Industry Secrets We Wish We Knew Before Graduating | Staff Eng Talk @ UCLA

Ricky (Google Engineering Manager) and I were recently invited to give a talk at UCLA for the UPE/ACM clubs. We wanted to share the industry secrets that college didn’t teach us about the tech industry, career growth, and more. Students were able to submit questions in advance that we prepared slides for. We received a bunch of interesting questions that should be helpful to any college kids looking to get into tech. You can look at the timestamps below to jump to whatever questions you’re most interested in. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:47) Primer on SWE levels (06:12) How to succeed as an intern? (09:13) How did you get promoted quickly? (11:36) How much of success is luck? (13:32) If you had one piece of advice, what would it be? (16:11) What if I’m not a gigachad coder? (19:12) How to handle imposter syndrome? (21:36) How to advocate for yourself? (24:20) Big tech vs startups for new grads? (30:28) How do people measure impact? (32:17) Would an MBA help for eng management? (33:45) How was college recruiting? (36:10) How do you make as much money as possible? (38:00) Parting words (40:10) What are your current goals? (42:02) Thoughts on job hopping? (45:49) What Ricky works on? (46:06) Thoughts on how AI affects engineering? Thank you to Jordan Nguyen (ACM), Ashley Cheng (UPE), and Lune Chan (Videography) for hosting and helping produce this event!! Where to find Ricky: • YouTube: https://youtube.com/@findingricky • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/findingricky 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 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.

• 0:00Ryan Peterman?

  You literally got rejected and you said, "No." Look at it again. Last month, a student group that I used to be a part of at UCLA reached out asking if I wanted to give a talk. I've had five interns at Meta. When I think about the ones that were rock stars, they had the...

• 0:19Ryan Peterman?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. My name is Ryan and if you're new here, I try to share conversations on this channel with more senior software engineers so that you can learn from their stories and their experience. There is so much that no one told me in college that I wanted to share with these students. And so I enlisted some help from my friend Ricky.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  You know, my way is usually right and I make a bunch of money and they're like, "Okay, actually..."

• 0:41Ryan Peterman?

  We hosted a Q&A style event and we received hundreds of questions, some of which I really didn't expect to see. How do you make as much money as possible? I would say, and others I expected to see, but hopefully our personal stories were helpful.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  So I feel like Ryan scammed me because I got really lucky and I got all the offers at every place I interviewed at, except for one. Like my mom. She was my hater. She believed I wouldn't succeed without an MBA.

• 1:09Ryan Peterman?

  Here is the full video.

• 1:14Ryan Peterman?

  Excited to be here, everyone. My name is Ryan. When Ashley reached out, I was excited to talk to you all because I feel like there's so many things that we learned in industry that no one tells you until you actually fail and you get into industry. And I'm hoping that we can tell you a lot of that today. Do you want to introduce?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, hey, I'm Ricky. Really excited to be here too. I feel like so much of my success post-grad is from everything that I learned at UCLA and all the people that I've met. So really excited to be here and kind of give back.

• 1:46Ryan Peterman?

  Before we get started, when I, right before I got into industry, I knew nothing about the levels. And so like, what even is staff? Like when I got promoted to staff, my parents thought it was lower than senior. So it doesn't sound that good. So this is just to give you a little idea. This is like levels FY. Of course, when you get promoted, you make more money. But also, I feel like your work becomes a lot more... More interesting because it becomes higher level, more impactful, and it's a lot more satisfying. I'm just showing this to you so that when we say junior, mid-level, senior staff in this talk, you know what it means and like what it refers to.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  So I'll give you a little bit of an explanation of what each level means, right? Because you look at it and you're like, you know, what does it actually mean? So at the junior level, so this is usually where new grads are, right? Here, the expectation is just for you to be able to kind of code and, you know, push out some stuff with a decent amount of help. Whereas, once you get to the mid-level, there's an expectation that, yes, now you can kind of do more, do more things on your own, but you still need help here and there. And usually from junior to mid-level, I think on average it takes people maybe two to three to four years. And then from mid-level to senior, at the senior level, so we say that senior level is terminal because a lot of people will get to senior and just stop.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  So there's usually no expectation to go beyond senior. It's more like, do you want to? But there is an expectation for you to go from junior to mid-level to senior. So mid-level to senior, it takes around maybe also like two, three, four years. At the senior level, the expectation is that someone will give you a task and you can kind of finish it on your own and you don't need that much help. And then at the staff level, so again, this is if you actually want to get to that level, it's a lot more responsibilities. Some people say that, you know, it's not even worth the pay increase because you probably have to work a lot more in terms of your, you know, your hourly wage, right? How much you make per hour. But at this level, the expectation is that you're setting the strategy for the team.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  You're really thinking about the direction that the team should go in and you're kind of leading all the, you know, senior, mid-level, junior folks. So hopefully that was helpful. I thought, you know, I had no clue what all of these things were when I first started at Google, so. Yeah, hopefully this gives you a better view of what all the levels mean.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Uh, I was wondering, is it true I Google that terminal level is actually L4? Cause I've heard that somewhere, I wasn't.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh. With time, not really. Um, so there definitely is more and more of an expectation that you can eventually get to senior. But I think other companies um are more aggressive. So other companies often have a policy called up or out. So if you aren't able to get to that level, then bye bye. Um, but, but I think at Google, at least it's a little bit more relaxed and it's not as aggressive of a policy. Yeah.

• 4:49Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, and the up and out policies, by the way, they're not meant to be intense and scary like ninety. I don't have the exact, you know, data, but it's like ninety plus percent probably. Um, you know, make it to those levels. So it's actually kind of like, uh, I guess an upper bound of how quickly you'll grow. Go ahead, Bill.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  What's, what's the mix of uh, of technical and supervisory responsibilities that you had as you're going up those levels?

• 5:14Ryan Peterman?

  I see. I mean, on a high level, like junior, people are handing you tasks, you're doing them with a lot of help. Mid-level, you're not being watched on how you do it, but people are still giving you things to do. Senior, people tell you there's an area that needs your help and you go and create the tasks and you do them. And staff is you find the areas that need things to be done. That's like the high level.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Uh, how accurate is levels FYI, say during this?

• 5:41Ryan Peterman?

  It's pretty accurate, except the fluctuations in the equity. That's actually, yeah, so I just polled these numbers today. The Meta's numbers on the left, like why are they so much higher than Google's? Well, Meta's stock has been like ripping recently, so like, like that's why. But generally it's pretty, it's pretty accurate. So yeah, let's get into some of the prepared questions. Before we got here today, you know, in the RSVP, there's the ability for you to submit questions. We'll go through those and we'll kind of answer with various stories. Maybe Ashley, you can MC.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  A lot of people in the audience have internship plans and we're all wondering, how do we succeed? As an intern.

• 6:18Ryan Peterman?

  The rubric at different companies, it fluctuates slightly, but it's somewhat similar. When you get into that internship, they're going to give you a project. And they're going to see how quickly you can get the project done. If you can do that project in half of your internship's time, obviously, that's going to be really good. So they're going to be measuring your productivity. That's a big part of it. Another thing is the quality of your work. And you can measure that by how many times your code needs to be reviewed until it's submittable. So at the beginning of the internship, you write code and then it's trash. And it needs to be reviewed many, many times because you don't know the code base yet.

• 6:59Ryan Peterman?

  But ideally, by the end of the internship, your code should be reviewed with Nits and landing with one or zero revisions. So that should be changing. And then lastly, you should be communicating and, you know, pushing like after you finish that project. What is that thing that you do afterwards? If you propose improvements on top of your project, maybe you propose a new project entirely. Like that, that's like a really strong internship performance. And so that was, that was a lot. That's pretty intense. But that's what it looks like if you want to really crush it and for sure get.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I would say I definitely agree. Like most of the time internship projects should be pretty well scoped. Like there's kind of a defined end. So that's not usually true more at the higher levels when you know, when you're a full-time employee. The problems are a little bit more ambiguous, the solution is a little bit more ambiguous. But usually as an intern, they're, I feel like they're really just trying to see if you can like, you know, do some basic coding, kind of finish a basic task.

• 7:57Ryan Peterman?

  But your, your project was actually not like that, right?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:01Ryan Peterman?

  So that story, maybe it can help some people if they.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So during my junior year, um, my internship was at Google. And my internship, I only wrote 800 lines of code, which is really low. And I was really stressed out because I looked at my peers, you know, my other UCLA friends that were Google interns. I was halfway through the internship and I had submitted like 300 lines of code. And I look at my friend and they've submitted 11K lines of code and I'm like. Oh shit. But in the end, it was fine. And the reason was because while lines of code is definitely, you know, part of the metrics that people might use to evaluate your productivity, they also look at other things. So for me, I really took a lot of time trying to understand the code base.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I wrote a really complex design doc that explored a lot of pros and cons of different approaches. So the design doc itself was very technical. And that's how I was able to show my productivity and that I was able to kind of find a solution to this problem at work. You know, even though at the end of my internship, I still only wrote nine, eight hundred, nine hundred lines of code. I did get a return offer. It was really nice. So that's kind of what happened in my internship.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Next question. After we hopefully all get our return offers and we're working full time, we're all wondering, how do you be successful and how do we get promoted? So how did you guys get promoted so quickly to staff engineer in your twenties?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  You know, going back to the levels that we saw earlier, right? We had junior, mid-level, senior, staff. So at each level, you get to kind of a steady state where you're able to do well at that level. Right? But if you want to get to the next level, you really need to be thinking about, what exactly does a next level project look like? How do I start acting like the next level? Right? Let's say you were a junior level and you were super productive. You did a bunch of junior level projects. That is not enough to get to the mid-level because you have not been able to demonstrate that you can do a mid-level project. So what is actually more impactful is for you to do, you know, one mid-level project that solidly shows that you're at that level.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So I think what Ryan and I probably did really well is that we were really able to think about, what is the next level project? How can I do it and how can I get there? So we were really focused on making sure that we weren't spending too much time on projects that wouldn't necessarily get us to the next level.

• 10:23Ryan Peterman?

  You'll hear this key word, your manager will probably say it a lot, which is behaviors, which is that the things that get you promoted is not just doing a ton of work at your current level. Like I say, a junior engineer, you do 10 times as many features as a junior engineer. That will get you a really good rating. Your performance review will be good. But when your manager is looking to fill out like the rubric for the next level, for instance, none of the things will be checked off. There's nothing about, you know, initiative or doing anything that's expected of the mid-level. So like the thing that gets you promoted quickly is really understanding the next level's behaviors and going and taking initiative and finding projects that fit that.

• 11:08Ryan Peterman?

  And so I remember when I was like, you know, I was really, really eager to get promoted. And so I was constantly talking to my manager like, you know, as soon as I got promoted to one level, I was like, okay, what's, what's the next level? What can I do? Maybe that was annoying for my manager, but he was really helpful in teaching me what were the things that I needed to pick up so I could continue to pick up next level opportunities. And I think that's a big part of why my promotions were as fast as they were.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Next question. How much of your success in software engineering and getting promotions is just luck?

• 11:42Ryan Peterman?

  Although luck is a big part of it, you can actually do things to increase your luck. When I think back to a lot of the projects and things that got me promoted, there was some level of initiative where I went out of my way to find something. I'll give you an example, like actually, you know, actually when I graduated UCLA, I went to Amazon and I was floundering, like I was not doing well at all. But after I was there for like eight months, I realized like this is, I'm not learning. I don't know what the growth to the next level looks like. And so I just took matters into my own hands and, you know, applied to a bunch of different places. I got really lucky and I got all the offers at every place I interviewed at, except for one, which if you're curious what that place is that rejected me, maybe I can tell you off camera later.

• 12:27Ryan Peterman?

  But, um, you know, like I ended up getting to Meta and that kind of like set up my career for the rest. And you could say that it was lucky that I got the interview, but also, you know, I grinded to like, you know, applied to all the places, grinded lead code and like that really increased my luck. A good part of it's luck, no doubt, but also you have a lot of agency. And so I think that's. You know, really important too.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Definitely agree. I think the way I would frame it is that luck is two parts, right? One is the opportunity coming and the other part is you being prepared for that opportunity when it comes. Because if you got an interview, right, that could be luck, right? Maybe you talked to the right person at the career fair and they're like, oh, you know, why not, you know? And they give it to you, but you're not prepared, right? You're not like studying and preparing for the interview and then that opportunity is gonna pass you by. And I feel like that is really true, you know, not just when you're finding a job, but also at work. And in Ryan's case, right, he is setting himself up for more opportunities by leaving Amazon. And of course, like, he was prepared and ready when those opportunities came to him.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  If you had one piece of advice to give us, what would it be?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I love this question, cuz I, a lot of people have asked me this. And if, if you don't take anything from today's talk, I hope at least you take this part. I would say that the one piece of advice is to ask tons of questions. Keep asking questions when you're at work. I mentored a lot of interns and one intern mentee I had, she, at the beginning of her internship, she asked me, you know, Ricky, if you had one thing, one piece of advice, what would be? And I told her, ask questions, keep asking questions, keep asking questions. And at the end of her internship, I asked her, okay, so is there anything you wish I told you at the beginning of your internship? And she was like, I wish you told me to ask questions. And I was like, no, no, no, I definitely told you that. I, that's a, I'm hundred, hundred percent sure I told you that.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And she told me, yeah, Ricky, you did, but like, you didn't mean it, you know? I really wanna emphasize it to you. So I think a lot of people, you know, me included, when we start at work, we're like nervous and a little bit scared. And for me, I thought if I ask too many questions, they're gonna think I'm stupid, right? But I ended up kind of like trying to be, you know, delusional as possible and just be like, hey, you know. I deserve to be here, like, I have to ask questions. And I also kept trying to remind myself that it's better to ask questions and learn, and for them to think you're stupid than to not ask questions, never learn anything, you know, and stay dumb, right? I also remember thinking like, I'm just gonna try to learn as much as I can here, and if I get fired, I get fired, but at least I learned. So definitely try to ask a lot of questions.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I have mentored and grown a lot of engineers. And what I think is the biggest differentiator between those that like really succeed really quickly and the ones that don't is how quickly they're able to start asking questions, learning, being curious, unblocking themselves, and really taking that initiative to figure things out.

• 15:23Ryan Peterman?

  One thing I can add to that is I've had five interns at Meta, and some of them were rock stars, some of them were not. When I think about the ones that were rock stars, they had the the audacity to propose improvements, even though obviously I'm the more senior person. They had the audacity to ask questions, propose improvements. Sometimes they weren't right, but I could see the logic. But many times they were. And when I think of the low performers, I remember oftentimes they were like quieter. They kind of, I didn't know exactly what their progress was. I could tell they were trying really hard to figure things out without my help. And then time would pass, time would pass, and they're making no progress. And then, you know, at the end, they're not gonna get a return offer.

• 16:07Ryan Peterman?

  So asking questions, especially when you're junior, is is really important.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  What if I feel like I'm asking too many questions and I feel like I'm not a good and bad?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So my perception really successful software engineers were in college was that they were just like the super genius. You know, they're probably the ones setting the curve in the class, in my CS classes. But that's actually not true. Like, I think what makes a really good software engineer is having a decent level of technical skills, of course, but also having a decent level of soft skills. You know, learning how to persuade others, how to influence others. Because if you think about what you're doing at work, it's like this giant group project, right? And, you know, I'm sure y'all have had group projects. And you probably also Had tension at times in a group project, right? You want it, you want things to be done this way, but this other person is like, no.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  And at work, if you just tell, you know, whoever you disagree with, like, your idea is trash. You know, we should do it my way. They're not going to listen to you, right? So a better way to kind of communicate that message is, hey, you know, I see that you're pretty frustrated. You know, I see your point of view and why you would want this solution. Perhaps we can compromise and find, uh, you know, negotiate like some in between or some middle ground. What do you think? They are much more willing to buy into your idea and you're ultimately able to kind of ship things and get things launched. And that is, you know, I would say just as important as being a really great coder and understanding the technical parts.

• 17:39Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, definitely. I think one thing that surprised me, which I never thought would be true until I got to the industry, was that how little of the job was actually the code. So, uh, code is, is really important too. So they're both important. But I think when you get into the industry, you'll see there's all this other stuff around the code that matters a lot. Obviously the people are important because it is kind of like a giant collaborative project. Like there's thousands of engineers working on the software. But there's all these other things too, like you have to write a ton. Like I hated writing in high school, felt like not objective, like not as, I don't know, I just didn't like writing.

• 18:22Ryan Peterman?

  But when I got into industry, like I realized writing is the job. It's how you influence others. Every code change has all this writing around it. Like you gotta write design doc before you start, you know, get feedback. Then when you're actually writing the code, you write a description of the code. Then when you land it and it has results, you write results, you write about the results and, you know, share that with the group. So there's, there's so much around the code that you need to do. That's about people and communication. And I think if you're not, is this a common term, GigaChad, GigaChad coder? But if you're not a GigaChad coder, you should be fine. I think everyone in this room, if you go to UCLA, you're smart enough. To be writing code that matters.

• 19:07Ryan Peterman?

  And then a lot of what's going to make you excel is actually not about the code and your technical skills.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Yes, related to that, have you guys ever gotten imposter syndrome?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Imposter syndrome, my best friend, been with me my whole career. So I think a lot of people get imposter syndrome. I think it's very normal. I think a majority of people actually do get imposter syndrome. And I think it's a little bit odd too, because I remember when I first joined Google, right? I passed the interviews, I did my internship, they gave me a passing grade on my internship. And then I got there and I was like, oh shit, you know, like everyone, everyone, everyone's a good chat coder here. Um, how am I gonna make it? Surprisingly, even after I got promoted, after I got promoted, I was still like, uh, maybe like they promoted me wrong, like maybe I got promoted too early. And then after I got promoted after that, I was like, oh man, this, well, maybe not the last promotion.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Maybe they like screwed up this promotion and I had it a lot during my career. And you know, it's pretty normal, right? Um, the best way I kind of got around it is, you know, again, going back to that mindset of, all right, even if I'm like not meant to be here, like let's try to learn as much as I can, do the best job I can. And you know, if I get fired, then at least I learned a lot. But you know, I never got fired luckily. Uh, but imposter syndrome definitely still comes here and then in waves too. Um, but you know, I think eventually uh, you get over it and everyone. It's really an experience that a lot of people have, so don't feel stressed out if you ever feel that way at work.

• 20:39Ryan Peterman?

  Did you ever have any feedback that made you feel, because you must have been

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:44Ryan Peterman?

  just getting good marks, like how'd you, how's it possible that you felt not good even though you were getting all this praise?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I was just an anxious little kid, you know, I was, I was just always stressed out about work. And I remember one time in a one-on-one with my manager, you know, he like looked at me a little bit and he was like, you need to chill, you know, like you're doing okay, you know, calm down. And I was like, are you sure though? Like, you know, seems us.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  I think part of it was also because, you know, when they

• 21:14Ryan Peterman?

  They say you're doing well. I'm like, is this like a C passing doing well? Or is this like an A plus doing well, you know? And I think eventually I did kind of learn, you know, through talking with a manager and understanding the expectations for myself of like kind of how I was doing. And I was a little bit less stressed after that, but yeah, I was pretty stressed in the beginning.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  How do you advocate for yourself while at work?

• 21:41Ryan Peterman?

  This will be helpful for your whole career, but if you're also going into internship, this could be helpful. In order to get promoted, there's kind of like two pieces to it. One is you do good work. That's obvious. Like we all know, do good work, you're gonna get promoted. But actually promotions are ultimately decided by people. They need to know about your work. And if you go and build this amazing feature that nobody knows about, it doesn't matter how good it is. No, you're not gonna get any recognition for it. And so, you know, how do you advocate for yourself? After you've done great work, which is the hard part, there's just this last step that you gotta do, this last few percent of your time, where you, maybe you either write about it or you present it in a meeting or something like that where you say, hey,

• 22:26Ryan Peterman?

  everyone, let's say you're at an internship, you have your intern project, you hit a big milestone. Rather than just like quietly moving on to the next step, maybe in your one-on-one, you tell your intern manager like, hey, I did it and it's like a few weeks early, I'm ready for the next thing. Like that kind of puts the thing, the idea in their head. Also, maybe you make a post internally, you write an email or something that says like, hey, you know, update on my project, it's done, I'm, I'm killing it, look, all the good results here. And you can write about it in a way that matters to, to the audience. If you do that, people are gonna get a sense of, okay, this person's killing it. And it will be kind of surprising if you didn't get a, a return offer,

• 23:09Ryan Peterman?

  if you were doing so well and people knew that you were doing well. So this is like specifically that last step, and I think a lot of people miss this, especially if they're more introverted or they're more quiet, is taking that last step on after the good work. You gotta tell everyone about it and writing is one of the best ways to do it. But maybe, you know, it depends on your specific team setup. Maybe you can talk about the work and stand up or whatever meeting.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  The term that we often use at work is visibility. So you want to have visibility for yourself. It could be doing it by yourself, as Ryan said, but it can also be doing it through other means, like through your manager or through, you know, whoever else you're working with, like a PM. They can also help you get visibility, but it is really important. I forgot, but there's some analogy where it's like, oh, you know, if a tree falls in a forest and no one sees it, did it really fall? So I also think, I often think about that, you know, like just because you did a project, people, you also need to get people to know that you did that project, right? Otherwise, in the future, like you're trying to get promoted and you're like, oh, I did this. And, you know, whoever is helping you get promoted is like, no one knows, like, how is anyone supposed to know?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  So it's definitely important to get visibility for yourself at work.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  So I think a lot of people are interested in this. Post-ride, which is better, big tech or startups?

• 24:29Ryan Peterman?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Okay, actually, I'm curious. What do you guys think? Okay, so between big tech versus startups, if you had both options, if you would pick big tech, raise your hand.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Okay, that's like the whole room.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Okay, and then anyone startups, I'll hop up for startups. All right, we got a few, a few people. For anyone who's going to, or would wanna go to startup, are you willing to answer why? I'm kinda curious.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  I have a first movers' advantage, so like if the company gets really big, you'll have a lot of that.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  You fail, but it's always gonna work for big tech. Yeah, I see another hand raised.

• 25:12Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 06

  Whoever changes you doing like more on facing and like, like make more of an impact.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Like proportional to the company, yeah. Cause I think the impact is probably gonna be smaller because of the scale of big tech, but proportional to company will be bigger, I'm sure, yeah.

• 25:29Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, yeah, that's that's really interesting. So, okay, big tech versus startups. Before saying like the answer that I would give, I think there's some differences, right? Like, you know, big tech versus startups, one of the biggest things is the prestige, or like the, some people call it like brand equity. If you go to a name that is known, and then anyone sees that resume, it's, you're at least that good, you're at least that bar. So it makes it a lot easier to get hired. So if you go to a startup that people don't know, then you wouldn't have that prestige. There's startups, there's a whole range of startups, so there are very well-known startups too.

• 26:11Ryan Peterman?

  Like, imagine a company like Perplexity or something, you know, that's a hot startup. Maybe you would still get some of that prestige. But I definitely remember I went to Amazon, which was, I guess, the lowest tier of the thing ones at the time. Probably still true, I don't know. But a- after I I went there, like, my LinkedIn was blowing up, and I was not writing on LinkedIn or anything, just so many recruiters just coming in, random emails. So I do think that's worth something, for sure. The the first mover advantage, that's interesting. One thing that I'll say is generally true for big tech versus startups, across career growth, across your compensation,

• 26:52Ryan Peterman?

  is it's a trade-off between high expected value versus high variance. So what I mean by that is, if you go to big tech, you're, in the average case, you're probably going to be doing better, but you will never have a moon up or a moon down scenario. So if you wanted to, like, you know, the jobs we work today will never be like rich, rich. Like, you, I mean, you'll make a good amount, you make a good amount. It it's it's a good amount, I'm very happy, no, no, that's great. But like, well, if you want like ten million dollars or something, you're not gonna get like that level of rich by, you know, working in big tech. Whereas at a startup, you can, you know, boom or bust.

• 27:35Ryan Peterman?

  You could, your company could be dead tomorrow, you could also be- You know, making, you know, eight figures or nine figures in like some crazy cases if you're founders. So, uh, and then that's also true for your career. If you were there early and it moons, you you'll be, you know, like a director really fast. You'll you'll go on like VP, like some crazy thing where, you know, you could never do that in big tech. So it it kind of depends.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I personally chose big tech. Um, like at the time I had a couple of startup offers and I also had a couple of big tech offers. And as part of the reason is I'm just lazy, you know, I'm a good work-life balance. Like I sold my soul to Google so that I could live a good life. So I'm so glad I chose big tech because, you know, some of my friends, they are at startups. They're working so hard and in some cases, I think some of them did moon, you know, go crazy. And some of them did not so crazy and, you know, I'm very happy I chose big tech. Uh, it's actually really interesting because, uh, at UCLA, it seems like there is.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  There are a lot of, there's a big proportion of people that want to go into big tech much more than other colleges. And I've always wondered why, because I've also talked to some recruiters from startups. And they say, yeah, we always go to UCLA to recruit, uh, but no one seems to want to join. So we kind of stopped going.

• 29:00Ryan Peterman?

  Which colleges are the startup colleges?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You know, like, uh, Stanford, I think, uh, they said a lot of Ivy ones. So I I'm like, is it just because, you know, like they're rich, so they don't need to make money immediately after college? I don't know, you know, these are just my guesses.

• 29:17Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, uh, one last thing I would say is the learnings can be different. So in in big tech, you're learning from the industry best practices that are already set. So it's kind of like you're not going to have a lot of variance. You're gonna get, you're gonna learn the good stuff. Uh, it's it's all there, like, you know, all the the best practices. In startups, it can vary widely, like your role could could be even less code. It could be maybe more PM stuff. It can be more a bunch of things, whatever the startup needs at the moment, depending on how small it is. Yeah, I think it's, I guess it's similar to the variance thing. You could learn a lot too from the crazy startup trajectory. But also there can be a case where it crashes and burns and you don't learn as much.

• 30:02Ryan Peterman?

  So, um, so, yeah, I mean, you know, in conclusion, I'm. I picked Big Tech and I would recommend Big Tech. At least for the first few years of your career. You get just huge jump in prestige. You just lock that in and then you can do whatever you want after that. Just learn all the basics in Big Tech. Get that early signing bonus and then, you know, the rest of your life, do it. You can go, you know, do whatever.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  And as interns and as future new grads, how do people, managers like you guys, measure by impact?

• 30:38Ryan Peterman?

  Impact is just another way of saying the concrete measurable outcomes of your work. And the tech industry is great because you're not compensated or rewarded based off of the time you spend or like your years of experience. Like literally, you know, how much money did you make? Or how much, you know, how much faster did you make that important customer flow? Or whatever, whatever it is. And so when we talk about impact, it's specifically that. And so my answer to this question would be, it really depends on the team you're on. If you're working on ads, it's going to be money. If you're working on some infrastructure team and maybe it's the cost of the database

• 31:21Ryan Peterman?

  or maybe it's the latency of the database. If you're working on like a growth team, it might be like daily active users or a percentage of people that sign up on some critical customer flows. So it really depends. I think the main thing is like wherever you go, you should hundred percent learn this from your team and your manager because this is how you're rewarded.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if you write like 10K lines of code and it's all fixing typos in a code base, there's no impact, right? Like, you know, I mean, there's a little bit of impact, a tiny bit, but it's nothing compared to, you know, for example, if you were somehow able to 2X the revenue of the company, right? That's, that's probably something that people care a little bit more about.

• 32:02Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, like one line code change that makes a 20% improvement and something that matters versus like hundreds of thousands of lines doing random things no one cares about. Always want the one line change and that's true pretty much at every company.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Do you need an MBA for engineering management?

• 32:21Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, so this is an interesting question. I remember when I was in college, I had the same question because I didn't know and I think you just learn from maybe the older generation that MBAs are good for some reason. I don't have an MBA, I'm a manager. You don't have an MBA, you're a manager, but actually I was working on some research with some company to like answer this question. I actually have this graph, it's kind of interesting. So this company basically scrapes LinkedIn to pull data and you can see here, they pulled like a few thousand data points from LinkedIn about directors and hire. And you can see with and without MBA, it's comparable. And actually without MBA is even lower. So yeah, you don't need MBA.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really odd. Like my mom, she kept telling me to get an MBA, like I had to get an MBA. I didn't understand why, but I think also it's because like my mom's, you know, an immigrant and she was like, ah, UC is not good enough. You need an Ivy, you know, like Stanford, you gotta go to Stanford. You gotta get MBA at Stanford. And she, she always like, I don't know why. She was my hater. She would have, she believed I wouldn't succeed without an MBA. Now she's a little bit like more chilled because I got the staff, right? And then she's like looking on Xiaohong, she's like little red book and she's like, oh shit, wait, that's kind of good.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  And I guess we're all suffering through this right now. So we're wondering for you guys, how was college recruiting?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely wanted to have a black hole swallow me at times. College recruiting was definitely, you know, hard. I'm sure all of y'all have kind of endured it. I think one of my recommendations or like a story I like to share with y'all about my college recruiting experience is with Yelp. So I had a, I had a technical coding challenge with Yelp, right? They sent me, I don't know, it's a Hack and Rank thing and I opened it. I was doing C++ because you know how we all learn C++ to start and that's all I knew at the time. God forbid. And it was it was a merge step of a merge story, right? And I just had to complete it. And like I did, I put it together.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure the code is right, but I was getting a seg fault and I did not did not know why. I kept checking my work and I really didn't get understand why I was not able to compile the code. And it was a 15 minute coding challenge and then I failed. And, you know, the Yelp recruiter came out and I was like, okay, Ricky, so goodbye. And I even called her back and I say, come on, like, I knew this. I knew this hack rig. It was the merge set of a merge sort. Tell your engineer to look at it because I'm 100% sure it's right. And she did. And she said the engineer took a look at it. It looks correct. Actually, here's another coding challenge to do again. And that one I passed and I was able to move on to the interview round. So that was an example of me persevering through college recruiting.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's worth it to kind of push back sometimes and advocate for yourself during the college recruiting process.

• 35:27Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, for your first role, that's the hardest one, no doubt. You have to be scrappy, like what you did there, like you, you literally got rejected and you said, no. Like, look at it again. And so you, yeah, you kind of have to do stuff. Once you get the first one, it's a lot easier. But yeah, definitely want to be scrappy. And I think like, yeah, my first role was like some random company. I don't even put on my resume anymore, but it helped me get some experience. So then the next time I my resume looked a bit better and then I could shoot some shots at some better companies. Yeah, I think it's tough, the first one, but if you can get a little scrappy or like take on some companies that are not as desirable, that can help a lot.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  People's number one motivation. As much money as possible.

• 36:16Ryan Peterman?

  This is interesting because I feel like I didn't, I have no idea about money when I was in college. Like, actually, my life goal at some point was like, oh, I want to make 200K one day eventually. And then I have some people, yeah, I was actually, I was eating, I was eating lunch with Daniel. And you were saying, you look behind you and you're like, oh, 200K is like minimum wage in the Bay Area.

• 36:45Ryan Peterman?

  So, yeah, but it's interesting that you guys asked this. How do you make as much money as possible? I would say. That it depends on how much money you wanna make. If you wanna be rich, rich, then you don't do what Ricky and I are doing. Yeah, if you wanna be truly rich, you probably go to big tech for a few years. And then you start your own company. Cause that's like the only way to make, you know, super crazy amounts. I mean, would you say it's something different?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  It's like, if you want to be like fifty mil rich, right? You probably have to go crazy with something. You gotta, you know, join OpenAI as employee number fifty and then you can probably make it. Me and Ryan, maybe if we work hard for another twenty, thirty, forty years. Uh, and we get promoted three more times. Yeah, maybe we could get there and, you know, the stock market, whatever, continues to do well.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  But if you're, you know, if you're just having, if you're just looking to have like a good life and, you know, just buy the things that you want and, you know, go on vacation whenever you want. I would say definitely go into big tech and just do a good job there, um, as me and Ryan did. So we have some last words for you. And what I would like to impart with you guys is that work is not everything. You know, like even though we're here talking about our careers and we look back at our careers and we're very proud of what we did. When I look back on my twenties, you know, now I'm in my late twenties. I don't, the happiest moments for me were not when I was like working all the time or when I was getting promoted, right?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  The happiest times were like when I'm at Coachella and I'm really drunk and my shirt's off and I'm having fun with my friends. Those are the most memorable moments for me, um, in my twenties, right? So even though you should work hard, right? And hopefully you can do a good job at your job. Definitely make sure to also go have fun. You're in tech, um, you'll graduate and then you'll have free will. I don't know, go see a Beyonce or Taylor Swift concert. Go travel if that's what you wanna do, but, uh, make sure you're definitely a multi- multifaceted person, you're not just, you know, like, if I made Google my life and I got laid off,

• 39:08Speaker 01

  you know, I'd probably be crashing out, right? But if Google lays me off one day, I'll be fine because I know I'm so much more than just, you know, some computer science guy. So that's advice that I want to impart with y'all.

• 39:20Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I mean, on that point too, I guess one another way to look at it is in every aspect, like every area, there's like this general curve of like diminishing returns where if you put in a lot of extra stuff into some area, that little by little, the gains are going to go away. And so actually, if you're truly a maximizer, you go everywhere where you can get more returns before it starts to diminish. So I guess that could be another way to to look at it as well. But yeah, thanks for for having us here. That's like the prepared questions. If you guys have any questions too, we like, let's get into those too.

• 40:01Ryan Peterman?

  We don't need to to end it. We're happy to continue to answer, but it doesn't end at the slides.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're gonna open it up to audience questions. I guess like, what are your current goals, like career or like social wise?

• 40:15Speaker 04

  You seem pretty successful, so just like.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  My story is funny. So I feel like Ryan scammed me because I actually like in the beginning, I was not that career driven. But then, you know, Ryan and I were roommates, and we're still roommates. And I feel like he would kind of like whisper in my ear and be like, oh, but what if we got promoted, bro? Like, that'd be dope. And then I was like, oh, maybe, I guess. And, you know, but I'm really thankful to Ryan, right? Because I think back in the time, back in the day when I saw these levels, we also had data about, you know, how long it took to progress from each level, right? And I was like, oh, you know, I'll just take my time kind of doing it. But then Ryan was like, oh, but what if we went faster than that?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  And I honestly didn't even think that it was possible, right? So but then I kind of asked my manager, and my manager was also supportive of me and also kind of helped me. And I actually got promoted a lot quicker than average. I obviously tried, right? I obviously put in the work.

• 41:20Ryan Peterman?

  I don't know how many of you guys are from the Baria. He's from the Baria. He went to one of those intense high schools. He says that I tricked him. No, he has something inside of him. He's pretty competitive, I'll say.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Grinding is kind of fun, but uh...

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Do you guys know where Montevista is?

• 41:40Ryan Peterman?

  It's a Montevista kid right here.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  But I've been trying to get the Montevista out of me. It was kind of like, oh, why not, right? Like, if I'm gonna, if I can, like, why not try to do it? So I did put in the effort and I did kind of succeed, but I wasn't, I definitely wasn't like, I don't know, giving up all the other things in life that I wanted to do just to kind of continue on with my career.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  So it seems like you guys have stayed at your same job for most of your career, at least for now, and I'm wondering like what your guys' perspectives are on switching jobs every two, three years for like, for the money or for like more responsibilities promotion?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think I'm a really special case where since I have joined Google, I've been on the same team and basically under the same manager and I really have not changed any teams. But that's not to say that I haven't like looked for other teams, right? I think what usually happened is I would look around and I would see that my grass is indeed greener. So for me at least, I stayed on the same team, but there's definitely this aspect of survivorship bias, right? Maybe other people on my team, they left because they weren't having as good of a time. So I think it really depends case by case. I definitely think it's worth thinking about, you know, every six months,

• 42:59Speaker 01

  do I still want to be here? Are there still the right opportunities? Does my team support me? Does my manager support me? And you know, depending on your answer to those questions, you can think about leaving or staying.

• 43:09Ryan Peterman?

  I've done a lot of research on this topic, actually, and it's kind of interesting. It's a little bit nuanced, so uh, actually maybe the level thing. Okay, so actually, job hopping, the common take you hear is like, job hop for promos, you know, no brainer, do it. Actually, it really depends. So, like, if you want optimal career strategy, it would probably be that you aggressively try to job hop in this area while you're trying to get promoted, and you just take the faster path. Because here, like, momentum does not matter that much. You're just trying to get to the next level. And so, you know, if I were to put it simply,

• 43:50Ryan Peterman?

  you probably want a job hop in this area, but once you get down here, job hopping is actually counterproductive. Because, first off, you're not, no one's gonna hire someone at E7 or L7 if you're in L6. It just does not happen. If anything, they're gonna down level and you hire you here. So it's not gonna be an effective strategy. But also, a lot of the promotions at this level come from building credibility and trust and having a track record. And so if you're just job hopping all the time, you're not gonna have that momentum and people are not gonna know you. So I would say, you know, optimal is like aggressively job hop, especially if things aren't good, just go to someplace that'll give you a promo, if you can get one.

• 44:33Ryan Peterman?

  But then here, you gotta be a little more thoughtful. One last thing I'll add, which is kinda interesting, is I've seen, I saw someone job hop from E5 to E7. I also saw someone job hop from E5 to E6. And I think the way that they did that was really interesting. If you're in a well-measured ladder, like I am, you, you all know I'm right here, and the recruiters know that too. No one's gonna put me here. At best, they'll put me here. But if you left here, like, let's say I left and I went to start my own company. I'm, I'm like in this probability cloud somewhere, you know, like, no one knows what I am.

• 45:13Ryan Peterman?

  And so then you could come back in somewhere if the work you're doing matches the expectations of these levels, which is really rare. It's like an unusual thing you'll never hear anyone say. But I've seen some very rare data points of that. So if you ever leave the ladder... Now you you kind of created some some leeway here. But it's it's very rare, though, to do something like that. I think that guy that went from five to seven. He left Google at five. He joined a startup. He wrote a book as well on JavaScript. And then he came in at Meta as an E7. And then he continued to get promoted.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  Ricky, what team are you in at Google?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I'm in ads. I I describe my job as making ads pretty. Y'all have definitely seen my ads, even if you've had ad blocker, I'm sure.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Maybe maybe afterwards, I'll show you my beautiful ads.

• 46:06Ryan Peterman?

  I've seen videos of very like prolific people in the industry coughing about how AI is going to be like a low to mid-level software engineer. I was wondering how like the implementation of AI and she's been affect hiring for like entry level.

• 46:22Ryan Peterman?

  As far as we see it today.

• 46:26Ryan Peterman?

  I think, you know, it's hard to say in the future, maybe in ten ten years, five, ten years. In the short term, though, for all of you, even if you're first year, I still think that it's not going to completely change things. There are still some things that it's difficult for LLMs to do. And if anything, we just see that LLMs just empower engineers. So. You know, it's something that we use as a tool. And there's a lot of non-AI tools that we use at work that write code for us as well. And that doesn't scare anyone. This is just like a little bit further. In conclusion, I don't think it will majorly change things, and I wouldn't change your strategy like. Don't just change major from CS because you're worried that there's not going to be any jobs.

• 47:09Ryan Peterman?

  At least for for the people in this room, if you were maybe a freshman in high school or something, I I'm not sure.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think my perspective on it is there are always going to be people who have to kind of like tell the AI what to do, right? Tell the AI it's got to build in this way and then kind of like verify that it's like correct. So even though, even in like five, ten years in the future, I am still imagining, right? Maybe like an entry-level software engineer, they're not coding as much because the AI is going to do it for them. But they're still kind of like figuring out how to, you know, get that AI to do what you want you want it to do. Because AI is always going to be a tool for us, right? And also, people got to build the AI. So that's kind of my perspective on things.