OpenAI & Meta Distinguished Eng (IC9): The Psychology Behind Tech Career Peaks | Philip Su

0:00You know what? Like, maybe this ultimately is my final level. This is Philip Su. He grew quickly to a Distinguished Engineer, or IC9, at Facebook, and then OpenAI. And I interviewed him about the psychology of peaking in your career. When I got to seven, you know, I felt like, hmm, this is pretty much nearing the boundary of my capability. It's like when Beowulf at age 70 is asked to, like, slay the dragon one last time. Part of me wishes that I had that in me. Do you think that you'd be happier if you got promoted slower? I feel like titrating it out would have been better for me. Here's the full episode.

0:42Last time we talked, I focused almost entirely on you got to a distinguished engineering level. You grew very quickly. How'd you do it? and this time I wanted to focus more on what happens when you hit your terminal level or what I mean is there's this idea of a career asymptote which is no one can grow forever and at some point you're going to get to a level where you can't go any further and you may have 20 30 years left in the career so what I wanted to ask you is you know when you got promoted to IC9 or distinguished engineer, which is crazy high. That's like four levels higher than a senior engineer.

1:27What was your immediate thought? Were you thinking, I want to go to IC10? Does that exist? Or are you thinking something entirely different? Yeah. I think when I started, I honestly didn't think about it. When I was earlier in career, I really just assumed that, oh yeah, you go for a promotion. And once every few years you get promoted. And I never once thought there's got to be an end to this, right? Like everybody, there's got to be an end, right? And I think many people might not think that through, right? And so for me, it took many years before I figured out, you know, even at seven, for instance, I felt like, oh, hey, things have got to slow down because, you know, it gets harder and harder.

2:07The amount of scope that you need becomes tougher. The number of roles that offer the opportunity actually gets smaller because the organization needs to also need that scope of work, right? So for instance, at Microsoft, oftentimes when they reorganize, they figured out, hey, your organization should at most have four partners. And that's just a budgetary sort of thing. That's a business opportunity thing. So you need the opportunity as well. And so when I was growing to nine, I think I just didn't think of going any further as realistic. I was at Facebook when they first created Level 9, right?

2:44And I remember that three Level 8s were promoted into 9. And at that point, those three Level 8s were all universally loved and known throughout the company as obviously super senior technical people. And to me, that felt unreachable, if I'm honest, when I think about those folks and the type of work they were doing. That really felt out of reach for me. So I think definitely by the time I got to eight or nine, it really felt like, you know, the end is near. Well, a lot of people might feel that sooner in their career too. What kept you pushing past the staff level or the senior staff level, you know, six, seven, eight, nine?

3:24When I got all the way through to seven, I think, which was at my 12 years at Microsoft, right? I was really personally ambitious for level growth. And I think the reason was in schools, I loved tests, I loved grades because I was good at grades and tests. When I started professional work, there was nothing quantifiable. Like it wasn't like once every two months, you got a test that told you you were doing well. So for me, promotions became one of the very few quantifiable things, right? It's sort of like, well, how much money do I make? And like, there are so few things that are actually numbers, right?

3:59So to me, a level was almost like an achievement number. And so throughout my 20s and my early 30s, I was really ambitious to get through all the way to level seven. But I think starting there, I just realized, you know, the nature of the work changes with every additional level that you go into. I wasn't sure that I would like the nature of work, first of all. And then the other is I felt things slowing down rightfully because everybody has a talent limit. right so for me as I approached that I just began to feel like you know I was no longer ambitious for the further growth so I would say my growth into eight and nine neither of those were things that I was seeking myself I was by that point doing the work I found interesting and trying to do a better job of it as opposed to I would characterize my time especially in my 20s as mostly focused on how do I grow to the next level tell me what I need to do like that sort of thing By the time I went from seven to eight, getting to eight was honestly a surprise for me at Facebook because getting to eight was the first time I learned that there were levels at Facebook.

5:04When I joined Facebook, it was 500 engineers, right? Everybody was focused on the work itself and did not worry about careers and stuff, which I think is normal for small companies when you're on a big mission. You're just trying to get the mission done. So I didn't even learn I had a level until my boss, who was Boz, right, said, hey, congratulations, you've been promoted to level eight. And I was like, what? There's a level here? Like, that's kind of amazing. Thank you. Right. So I think I stopped focusing on the level itself and my promotions became more a consequence of the work that was being done.

5:39Early in your career, it sounds like you were constantly maybe harping your manager and you say, how can I get promoted? What's the next thing? And later you transitioned into doing meaningful work and getting promoted as a byproduct. What was it that changed in your mind where you went from that mentality to promos don't matter anymore? Yeah, I think there were two things that come to mind. One was that the thrill of the promotion itself was no longer the same as when I was younger. So I think when I was younger, because I sought after those grades, those measurable metrics, I very much felt great every time I got promoted.

6:20This was like wonderful, right? I think as I got promoted, even into level seven, I started to honestly become a little bit not ambivalent about it, but I guess it wasn't all roses to me anymore. The idea of getting promoted because I realized that each promotion also came with much higher expectations, expectations that I was no longer positive that I was going to deliver well. You know what I mean? When I went from a four to a five, you know, I was confident that I could do this work. Like, it'll be great. Right. When I got to seven, you know, I felt like, hmm, like this is pretty much nearing the boundary of my capability.

6:56And so I felt a lot more comfortable saying like, hey, if they keep me here perpetually, it is still work I enjoy a lot. I think the second thing that really changed for me is realizing also that asymptote, right? Realizing that, you know what, like maybe this ultimately is my final level. I was so humbled many years ago when I've had this lifelong mentor throughout much of my adult life that was one of my best managers at Microsoft. and I recently just in the last few years thought you know there was this one conversation where he promoted me into level seven and I said to him that's great thank you let's talk about how to get to eight right and his first response to me was like Philip can we just take at least one one-on-one to celebrate the fact that you've actually reached this tremendous level at Microsoft and I honestly felt like no like we can't like I've got to keep going but years later I realized you know, he himself was probably 15 years more in industry than I was at the time.

7:57And he himself in hindsight had to be a level seven. He was not a partner at Microsoft. And so for me to come across sort of so naively, like without considering, for instance, his feelings or considering just realistically, this is a guy I look up to a lot and he's giving me mentoring advice all the time and he himself is level seven. And so for me to like be pushing so hard. I think just the humility of realizing that, you know what, like people do tremendous work at those levels. And I should just appreciate that if I can even keep up with the expectations, that's already kind of a big accomplishment.

8:33If I were to think from when I was at my youngest, the beginning of the career, my thought would have been keep pushing. And the thoughts that you just said are, uh, they're noble, but let's, let's go to eight. Let's go. Yes. This person's that level, but I want more. I want more. What, what calmed the, I guess the gut crazy energy of I want more, even if it's not realistic. I think some of it might be as simple as age, to be honest. And I think society is designed to work this way, right? Like young people go to war, right? Traditionally. And like, there needs to be like this ambition of like, I'm going to build great things.

9:18I'm going to do great things. I think that energy from the young is super powerful. And I definitely don't want to sit here and say, let's quell all of that. Like, let's make sure when a person is 23 and they start work, they're like, you know, like E3 is fine. Right? So I definitely want people to have that ambition. I think maybe some of it is the natural aging process, but I do think at least for myself, a lot of it was the shifting nature of the job itself. I would say for me up until, let's say, an IC6 level of work, it just felt like doing the same stuff, but grander, if that makes sense.

9:53Like you're still coding all day. You're like meeting with engineers primarily and product managers, sometimes designers. But it's just about doing like at a much higher amplitude. You know, I'm now going to like do much bigger refactors. I'm going to like participate in longer range projects like, oh, we should like do this new service that does X. but I think beyond that the nature really changes to where like just doing more better is typically not how people get there you will have find very rare cases for instance where people can do more better but they are like preternaturally like gifted for you know super fast coding or whatever I was definitely not that person because I was much more a generalist and so for a generalist going beyond six I think it does change the nature of the work such that you're doing maybe less direct coding, for instance, maybe even less direct architecture stuff, but much more things like team direction.

10:45You know, is this even the right product to be building right now, given where the industry is moving? Maybe trying to influence even another organization that's on a collision path, right? Like maybe trying to find a mutually, you know, useful way to land both sides. So I think that also, you know, take pragmatically as you go up higher in levels, it's almost definitely true that you will have more meetings, just period, whether you're an IC, whether you're a manager, that's just what it is. And you know, plenty of people for whom like directors, as an example, every single hour's meetings and half of the hours are double booked.

11:19And so they're just choosing which one to go to like for that, right? That's typically how, like one small example of how the nature of the work changes. And so for me, as the nature of work changed, you know, I was less enthused about, um, you know, how it might continue to change if I continued getting higher level. You mentioned that you sought out a demotion from IC9 to IC7 or distinguished to senior staff. Did you ever consider saying to your manager, I don't want to get promoted past IC7? From going to seven to eight, not really, because I didn't know levels had existed at that point. So like that promotion was sort of like surprise, right?

11:58But I think if I'm honest, Facebook was also so small. Even back then I was promoted into eight, maybe one year at Facebook. I was a seven at Microsoft for probably three years. So you figure like, let's say four years, right? One year into Facebook, I get promoted to eight. Facebook was still, I want to say back then, 800 engineers globally. So, so the company was much smaller. And I think when a company is that size, I think the work doesn't include as much meta work. You know what I mean? Like the work is mostly the work. So you're like doing the code, you're doing the actual, right. Whereas I would say my experience, even of Facebook many years later, you know, when I came back to Facebook Seattle, you know, um, when I joined, I was the second person who joined, right.

12:41So the office was four desks. When I went to London for five years and I came back, the office was more than 2000 people. And so just like that mind blowing size means that the typical senior job when an organization is tens of thousands of people is a lot more people wrangling, I guess, and a lot more, I don't know, a lot less technical. I think one of the struggles I've had throughout my career is so many higher level jobs, including a solid IC6, quote unquote, just coding, has to do with how well they work with others. And I, in some environments, just don't work very well with people like I and others do.

13:22I would say objectively when I was leading the Facebook London site, I was good at the job. It was a very people focused job, but it was for me, the happy parts of people like welcome to the team or like, Hey, we're going to like do this collaboration with mental park and all this stuff. I think there's another type of people oriented thing that happens at large companies, which is a lot of what people might call politics, but a lot of sort of work that has nothing to do with the actual software deliverable, but has everything to do with the fact that when three or more people are somewhere, there's politics, right?

13:56And like just figuring out the people thing, dealing with unhappy people, for instance, is something I'm very bad at. Giving people constructive feedback is something that I am fairly bad at. And so more jobs at those levels just require even an IC7 minding his own business is probably regularly supposed to be giving pretty helpful feedback to other engineers. You know, they're not their managers, but still you should be improving those around you. And I am much less good at that. When you sought out the demotion from IC9 to IC7, I'm just thinking for someone who's thinking that the success criteria is going up in levels, it would be very difficult to accept going down from, you know, kind of like undoing all that hard work, quote unquote.

14:47What was that process like? I think it was hard. I think it was Will Smith or someone else famous said like, getting famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. And then getting not famous is horrible. And I think that's human nature, not just about fame, but about anything, right? When we are growing in anything, like let's suppose you first get into auto repair, right? The first big job you do beyond an oil change feels like success, right? Eventually you've like removed an engine, you've like done clutches, right? And at some point, like my age right now, I literally just started giving away some of my auto repair gear because I'm realizing, you know, I'm not doing this as much, like physically I'm not as capable of doing in.

15:33And that feels a little bit sad. And I think the same thing happened to me in my software career, which is on the way rising up, it always felt great, right? Other than the rising expectations and the worries around that. But the general thing felt like, oh, I'm progressing. Being at the top was a mixed bag. You know, there were some amazing things. There were some very hard things. And then I think coming down, I feel like there were a few things that were hard about it. One was that I think I knew I could do more, you know, because I had done more before. But part of it was the feeling of being exhausted, running at that pace, and always having the eye of Sauron, like roving the land, looking for people, right?

16:20And I think the higher level you are, the more that you feel that intensity all the time. And rightfully so, like you're getting paid the big bucks. And so it's right for a company to say, you know, constantly question whether or not they are getting their value out of you. So I think it's only fair, but I felt that struggle. And I think the other thing that was hard for me about getting demoted down to seven was more that feeling that as I saw other people who used to be below me rise above me beyond that level, that was very difficult. I don't begrudge them their success. So I'm not at all saying like, I'd rather go out there and make sure this person never succeeds.

16:58What I mean is more that I felt wistful, I guess is the right word, which is like, I was not crushed that someone else was doing better. But I did feel a little bit like, hmm, I once could do that work. And part of me wonders if I could again, right? It's like when Beowulf at age 70 is asked to like slay the dragon one last time. Like he gets out of his old, you know, house and he's like, and he slays the dragon one last time. Part of me wishes that I had that in me, that like when I'm 70, I can be called upon one last time to do this thing. Right. And I'm able to deliver at that level. But I know that maybe that's not it for me.

17:33Right. You mentioned that you used to be able to do it and then you couldn't. Well, what changed that made it hard to perform at that level? I think if I were to. Bucket it into a few categories. One is my environment changed. So as Facebook, the company grew. right um senior ic's do a lot better i think in tiny uh in in larger companies if they are domain experts so you're great at let's say sequel optimization right and like you're helping sequel move on to ssd and you're moving sequel into the cloud um that sort of ic does best in a large company in a tiny company a generalist does best because like when i first started on video calling i also negotiated like the contracts with skype with the third-party tester like with all sorts of things.

18:19So I'm like negotiating contracts. I'm like doing crazy things, but I'm also coding the thing. And then when the press release goes out, I'm talking to the press. So I'm literally meeting the press about the video calling feature, right? That is what a generalist excels at. And I could only do that because Facebook was small. By the time I came back to Facebook Seattle and the Seattle office itself was 2000 plus people. And the company was maybe, I don't know, 30 ,000 people. There's no way you would send me out to negotiate a contract with Like Microsoft, that would be ridiculous, right? And so for me as a generalist, my environment shifted to where specialists would survive better.

18:51And for me as a generalist, I was honestly just not as useful, right? Like for one whole six-month period, the team that I was on, the only mission for the ICs for that entire six months was fix the bugs on this internal tool. So I spent six months fixing the bugs, which I'm happy to do, but I am not especially skilled at that, right? And so I think one thing was my environment change. I think the other thing that changed for me was I did tire a little bit of feeling like there was always so much pressure just to meet expectations, if that makes sense. So up until I would say IC6, I never felt the eye of Sauron.

19:30Like I was never at any point in my career feeling like, oh, if I just fall a little below right now, maybe they're going to can me. right? But I think regularly at seven and beyond, once in a while, I would feel like, oh, like I feel like my own performance this half. I don't know. Like things aren't looking great. You know what I mean? And I think in a way, it's like when I was super ambitious, being like the slowest member of a team, but catching up and rising was exciting to me. As I accomplished more in my career and I felt my happy places, I no longer like the feeling of being slowest on a team or feeling like I was potentially going to have a talking to at some point because I wasn't performing on expectations.

20:13So I think that that sort of pressure also was something that I no longer enjoyed. In reality, that Eye of Sauron, though, was in your head rather than reality, given that you got promoted from seven to eight and eight to nine, right? Yes, maybe some of it is imposter syndrome, but I think a lot of it is actually just an honest look at myself and reality. So when I was an IC4 looking to go to IC5, right, there were plenty of IC5s where I felt like I could totally do that work. Like, just give me two years and I'll be just as good, right? At IC7, I could see many IC7s where I'm like, honestly, if you put me on that guy's team, I could not do that work.

20:54Like, right? Like, I know I can't, right? Right. And, and so I think my realistic appraisal of my own abilities was, I think, more accurate to what they actually were. Right. Um, and also maybe some of it, you know, if I riff on your theme a little bit, maybe some of it also is that, um, as you get more and more senior, not only are the expectations higher, but the number of business roles where you are the perfect guy for the role actually is far, far less. So when you're an IC6, almost any team would welcome one. It's like, great, like just pick up a keyboard and like, we'll get going. But I think once you get to a certain level, it's like, well, we need someone who's good at like, we need someone who's good at marketing.

21:41And then this person has to also be somewhat technical or like the shapes become very specific. Right. And I think that just realizing that my shape wasn't right for many, many roles also made me realistically feel like maybe this isn't the right long-term place for me. It sounds like over the course of your career, you worked an extraordinary amount. I mean, you mentioned last time we talked that you bring a sleeping bag to work. I think early in your career, it makes a lot of sense because you were so gung-ho and you're pursuing the promos. But then when you were at Facebook and you weren't pursuing the promos, you're just getting them because you were doing awesome work.

22:21What was your motivation to work so crazy hours at that time? One of the most intense work periods of my life was shipping the first version of Facebook video calling. I had worked with Denise, with Chago, with maybe one or two other, with Vijay. That first version, when we went out, I think I went about six weeks down in Menlo Park, where I literally got up out of bed, went in straight to work and worked all the way until I drove back to the apartment and went to sleep. I was eating junk food the whole day. It was like sun chips and like whatever. But despite that, I lost 10 pounds in the six weeks.

23:02So it goes to show like how intense like brain related work can be. But I had no idea there were levels. So obviously a promotion was nowhere on my mind when I was doing this work. But I tell you, it was one of the most fun periods of my life because it felt so thrilling that I was directly impacting like real users because Facebook was so tiny back then. Like you could see the users having errors right away. I was patching errors every day. Like it felt like missional, right? It felt like this was the first time video calling was going to be easy for people without installing any software. WebRTC was relatively new back then.

23:40We still had to get some software with the first version out. And so I felt like the strong sense of mission and being on a tiny team of like three people also felt like wow i owe it to the other folks too who are working equally hard to like pull forward right so i think that was still in it for me but no longer based on um promotions as a thing but more like i believed in what i was doing and i felt that direct um direct customer contact with people i could actually see getting impacted positively by the fixes. When you look back on a career of working so many hours, would you say that it's worth it?

24:19And would you recommend it to others? I think it's become popular for successful people to tell people not to push us hard and for wealthy people to tell people to not push us hard. And it's understandable that people who aren't as late in their career or aren't as wealthy would say, well, it's easy for you to say that, like, right? Cause you've already gotten the, like, I once had a guy say to me, like, well, it's easy for you to say that. Cause you've already been there, done that. And I think at some level, yes. Um, but I also think that there is sometimes wisdom that can only be gotten when you live a certain thing yourself.

24:57This is why when someone tells you, um, money can't buy happiness, nobody believes it. Right. Everybody thinks there'll be the one exception. And I think the thing is like, you have to have lived a certain life before to really objectively be able to say whether it's better or not. And I think for me, given my personality, I think the really much higher level roles that require broad impact and feel like a lot of pressure for me people-wise, just for my own personality over time is not the right thing. But I would at the same time say, well, I don't want to look at Gitforce in the mouth. Like the freedom for me to, for instance, work on my own software right now, it only comes from having had a career where I got paid enough that I could save enough money that I can go two years writing my own software.

25:46Right. Um, and I don't want to look that in the mouth and say like, Oh no, like I totally shouldn't have done that. Like that's not true at all. Like, I think what it is for me is, um, I would have appreciated when I was younger, being more cognizant of the trade-offs that I was making. You know, like, hey, if I dig in really hard right now and I really work hard, then this will buy me the freedom when I'm 50 to work two years on my own software. Like, I wish I knew that was the trade-off. Whereas I think at the time I was just blindly pushing forward of like, hey, like I'm just ambitious. I want to do all this stuff.

26:21And in your career and your life in general, you must have mentored so many people. And like you said, if you give someone advice and then, but they can't really take it until they actually experience it, is all advice useless then? What's the point? I think there is still a point, which is there's a massive difference between you ignoring advice and you not knowing the advice was even there. And I think the difference is two things. One is when you have the advice in the back of your head, but you're ignoring it, when eventually some consequence comes about, it actually will reinforce for you why the advice was given.

27:06And you're much more likely to take more immediate action because it rings true. Right. And so when someone tells you money won't buy happiness and let's say a brick of two million dollars falls on your forehead. Right. And then you go out and you buy something and you realize it's not a happy thing. like one of the things that I splurged on for myself when I felt like I have financial security is I bought a$50 pen okay because the New York magazine said this is the best pen out of the 100 they reviewed and it was this barren fake pen out of machined aluminum or something and I bought that pen and after using a while I realized this is not my favorite pen like there's a G2 pilot or whatever that's like much better than this and it's like a buck 50 right um it took me buying that aluminum milled pen before i'm like actually if you mill a pen exactly round no matter what surface you put it on it's about to roll off right and like it's like hard to grip onto because it's slippery um it takes getting there so i i think part of the advice is when you finally do like buy that pen and you're disappointed by it you realize hey people used to tell me that this thing might happen, right?