agree with that. And so for someone who's, let's say someone's a big tech engineer in, at a, yeah, at one of these big companies. And they're thinking about, one day they'd like to try to start up, but they, you know, are kind of thinking, what do they need to see to actually think, okay, now's the time and now it's a good time to go to a startup. What advice would you have for them?

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  This is super hard. I actually wrote, I wrote a post two years ago or so, and I posted it on Blind. And it got like a decent amount of attention. And it would be basically convincing big tech employees that like they should leave and start a startup or join a startup. And it was through the lens, you know, it had good intentions from what you and I are discussing now. Like you're going to learn more. Here was my experience. Now, rightfully so, I got ripped to shreds in the comments of the post. Blind is an aggressive place, first of all, but it was because, you know, I struck a nerve with many people and I was insensitive to the fortunate situation that I had, which is that I was financially secure. And I didn't have a family that I was supporting and like, I could afford to take this risk and not get paid for a while and it was going to be okay. So I recognize most people aren't in that situation. And so the reality is only you know what makes sense for you financially.

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  If you're purely optimizing for your own learning, your own technical learning and your own improvements from a technical perspective, and I think beyond a technical perspective, then I would do it as soon as you can. If you're brand new to your career, I'd probably wait until you're at least a senior engineer. Like go up the ranks of big tech if you're, if you're new to it and then consider making the switch. I wouldn't do it before that. But you're going to learn a significant degree more somewhere else is what I think. You're going to learn a lot about how organizations work at big tech. That's important. You're going to learn a lot about people's skills and you will of course, learn things technically. But you'll learn more somewhere else. And maybe the middle ground is to like go to a, a series B or series C or something ASAP. Spend your time there and then consider starting your own thing.

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  If you can afford to financially, of course.

• 1:42:20Ryan Peterman?

  It is a privilege to be. To not have a family, to be financially secure enough to be able to do it. So yeah, that that that makes sense. And I think, like I said, almost all of my friends at this point have gone off and done startups. So I think what you're saying makes sense. And a lot of people do enjoy it. And and it is like this fun thing to do.

• 1:42:41Speaker 00

  And and now the now is a cool time to do a startup with, you know, the the advancements of of L L Ms, not just in terms of making a generic AI this company, but in terms of like accelerating your own rate of progress. Hello, interview is still to this day just Stefan and I in terms of two full time employees. And we've slung a lot of code and a lot of that code has been accelerated based on the tools that we have at our disposal now. And so like, what would have been many week cycles at even a meta with a team of some number of engineers, if you have two highly capable engineers and Claude at your disposal, you can move pretty quick. And plenty of opinions about where Claude's useful, where it slows you down, whatever, but I'll I'll hold that for a different conversation.

• 1:43:22Ryan Peterman?

  I think that could be really interesting. So for the last part of this interview, and I think this is my favorite part always, is just reflecting, looking back on everything. Your career going into meta, growing so quickly, and then going into startups and, you know, through those acquisitions and everything. I'm curious to look at all of that and ask you some questions. And so the first one that I'm curious about is, and maybe this is similar to what we were just talking about, but what periods of your career did you feel like you had the most skill growth?

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  The the skill growth was certainly we just led it to the startup stuff, undoubtedly. Of course, there's a lot of skill growth in the early, early days of your career as well. But everything pales in comparison to the to the startup journey from skill growth.

• 1:44:03Ryan Peterman?

  Once you left to to do the startup, that was like the you never felt growth that that fast.

• 1:44:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And it's all the things that they say growth should be. It was uncomfortable, certainly at first, it was stressful, it was like emotional at times. Credit to to my co founder for putting up with some, you know, emotional moments for me where where things felt difficult. But yeah, here we are on the other side of it. And it was all tremendously worth it.

• 1:44:28Ryan Peterman?

  And I'm curious about, because your career has grown so quickly, when you think about how How many hours a week that you are working throughout the different parts of your career? Yeah, how much were you working?

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  During meta, I usually tell people not a lot, and that's generally my advice. But like in reflection, it's it's probably not totally honest. I loved what I was doing. And so I got to work at eight o'clock or so, maybe eight thirty, and I left work at five thirty or six. But I got home and I decompressed and I sat down, I watched TV, I did whatever. And like I would open up my laptop and I would check and experiment or I would tweak something or I would do something because I was like passionate and excited about it. To the point where sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night because much of what we were doing was training models, which training takes time. I would wake up in the middle of the night being like, did my run finish? Like, let me go, let me go check it because I was just excited. And so if you actually accounted for all of those hours, certainly it's more than your average forty hours a week.

• 1:45:22Speaker 00

  But at the same time, and this part's important, I love to snowboard. Wednesdays, I would leave work at like two o'clock and go drive up to the mountains. Being in Seattle, they were only an hour and a half, two hours away. And I would, I would snowboard until eight P M. And then drive home. Um, so like you can do both.

• 1:45:36Ryan Peterman?

  And you weren't working weekends or anything. Sounds like you were.

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  No, no. If I, if there was something I was passionate about, but not really.

• 1:45:43Ryan Peterman?

  Right, right, right. Okay. So this sounds like, I don't know, maybe fifty hours a week or something. One of the more balanced uh career paths. What about when you did startups, though?

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. Then it changed.

• 1:45:54Ryan Peterman?

  Okay.

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  So, so particularly with that first company, when I was both struggling to learn and consume everything I needed to. I didn't have my feet under me yet and it was a company that like, it was doing a lot of face, fast paced, real time data analytics. And so like a lot of things can break. And when they do break, because it's money, people really care about it and it was stressful. And so I was working all the time. Like I'd be waking up at seven or eight and I would stop working at midnight or two A M. In many cases. And like I couldn't leave my house without my laptop. Like I distinctly remember one instance where I felt like things were pretty good. I was going to leave and go to a friend's birthday party that was just up the street from me. And I went and I brought my laptop and I sat down and I ordered my food and then bing, bing, bing.

• 1:46:39Speaker 00

  My pager duty starts going off and the whole site's down.

• 1:46:41Ryan Peterman?

  Ah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 00

  And I'm like. God, and I grab my laptop and I start running down the hill to try to, because this was one particular moment where I think my co-founder was either on vacation or at something with his kids, or you know, like I was the only one to do it. And so that was stressful. And then now we've sort of come full circle and that Hello interview is starting to become much more stable. Things don't necessarily break. It's fortunately in the nature of the business, not something where people are like eagerly staring at the site every second. There's less opportunity for things to go wrong. And now my hours are still more than my meta days, just because you're passionate about your own company and you want to make it successful. But I go to friends' birthdays without my laptop.

• 1:47:21Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, okay, that's good. I remember you, you were telling me that you were looking, and you also wrote a post about it, the work-life balance and you know, not.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Ryan Peterman?

  But by you doing startups, you're, you're kind of contradicting that by working such an insane amount of hours. So what do you say to that?

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was at this point, I think you and I chatted about this a little bit. I was at this point at the end of my meta career where I had kind of come to like this come to Jesus moment where I had been chasing the next ring in the ladder the whole time. I had just been focused on that. That was about to come to an end, certainly if I got that seven promotion. I need to kind of figure out what else matters in life. I'd been hyper optimizing for my career growth and like letting other things around me maybe slip consequentially. And I had convinced myself of this realization that like there's two paths in life. One, you make sure you're really passionate about work and you spend all your hours on that because that's what you love and it checks all of your boxes. It checks your relationship boxes, it, it, it checks your fulfillment boxes, obviously the monetary boxes.

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  Or you just look at work as something that supports your passions financially. And so you go to work, you do a good job, you do a great job from nine to five, and then you hang out with your friends and you travel the world and you live a great fulfilled life finding other things to find your passion. And so I was excited to go for option B and I thought that's what I was transitioning to after hopefully a seven promotion. And yeah, here I am, so be it. Things went in a different direction. I think that I might be able to pull back out option B in a handful of years down the line. At least I'm still in option A where I'm passionate and excited about what I do and helping people and. You know, that's fantastic.

• 1:49:01Ryan Peterman?

  You mentioned earlier, I think a while ago, when you were talking about starting your startup, you talked a little bit about regrets. Is there anything, when you look back on your career? What's the biggest regret that you have? Something that others can learn from potentially?

• 1:49:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, I think that my biggest regret would be not slowing down. And like, I, I took shortcuts. And I saw the tendency to do this sometimes now, although I push myself to be much better here, for what it's worth. But like, you need to understand how things work. And so there are certain approaches that you can take in order to accomplish the task through iteration. And you'll get there, but once it works, you might move on. Alternatively, you get there and then you're inquisitive about why it actually worked. And I think that this is just a much more sustainable foundation. And so like, at Meta, it was easy to kind of experiment, see numbers go up. I was in a very quantitative kind of field or team where we had metrics and those metrics would go up, or they would not go up. And if they went up, success. And you generally have an idea for why, but I wasn't as inquisitive as I could have been

• 1:50:01Speaker 00

  about what like the actual underlying, particularly technical cause. And then the same was true in the early days of startups, because I didn't feel like I had the time. I was learning so much and I was trying to just get my feet under me. And I was trying to move that like, once I got it to work, it was like, okay, that works now, like next thing. And then now, only within the last year, I feel like I've been able to make that transition, kind of recognize that as an issue. And I have more time now, now I'm back to that, like I can do, you know, my work in 70% of the time. And I have a 30% of my time to dedicate to something else. And now that it's not about career growth, that 30% can go to actually learning and understanding. And so this is a combination of like, reading the engineering blogs from other companies that are coming out, me being inquisitive about underlying kind of like libraries or platforms that we're using, how they work, why they work, how they were built.

• 1:50:43Speaker 00

  And I think this is a valid and important shift in, in the way that I think about technology.

• 1:50:49Ryan Peterman?

  Got it. So taking the time to, rather than just pure impact machine, launch something onto the next thing, launch something on the next thing. You wish that you took the time to deeply understand things after things are launched too, just for the sake of your own technical growth, which has long-term benefits.

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I think that for all of the Great things about Meta that you and I have talked about now. That was probably the negative culturally is that it encouraged this culture of just like ship it and run and keep going. Impact, impact, impact, impact. And so I didn't need to ask those questions of like, how does Tao actually work? This thing that I use every day, right? Because it didn't matter to me, but in terms of my growth as an engineer, it would have been fantastic if I understood that. And it would have been fantastic if I could then ask the engineers who were working on it questions as they were coming up. And that's something that I regret not doing.

• 1:51:38Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, the cultural, I guess the other thing is move fast and break things. So yeah, it's also kind of.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  I was good at that.

• 1:51:45Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  Breaking things too, but I could usually fix them fast enough that nobody noticed or cared, but yeah.

• 1:51:50Ryan Peterman?

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I've had my fair share of breakages too. Okay. And then the last thing that I like to ask everyone is if you could go back to Evan, who's just graduated college and is entering the industry. And you were just tell that Evan something, what would be the advice that you give yourself just starting out in your career?

• 1:52:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a more maybe emotional angle on this as opposed to technical or career oriented, but like, I think the advice to me would be to really invest in relationships and the aspects outside of work. Like I'm only just now realizing in the last year and a half or so that like I was under invested in friendships and romantic relationships and things of this nature. And it was largely because I was putting so much effort into work. Even if it wasn't in hours wise, like that's where my optimizations were. And you realize that like you spend all this time roadmapping, goaling, checking in with yourself about your career progression. But in terms of like general life progression, I didn't apply nearly that same vigor. And so I think that that had a negative consequence and only moving to LA now two years ago did the shift. And this is because I got pulled out of the tech bubble.

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  Now a lot of my friends don't work in tech and we invest a lot more in each other, both financially and from a time perspective. And I have found that my life is so much more fulfilled because of this. And so work continues to be a focus. It continues to grow. Things are great there. But now like I have all these people that I can rely on and like I'm moving apartments right now. And I have any number of people that I can call to help me move. And these small things are like, you know, like I said, it's a bit sentimental, but they're they're really what matter in life. Uh, more so than your quick career progression. So I wish I had learned to more fairly allocate time between those two and effort.

• 1:53:33Ryan Peterman?

  So if you could go back and grow slower, yet retain more relationships and have done more outside of work. Would you make that change looking back now that you know how things went?

• 1:53:45Speaker 00

  If I was given that binary choice, I think I would, but I don't think that would have been the choice. I had more than enough time. I just didn't do it. Uh, it just like, it wasn't something that I was investing enough in and I just like, didn't understand the importance of it until I got a little bit older and wiser in age. So to anybody else, I think you can absolutely do both hindsight. If I had to make the binary decision, of course. Your relationships matter more than anything else in the world. So I would optimize for those as I, as opposed to career.

• 1:54:11Ryan Peterman?

  Makes sense. Okay. Well, that's all the questions that I had, Evan. I really enjoyed this conversation. I loved how it had some back and forth and we could kind of both go over our, our fast progressions to meta. And show, show everyone, you know, what they might be able to learn from that. And so with that being said, um, you know, this is an opportunity to plug anything you'd like to. Do you want to shout out anything?

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Well, first off, likewise, this was a super, super fun conversation. I can't actually believe looking at the timeline quickly. We moved through it because, you know, certainly having a lot of fun chatting with you. Um, in terms of plugs, yeah, absolutely. Hello, interview.com. That's the current startup. That's the current company. If you are preparing for software engineering interviews, you should absolutely check us out. We have everything from if you want just free resources to learn. And of course I'm biased, but we've heard over and over again from the community that these are some of the best free resources that exist on the internet. To if you want kind of self-guided practice, we've got you covered there. And then all the way, of course, to the mock interviews and we go through extreme lengths to make sure that we only hire the absolute best coaches. We make sure that if anybody drops below kind of our bar of expectations from a coach,

• 1:55:15Speaker 00

  that we part ways and we move on to, to another coach that, that can perform at the level required for our candidates to succeed. And so we hear a lot of great feedback. Check it out. Would love to be able to help you prepare for your interviews as well. And maybe the last thing there, since I'm assuming you're viewing. This on YouTube. You can also YouTube search for Hello Interview. We have a YouTube channel. It's largely me talking about interviews and breaking down common system design problems. So you can see how I think through these problems. Give that a watch too. Everything on there, of course, is is completely free.

• 1:55:44Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, and I'll be putting links to everything in the in the description, the show notes, so you can take a look at that. And yeah, the last thing I would add, by the way, about Hello Interview, just to give you some unbiased feedback. I can tell you a story that one of my roommates was recently interviewing and he didn't know that I've been talking to Evan and anything. He's just been talking to me unbiasedly about mock interview services and what the resources are in terms of system design. And he tried Interview IO and it was okay. And then he didn't have super great results in his one of his first rounds. So he had to reevaluate everything. And then he found Hello Interview and he, I remember specifically, he credited the free resources.

• 1:56:25Ryan Peterman?

  He said that was really helpful for him to learn because he had read some other book on system design. Was not super helpful. Also, he was overconfident when it came to system design because he felt like, oh, I'm a senior engineer and I've been designing systems at work. But actually, the interview process is this contrived thing that you need to study specifically and Hello Interview's free resources as well as doing mocks themselves were the critical thing that actually like helped my my roommate a lot. So although I haven't used the the interview service, I would say this is like a very strong recommendation that I could personally recommend because someone I trust had such a good review with it. Yeah, recommend you take a look at Hello Interview.

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  Hello, your friend. That's awesome. Yeah, appreciate that.

• 1:57:12Ryan Peterman?

  Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much, Evan. Yeah, that's that's all we got.