Anthropic Eng Leader And Ex-Senior Director at Meta On Microsoft vs Facebook, Career Learnings

0:00Fiona Fung:In a world where you can be anything, be kind.

0:02The Peterman Pod Host:This is Fiona Fung. She grew to a senior director by rising through the ranks of Microsoft and Meta, and today she supports the Cloud Code team at Anthropic. And I asked her for everything she learned along the way. What are the things that stood out to you that's different between Microsoft and Facebook?

0:19Fiona Fung:Definitely speed came to mind. Oh my gosh, a sprint lasts a week? Like usually a sprint for me was like four weeks.

0:25The Peterman Pod Host:Was there ever a time where you received feedback and it really changed your career?

0:30Fiona Fung:Looking back, that's probably one thing I wish I'd done better at.

0:34The Peterman Pod Host:Here's the full episode.

0:39The Peterman Pod Host:Let's say there's some project, it's going to be really impactful, but team health is going to take a hit or vice versa. How do you make those calls?

0:49Fiona Fung:Oh, that's a really good one. We had quite a few of these in the Facebook marketplace days, I would say recognizing when a moment is really such that it's almost existential. So Facebook marketplace, I would definitely remember we had a couple of lockdowns or war rooms where it really became, wow, we really needed to focus, like make sure, and actually that's one thing I like about lockdowns or war rooms, it allows team to focus, focus on what it is that we were really setting out to do and making sure we're focused on doing that really well. But it does come at a cost to team morale. So my advice is really have those deliberate trade-off discussions with the team and leadership.

1:32Fiona Fung:Like I think looking back, that's probably one thing I wish I'd done better at, that in the early marketplace days in some of those war rooms, I wish we were also, yeah, just even more up, like we took a very aggressive goal for, I forgot if we called it lockdown or rural room because we changed the team names after a while, but we took a very aggressive growth goal. So we weren't going to exit until we hit a certain growth number. And looking back, I think that like, then that could have been like, and that war room actually went on for like a really long time. If I had to time machine to do all over, I probably would have like taken a look at that and be much more realistic of how long that was going to take, discuss the morale and team health of the team, and then just be very upfront with the team of, hey, we're going to go on this journey together.

2:21Fiona Fung:But this is how long we think it's going to take.

2:25The Peterman Pod Host:I mean, when I think of war room, I think of everyone's in a big room and it's for maybe a week for a launch or something like that. How long was that war room?

2:34Fiona Fung:Oh my gosh. It felt like at least two months. And that was what I mean. We took a growth goal. But I think at the time we were like, well, maybe it's a couple of, you know, fixes that we had to do. There were so many lessons learned. I still remember in that war when we launched 75 experiments at one time, too, when we were trying to. And so and we were in a literal like there was a room in Menlo Park and a room in Seattle. But I think that one no one knew. We going into we didn't realize it was going to, you know, take us that long. So that was definitely a lesson learned.

3:04The Peterman Pod Host:At some point in your career in Microsoft, you became a manager of managers. I'm curious, what is the big pitfall that maybe you experienced or maybe growing pain when you went from a frontline manager to someone who's managing others?

3:20Fiona Fung:It kind of goes back to that partnership. Actually, I will share my story. The first time I supported managers or became manager of managers, I guess, was with two different managers. One was manager for TypeScript team. And they are brilliant, brilliant engineers, still probably one of the best compiler engineers I've ever worked with. And so I remember right in the beginning, I'm like, hey, it's like we were always collaborating as a partnership. What are the things you're really strong at? What are the things I'm good at? And how do we divide and conquer? So I would say that's maybe one thing that's unique of when you start supporting managers and managers.

3:57Fiona Fung:They are also going to have additional skill sets. That's not just IC skill sets, also manager skill sets. So it's even more opportunities to figure out how you both can complement each other and help each other where it's most needed. So that was one really good, you know, like just new approach that it was new compared to supporting all ICs. I would say the other one that becomes even more important is building that trust but verify muscle. Because there's a lot of trust. Like, you know, as managers, we have a lot of responsibilities, leading teams. And but making sure that, you know, because I think sometimes you might also hear advice of, oh, delegate so it can scale up.

4:35Fiona Fung:if you delegate too much but don't do the trust and verify you you lose touch with with a project a little bit too much so finding that right balance um of of and and and some of that comes from experience but also making sure encourage that really transparent conversation with folks you support like to to all managers one thing i ask for is um please you know like let's have fast feedback with each other but also let's be always super transparent about what's going out well and was not going well. Like, you know, that meme of the dog holding the coffee cup in a room of Fargo, this is fine. That's my nightmare of if something's like really that.

5:11Fiona Fung:I remember once I was supporting someone, I'm like, hey, how are things going? And, you know, they're like, oh, it's fine. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm not doing fine. I'm impressed that you're doing fine. So, but it starts with just, because if we can actually discuss, you know, things that are like, you know, hot or really need help, that's how we can actually solve it for a team versus the, this is fine dog me.

5:31The Peterman Pod Host:You mentioned to be a good manager, you should enjoy growing others or mentoring others. And I'm curious now that you've done it for so long, do you have any tips on how to mentor others?

5:42Fiona Fung:I would start it with just a really explicit conversation with your mentee of what they're looking for in the relationship. Like, so for example, after three months of mentoring, what does success look like to them? Or after six months, what does it look like? just so that then it's good effective use of time for you both. I would also say another tip is there's a difference between mentoring and coaching. And sometimes making sure you have that explicit conversation to see what the other person's looking for. So in mentoring, for sure, you're like listening and trying to dispel helpful advice.

6:13Fiona Fung:In coaching, you're actually acting as a mirror for the other person to help them discover the answers within themselves. So thinking about those two different modes as well could help.

6:23The Peterman Pod Host:I see. Yeah, that's one thing I was curious is how much of it do you feel like should be driven by the mentee versus the mentor?

6:31Fiona Fung:I honestly, the most effective mentoring relationships, it comes from that goal being set by the mentee. And for sure, the mentor can help with like life experiences or even advice of different resources. But for all the folks out there looking for mentoring relationship, I would say set really explicit goals for what it is that you're looking to receive out of the mentoring relationship.

6:55The Peterman Pod Host:If you were to give advice to ICs on like what's the best thing you can do in one-on-ones, what would that advice be?

7:04Fiona Fung:I would say save status reporting and all that for some asynchronous form. if you know like you know here in Anthropic a slack and and so it could be a slack message or I like to create a one-on-one doc that is a living doc between both of us so that any async update we can just put in there I would say save the actual one-on-one time for any conversations you want to have whether it's you're curious about learning about something new or you think hey it's a good opportunity for me to you know like dig a little bit deeper into the work that I'm doing with my manager because there might be some interesting product conversations whatever it is I would save the one-on-one time for those live conversations.

7:42Fiona Fung:And anything that's status reporting, you know, you can feel free to use the asynchronous forms of communication.

7:48The Peterman Pod Host:Yeah, I think I hear that a lot, but I still think a lot of people do status reports anyways and one-on-ones. So going into working at Facebook at the time, what's the story behind you leaving Microsoft and joining Facebook?

8:04Fiona Fung:So definitely I've had a lot of friends that was really, really enjoying Facebook and they're great engineers. But there was always something I really wanted to finish at Microsoft. So, you know, like whether it was Visual Studio Editor or Debugger. The last project I was working on was JavaScript and TypeScript. So I really cared about, you know, being there with the team to get TypeScript 1.0 out the door. But then I got a ping from Facebook in late 2014 from actually who ended up, you know, being my first manager of Facebook. We worked together on Visual Studio. And he's like, hey, I'm noticing people buying and selling products on Facebook groups.

8:44Fiona Fung:And we're thinking of building a product around it. And we're going, get out of here. I'm in one of those groups. It was an amazing experience. The first time I made meaningful new connections because in those days, Facebook for me was more about reconnecting with high school friends or coworkers. I never created any new connections. But I told him, but I really wanted to, you know, be with a team to help, you know, finish TypeScript 1.0. But that was like the like that was one big draw to Facebook. It was just this dream of enabling something totally different from DevTools, but the just dream of enabling commerce on Facebook.

9:19Fiona Fung:just because I really, like there were three things I really believed in, in that kind of starting with C2C commerce, because I'm very mission driven. So in those days, I was passionate about, wow, if we can enable the style of commerce. Number one, we're very fortunate in tech. We can afford most things new and probably deliver it in six hours, like 24 hours is not even fast enough. Most of the world isn't like that. And a difference of$5 or$10 can be a difference of can I afford it or can I not? You know, most folks can't afford things new, like, or folks may not be able to afford things new and buying them used would be a way to be able to afford.

9:57Fiona Fung:That was one. The second was an environmentalist at heart. I feel like there's all these goods in the world. It'd be great if I can help work on a platform that enables those goods to get their second, third or fourth life. And the last one is just supporting small businesses. I really love local small businesses. I feel like they're the lifeblood of any community. So having a platform that enables someone to kickstart a business without first having to get a brick and mortar store, I was really passionate about. So that was all the mission. And so that was one big draw to join then Facebook in 2015.

10:30Fiona Fung:The other was I was by this point at Microsoft 11 and a half years and I felt, oh yeah, I've become reasonably proficient at being a Microsoft engineer in the Microsoft stack. But I realized if you take me outside of that bubble, there were so many things I didn't know. And so part of it too was also wanting to just make sure how I can learn to be an effective engineer when I'm not within the safe cocoon of the Microsoft ecosystem.

10:59The Peterman Pod Host:after you got to Facebook and experienced the culture for a bit, curious, like what are the things that stood out to you or you saw that's different between Microsoft and Facebook?

11:10Fiona Fung:There were things that were definitely similar, like work with really great people, people really passionate about what they're doing. Definitely speed came to mind. So Facebook marketplace just operated. We were doing weekly updates at the time with the first version. And it was actually on www.facebook.com. So I remember there were weekly updates. I remember going, oh my gosh, a sprint lasts a week? Like usually a sprint for me was like four weeks at Visual Studio. And back then I thought that was already a short time compared to where it started. So definitely speed. Facebook also felt much smaller to me back then, especially coming from Microsoft.

11:46Fiona Fung:So there used to be this poster on the wall that says nothing at Facebook is somebody else's problem. And I really love that culture. It was no matter your role, if there was, you know, a problem, everybody leaned in to help. And so that was something I really, really loved and appreciated.

12:01The Peterman Pod Host:when you eventually left meta i saw that there were you know you write this badge post and hundreds of people are are kind of saying the reason why they enjoyed working with you and i noticed several patterns of things that you had done where you know many many dozens of people are saying i really like that particular part of working with you so i'd love to go on each of these and kind of ask you your thoughts on them so the first one is on dog fooding a lot of people are saying they really appreciated you being a great partner and reporting problems in the product and using the products. So I'm curious, why do you do dogfooding as much as you do?

12:40The Peterman Pod Host:And why is it important?

12:41Fiona Fung:Oh, I love it. It's one of my favorite topics. So as I mentioned, my first job out of college was using Visual Studio to build Visual Studio. And I'm really grateful that I got to experience that. And I think that's where I've learned, oh, wow, yeah, I'm going to use a product every day that I'm building. So that's where that initially came from. And I feel it really gave like, not only empathy for what our users are going through, but it really gives you a good pulse of the product. Plus, it was easy on VS because you're using VS to build VS. But then I guess I carried that over to Facebook Marketplace.

13:15Fiona Fung:I remembered our first test launch was in the Seattle area, and also Hawaii. And I remembered I would have a pile of things that usually we would have, you know, donated and my husband was getting so annoyed. Like, why do we sell this pop stuff? I'm like, no, I need good inventory for me to sell on Facebook Marketplace. And that was where actually it was super rewarding to not only in terms of using the product and gaining insights, also just inspiration from, you know, meeting users of Facebook Marketplace and seeing that what you do makes a difference. So I think that just kind of carried throughout.

13:47Fiona Fung:So then, yeah, when I was on RL, it was a lot of dogfooding of our VR Quest devices. Or I remember when we were first starting up Ray-Ban Stories, which now became Ray-Ban Meta. It was actually during COVID. So then it was a lot of dogfooding, you know, devices from home. But yeah, like, and I think definitely as a manager, you don't get to code, you know, every day or nearly as often as one would like. But dogfooding the product, that's what enables you to experience what it is that your team is working on. And I like to think of it as my maker time. So for example, in my last role working on VR product with Horizon OS.

14:27Fiona Fung:Yeah, like anytime I was able to help us debug some hard to repo issue, that was my maker time. And I felt it was my little way to contribute to the quality of the product. Plus, I don't know why the way my house is built, I was always able to repro certain floor height bugs. And I was really happy at being able to, you know, get those logs.