Retired Netflix Engineering Director On Regrets, Video Engineering, Hiring Stories

27:02And he said, she's killing it. It's like, how did you know? I said, I can't believe I was so wrong. How did you know? And I just told him straight up, when you see a brilliant engineering mind, everything else doesn't matter. How fast they can solve LeetCode, whatever. Can they build like a Google type ahead, you know, scalable solution or whatever? because these things can all be learned. They can be learned in a very short time, but you can't teach that. And you have that young mind hungry, willing to work hard and able to make smart decisions. So that's kind of how I approached hiring back when I was actually hiring people to bring it to work for me.

27:42That doesn't work. That doesn't scale, right? You can't do that at Meta. You can't do that at Netflix today or Google, maybe Netflix. I don't You know, you can't do it at Met or Google. It's just a legal and, you know, policy problems, you know, everything you'd have to worry about. It would break down really badly. But, you know, so we have to have the system we have to have. So basically it's like, hey, we're going to give you a bar. And if you meet this bar, you know, hire, no hire. Yes. Okay, level. This is what we can see from what we're in, you know. And I've had people that they were a six somewhere else and they said, well, I got an offer of five at Meta.

28:20I was like, look, better to come in under. And I said, if you come to Meta as a five and start immediately executing as a six, you're going to be blown away by your bonuses, your multipliers, your RSU refreshment. You're going to be blown away by the way you get treated by coming in and really demonstrating that you're under level. But if you get hired at that higher level and you come in and you're struggling, you would have been a really good five, but you're struggling to execute at that sixth level. It's just not going to work because there is no way to fix that. Right. If you get hired in a company like Meta or Google or probably any of the fan companies and you end up being over leveled, they don't have a way for somebody.

29:00Well, OK, you can leave or we'll put you to a six because we hired you as a seven. There's no way to fix that problem. So when in doubt, go low and work hard and get that quick promotion, get those bonus and RSU multipliers and prove your mettle. You mentioned in identifying the engineering skill set, that fundamental engineering skill set. How do you identify that? Is there a question you ask or is there certain things you need to see? I think it's you interview to the person, right, not to the process. So, if, you know, we have a master's civil engineer who's expert in wastewater treatment, and it's like, it's a hard engineering problem.

29:47And if you can demonstrate mastery of that problem, and you can explain it to engineers that know nothing, and, you know, to the point where those of us who got it realize that, like, this is just a finite state machine, right? I mean, after all, what is almost any engineering? I know when you get into structure and everything, a little different, but so many systems, mechanical systems, right, you know, engines, right, or whatever, they all end up kind of in some way connecting back to like states and transitions. I think when you see that, again, we brought this person in as effectively would be like a new hire, a junior.

30:26We had a role like as a data analyst or something. but so we we had an if we would have brought them in as a full-on software engineer with these expectations up here they would have failed so again that's when you're a smaller company you you create flexibility and you can actually hire and and build people up is there examples of the strongest engineers you worked with and what made them strong at Netflix? I'm simply going to say the absolute best engineer, strongest engineer I've ever worked with is Giannis Katzavanetis. I'm generally going to try to avoid names, but I got to put him out. I met him in 2000 in her video.

31:12I brought him in. He left the industry and was working as a professor in Greece teaching signal processing. And I brought him in during the summer break to help. I was working on, this was in 2010, I was working on some ideas around parallel encoding. And the work we did gave birth to content-based encoding, which is now how the entire industry is working. We wrote an early patent on that. He went back to school, but we convinced him to join us at Netflix a couple of years later. He took that one level further to now the model for encoding for both Meta and Netflix, which is called convex all encoding, which is actually mathematically delivering the highest possible quality for a given bandwidth capability.

32:04And he and I worked together at Intervideo, Netflix, and Meta. He's an engineer's engineer. One of the most brilliant people I've ever known, he actually developed a model for basically for codec evaluation that's a cost-benefit model. For this amount of energy, you get this amount of codec efficiency, which is revolutionary because he's very much academic. And you always heard the joke, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're very different. So his brilliance, I think, was really bringing this academic world and forcing it into the practical world where we can actually make decisions based on not what some hypothetical, you know, two videos you compress can do.

32:54But actually, you know, what happens when we run this test against 10 ,000 videos or a million videos or a billion videos? You've mentioned meta a lot at this point. Maybe we should go to that. But I'm kind of curious, what's the story behind you getting recruited to Meta or working at Meta? Sure. So as I mentioned earlier, the Netflix culture deck, the early one, said that we really should interview often so we understand our market value. And I had an outreach from Meta, and I don't remember who it was. But it was like 2018, I think, 2017, late 2017. I think it was late 2017. And I told my wife, I said, yeah, Facebook, it was Facebook at the time.

33:41Facebook wants to interview me. I said, I don't want to work there, but I haven't interviewed in like 12 years. I think I need to interview her 10 years, whatever. So I went and interviewed and I kind of went over, I will say honestly, a bit full of myself because like you would hear me, we built Netflix, we built the highest scale encoding platform in the world. whatever. And I got to the interviews and I was whiteboarding everything out. I remember one guy, he did good interviews, but this one guy said, David, you have to understand, Facebook cannot solve their video scale problem with CPUs.

34:18And I just, I walked away and I emailed him back later. I was like, you floored me, right? I never realized it. And so I turned, eventually I got an offer and I turned it down. I just wasn't ready at the time. But I had reached out to this guy and I just told him, thank you for letting me know that I was very narrow in how I understood the world of video because I had no concept. And I want to talk about this, about Facebook's meta scale in a little bit. I had no understanding or concept. shortly after that Giannis who was in Netflix pulled me aside and said hey I've got this offer from Facebook and we sat and talked about it he was talking about the ASIC he was talking about all these things he was going to work on and I I saw a passion in him that I hadn't seen in a little while and he had done some really good work at Netflix but I don't think that the culture again is not built around individual contributions I don't think he ever, you know, was getting the joy and I think the reward and recognition.

35:29Remember, recognition is not, for an engineer, is not your name in lights. Sometimes it could be as simple as like a senior executive saying, hey, this is really good work this person did. And I'm not saying they didn't do that at Netflix. I'm just saying it like, we'll talk about this, Meta is very intentional about individual credit. But so, and I think he felt like the problems weren't big enough for him. And he was, he just had this look and I was like, wow, this is amazing. You know, he's like, aren't you going to try to talk me out of it? I was like, you're my friend, right? As an employer, as your boss, I don't want to lose you.

36:07But as your friend, I'm like, how can you say no? And I'm not even going to try because, you know, because I care about it. And I just, I wish I could tell you going there would be the wrong decision. and so through that process i started with a company i was only interviewing just to work on my you know interview muscle and in the end i was just looking across the aisle and thinking man that's freaking hard problem and i had a good solid team doing well i had a leader lined up ready to take my place and just the way things kind of worked out in in in 2019 um i ended up leaving Netflix and word got out and Facebook reached out to me very quickly.

36:50I had to re-interview because the gap had been too long, but I got a job offer and I took it. I was excited and I came in really, really excited about that role. But I will have to say, it's really easy if you have leadership skills and talent, kind of that innate talent to be a leader, it's really easy to grow organically, right? The encoding technology team in Netflix was one person, me, and then it was two, and then three, four, five, six, and I need a manager, seven, eight, ten. Eventually, I had a director under me and a handful of managers and 55 people total. And you know everybody, you've grown into that role, you've built trust.

37:37I came to a well-functioning team. I was given responsibility for 55, 60 people that had the video processing team. And they didn't know me from anybody. And I feel like I came in, like one of the first lessons I got, and I knew, we all knew that we had problems. Everybody knew Facebook video platform, there were some quality problems. The scale had been met. The scale challenge had been met, which is the hardest problem. and they were looking for somebody to help them kind of let's you know can we be a better video experience i remember early meeting i started talking about some of the things i saw that maybe need to be worked on i got feedback like david you know first of all because i told everybody i really value and appreciate direct and candid feedback don't ever be afraid to give me feedback and i was talking about something and then and one of my people on my team the next week at a 101 and said, David, do you say you like candid feedback?

38:32Can I be candid? I said, yeah. He said, yeah, you've been here two weeks. You're already telling us what we need to do. And then we were talked about a little bit and I said, so what I think I hear you saying is I need to shut up and work on building trust. And that's what I had never, that's a muscle I had never, ever developed before because I built trust by working with people and growing over time and just coming in as a senior leader, as a director, and, you know, and they're asking, the company's asking, we need you to do change, you know, to help us, you know, improve this is all, but you can't just come in at the same, and start, and I didn't, and also I will say that, you know, I, part of that was ignorance, because I didn't really even fully understand, I knew what some problems they were having.

39:22So I stepped back. I realized that first and foremost, being a leader is about relationships. Ultimately, we're an engineering team. We have to make good engineering decisions. But if the managers reporting to me don't trust me, we go nowhere and I fail. And I realized it. So that was really good feedback in the moment or near the moment. And I spent a lot of time trying to sit, listen, build trust. And I feel I was very successful in that. Over the time, I've been told even now, the team, there was a lot of respect there. They knew I respected them, even if they were struggling or needed feedback, they knew I was going to give it to them.

40:04But they knew that I was going to tell them like it was, and I was going to be honest with them. And so that was my first lesson. It's really hard stepping in as a leader of a large team that's already doing well. If it's a broken team, your job is to unbreak it, right? But if it's a team that's actually executing well, your job is to not break it first and then help it move forward second. And I jumped in to move forward. So that was a really good experience for me. I really feel like, I mean, my saddest thing about Meta is that it was a last job because I feel like if I were to go take another full-time job in an engineering company in a larger leadership role today, the value, the skills I learned at Meta, I mean, I would just come in as such a better organizational and engineering leader, but I'm just kind of past the point of really wanting to take on that level of responsibility.

40:56So the only thing I wish I could have done, you know, if there was, I wouldn't get, wouldn't trade my Netflix experience, but there was somehow like, maybe I could have had these two in parallel or something. It just, the way it worked out, or if all this would have happened, but happened 10 years earlier, then maybe I'd be like, hey, I'm 55 and I'm going to leave Meta and I'm going to go join this other company and really help them build this engineering work. Because I learned a lot. I learned the most about engineering leadership, not at Netflix, but at Meta because of the challenge of the role.

41:29Yeah. I'm curious, when you come in as such a senior leader, you mentioned building trust. What does that mean concretely? What do you do if you're coming in as a senior leader to build trust with the existing team? I think, first of all, taking the time, and I did spend a lot of time in one-on-ones, but you don't want to get over your skis, ahead of your skis. So really spending, first of all, this is a very technical role. Video processing, even for the director, these decisions are being made. You have to understand at some level why you're doing what they're doing. Otherwise, they may not be successful.

42:14But it really involved spending a lot of time in one-on-ones and talking and asking questions and making notes and understanding the fundamentals of the system, the interactions, understanding their roles, the team, the people. I mean, one of the first decisions I had to do was like, because they reorganized when they brought me in and, oh, you need a manager for this team. I, you know, it's an up-level manager and you can, you can promote or you can hire. And, you know, and here I am having to make a decision and I have managers I don't know, or I could hire from externally. And I'm just like, and that's like, ultimately I, and, and some people are, why don't you just promote one of your managers?

42:56And I'm like, well, I don't know him. You know, I don't just want to make a decision because it's politically correct. So I sat on that decision. I got into that trust building mode. I spent some time talking. And finally, I said, okay, now, and they were right. There was already a manager on the team that would have been the right manager for the role. Because I told my boss, well, if you thought he was right, why didn't you promote him before you hired me? Because now you're asking me to own a decision that I can't, that I don't know. But I did take the time. And it was a difficult relationship at first with that manager, because I think, you know, He kind of felt like this was his role.

43:31And why isn't he giving it to me? Is he just going to hire somebody else? I mean, I have to quit. But we spent a little time together. And then I had one of them said, you know, I apologize for the time, but I just can't make a decision. This is like huge, right? It's your future. It's my future, everything. And I don't care what people tell me. I need to understand what I said. But I do believe at this point, I can say with confidence, you are the right person for this role. And I want to move you into this role. And that kind of, you know, and then, you know, by the time he left Meta to do something new, we had gotten past, you know, all the trust issues.

44:05He understood who I was. You know, I don't walk on water, but he knew like he no longer assumed the worst. He always went, wait a minute, I know I can trust David. If I'm understanding this, I know that's not what he would tell me. Hey, you said this, what'd you mean? And so we ended up having a very good trust relationship, right? And it was really just all that was about slowing down, right? Not making any rash decisions, not getting ahead of yourself, not telling the team what they need to do. And, you know, just like absorb, absorb, absorb. And I feel like even like if I could go back to my 2019 David, just joining Meta, I would even the investment I made was I don't feel as adequate.

44:44But I was like, that first six months, I should have just told my boss, I'm in school. And if there's a critical decision, you're not going to have to make it together because I need to understand better what my team is doing. I need to know the people better. And so I would spend even more time, both technical and people, understanding that. But I do feel like that early feedback kind of helped me correct and got me to a place where I was successful. I see. At Meta, you mentioned the scale was really unique. I'm curious, is there any favorite work or favorite project that you did at Meta? There's a couple of things that I talked about.

45:28I already talked about the scale, bringing that Netflix quality into the Meta scale, which we were successful. The second thing really we have to talk about is COVID. So you remember my world at Meta, I joined in late July 2019. By March, nobody was coming to the office, right? Not even nine months into my job, we're all working from home. And to make matters worse, you know, we, the video for, I think it was all of Facebook, but especially video, New Year's Eve was like, we started planning for New Year's Eve in the summer because every New Year's Eve, we would see this huge spike in traffic for 24 hours.

46:13You just like, I guess before I joined, perhaps New Year's Eve was a system breaking, but by then everybody was planning to make sure we were successful in New Year's Eve. Well, by April 2020, every freaking day was New Year's Eve in terms of video upload quantity or volume. in terms of streams, live, every system we had. And we're watching these systems slowly bleeding out, right? Because we had never run at that kind of sustained load. We have some race conditions and all these things. And I'm just like, the whole freaking world. You know, the prime minister of India was addressing his country regularly using Facebook live streaming.

46:52And the whole world is like maintaining their sanity and continuity and connection using our apps. And so that was just a huge, huge, I mean, I was terrified. They did the weight, you know, the weight of that realizing, I realized that the connection was a lot more than video, but video was like huge. And, and so, but, you know, but we all, you know, from our homes, we all got in and put our heads down and we, we found all these problems. We ironed out the wrinkles in our system. We resolved these race conditions and got to where we were chugging along at New Year's Eve every day. And the systems, after about a month, systems were all running, metrics were holding, everything was really good.

47:35And so I was really proud of that. And I think when I joined Facebook, I didn't really understand the value proposition of the company. I had a Facebook account and I shared pictures and social and some videos now and then. I didn't really understand because I was feeling like it was a very kind of like my US-centric view of the company. And it's just a social app that we all share our stuff on. And I learned in relatively short order, first of all, I understood what it means if your customer base is three and a half billion people. That means that half the world is on your platform. It means that, and again, I'm in no way disrespecting Netflix, phenomenal company, phenomenal product, but Netflix has 300 million people.

48:29So you could roughly say that's the top 5 % income in terms of income of the world, the wealthiest 5%. Meta has the wealthiest 50%. And that wealthy is kind of a loaded term because at the bottom, you're talking about people are making$6 to$8 a day. And Instagram and WhatsApp, in particular, or Facebook, this is their lifeblood. You have little mom and pop stores all through India. And I'll be in a Uber and the driver, it was actually very early on, I was going to a business meeting in Seattle. And the Uber driver, where do you work? I said, Facebook. He's, oh my gosh, I love Facebook. You know, he's from Somalia.

49:17He's with my family. We're all across the world. And if it weren't for WhatsApp, we could not even, we would totally lose touch. But WhatsApp keeps us connected. And I'm just like, so it was this realization that unfolded over time of what a phenomenal product this was, but not just Facebook or company, but how important our work was. Because again, when people talk about social in the US, I don't care if it was TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, they always kind of talk about the good and bad side of this, fake news, whatever, bad video, whatever. But we are totally oblivious to how we are improving the lives of people in the rest of the world.

50:00And when I learned that, I realized it's like, I've always loved doing what I do, but all of a sudden, the work I do is making a difference. I realize nobody's going to, in India, say, wow, David Ronka really changed my life. But in a small piece, they will say that the company Meta changed their life, gave them a business where they could support their family, gave them a platform where they could share social videos and make money and improve their standard of living, gave them a way to stay in touch with their family, distribute around the world. They will say the company made a difference in their lives.

50:33And I really liked being a part of that. I really, at the end of the day, and I try to explain this to people who don't work for the company or they're griping about this or that, or, you know, whatever, you just don't understand, right? How good it feels to know, right? You're making in a small, small way, you're actually making a difference in the world. Coming to the end of the interview, I wanted to do some reflections on your career. I think first question I'm kind of curious about is when it comes to work-life balance throughout your career? How did that change throughout the different roles you had?

51:07I had the first really visionary executive that I was working for in the late 90s. She gave us, she sold us on something we were passionate about. We all worked hard. And I was working hard, not because the expectation was there, but because we were trying to catch up. and we did. But when I went to the startup, the expectation was when I was at Intervideo, it was a 24-7 expectation. And I was going to work usually at 10, 1030 in the morning, coming home. Usually an early night would be 10 at night. A late night would be like sometimes two or three in the morning and oftentimes seven days a week.

51:53And we were trying to get to the IPO. And then we got the IPO, but we got to get these new wins, bundling wins to get revenue so that our stock price will be up or whatever. In January of 2004, I started feeling ill on a Sunday and was not getting better through the week. On that Friday, I went to an emergency room. I was having a serious, serious problem. My wife took me to the emergency room where I was immediately diagnosed even before they had proven it. The doctor told me, this is colon cancer. And I was like, my digestive system was blocked and it creates a very catastrophic quick death situation.

52:43So I just, I basically just fell off from a health perspective in one week. I had been driving myself, driving, push, push, push, and boom, I just fell off a cliff. And I woke up, I was in the hospital, it was Saturday, and I was on machines, and they had gotten me stable, and they were going to take, it took a week to get me physically strong enough to have a surgery to remove the cancer. And I'm laying in there in the hospital, and I know this kind of sounds cliche, but I was a dad, I had a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a seven-year-old. And when you work those kind of hours, you know, my daughter knew me reasonably well.

53:25We had had some time and some relationship. My oldest son we had, but my youngest didn't even know who I was. I mean, he knew who I was, but I was just the guy who come in, you know. And you're sitting there literally thinking you're at the end of your life. I was stage three. It had lymph node metastasis. when I finally got out, I had two surgeries, chemotherapy, but when I got out of the hospital three weeks later, I was in for three weeks and multiple surgeries and everything to recover. My five-year survival prognosis was about 25%. And so while I was in the hospital reflecting, I realized that this is wrong.

54:07And this was only four years into intervideo. And so when I came out, is like, I can't do this anymore. And I told my boss at Intervideo, look, I still want to work here, but I can't do this. And I realized it was not just because I was sick. You simply, if you're working at a company where they put those demands on you and those expectations, that if you're not there late, you're going to get fired, the best thing you can do is leave. And they were actually using work hours to compensate for really bad leadership. So I actually did some of my best engineering at Intervideo after I got out of the hospital, because I had to get back, ramp back up to full time.

54:45But I have work-life balance thrust upon me. And from that point forward, it became something that I was passionate about, that I was never going to be a leader that put expectations on people that you kill yourself for the job. You know, and literally, that's what we're doing. Even though most people don't die, They're selling their life, they're trading their life, their experiences, their children, whatever, anything else they could have for a job. And there's no job that's worth that. And that's where I appreciate when I got to Netflix, you know, it was a shock for me for them to tell me in the interview that we don't value 27 work, 24-7 work.

55:25And if you come in and work that way, we're probably, that doesn't mean you're going to be successful. but if you come in and make really good decisions in the time you're here and go work enjoy your weekends and your time away we're gonna love you and i'm just like wow and i realize that so that's now part of my dna and i think that what i would like to say is for everybody else that happen to be watching this don't wait till you get cancer or have a heart attack to wait for you to realize work-life balance is is is you know critical bake it into your dna at an early age learn how to take take time off, take vacation, leave your company alone for a week, whether it's going to kill them or not.

56:04If they can't survive without you for seven days, that's not your problem, that's their problem. And the only way you can make them understand that problem is for you to leave and make them face that problem and fix it. And so, and then I understand like, because, you know, having worked at Meta, at Netflix, these are performance oriented companies. And a lot of people, I think, feel like, well, you know, you have to work if you don't work hard, if you don't work all the time. But I think what we're doing is we're misunderstanding. Remember, there's a poster at Meta that I just love. It's a rocking horse.

56:38There's a picture of like a silhouetted rocking horse. And it says, don't mistake motion for progress. Right. And I think that in order to have work-life balance, we need to understand about our role and we need to work with your boss on this. What are the most important things I need to do? What are the biggest impacts I can deliver to Netflix or Meta or Google? What are the things that really, really matter? And the other stuff, just let your boss know, I'm not going to do this. And if it matters to you, I don't have time to do it. And if it matters, we have to get somebody else or you have to help me adjust my priorities so that I can get it done.

57:19The worst thing you can do is simply like if your boss is not giving you reasonable goals and not planning, giving you clear context around what's expected for a review cycle. The worst thing you can do is just try to, you know, do everything there because you end up doing work that maybe wasn't that important anyway. And so we do have to own our own, you know, to a certain extent. I realize this is for somebody who just got out of college. It's maybe a little hard to think of, but you really do have to learn how to own your time and manage your time and make decisions because you can't do everything.

57:52As an out of work, you may want to do marathons every week and do all this other stuff and whatever. You can't do everything. You have to start picking the things that really matter. It's the same way in work. I do believe as engineers, anybody that's working in an environment like Google or a company, there are going to be times where we have to put our head down and crunch. It may mean working weekends. It may mean working late in the evenings. But that has to be the exception, not the rule. It has to be the exception. You've been working on something all half. You've got your head down. Now you're getting to the end.

58:31You're about to roll this feature out. You may have to spend a little extra time getting it out. It's like, okay, so I'll plan for it. I know that, hey, sometime May, June, I'm going to have to get my head down. I may have to work a lot to get this across the finish line, but then I'm going to pull back out and then I'll take a vacation. You have to have that mindset. And again, you always have to make sure your manager is giving you clear context on what really matters and focus on those things. And then I think you find work-life balance happens, even at a challenging high-performance company like Netflix or Meta.

59:04When you look back on all the companies that you worked on, I'm curious, which one do you think you learned the most at or which one taught you the most and why? My last four jobs each did their piece. The first job, the first of the four, turned me into a full-fledged high-performance software engineer. I mean performance by the problems you solve, not by the hours you work. The second job gave me a really good video foundation. Netflix, you know, was a zero to one, right? People who were at Facebook from 2008, 2012 understand, if they're still here, understand how, you know, that early company where you're building a zero to one product versus, you know, working at a mature company.

59:49So, you know, I think I learned a lot about leadership, about hiring, firing, and context, setting context and executing and cross-functional. these things I all learned at Netflix and brought to Meta. What I came to Meta lacking was an understanding of objective, like planning, reviews, and performance, and having an objective process. And I mean, PSC time was both like the most dreaded time of the year for me and my favorite time of the year, right? It's one of the things I really, I mean this because, you know, meta is over-indexed on individual credit. And the whole, like, you know, everybody writes their self-reviews and their manager turns it into a review, a performance packet.

1:00:51It brings in feedback and lines up things with goals. And then that's brought into a large group of what we call calibrations where people will challenge, right? Because every manager thinks their team is the best team on the planet and their engineers are the best engineers on the planet. And the reality is where other managers, you're convincing other managers, not through arguments or pushing hard, but through data. Convincing them that this engineer deserves this level and that they were the ones to get credit. And we would argue a lot, wait, this project, who worked on this project? Who did what?

1:01:36Who gets the credit? And it's something we take so seriously. And to me, it was so important. is like taking the time and having the conversations across a larger team of leaders and understanding how individual engineers, how they impacted, how their impact landed, how they moved the needle, how they brought other engineers through, how they led projects, and getting that credit down on paper. When you leave Meta, the one thing that you get to bring with you is every single performance review package you ever was ever in. And everything I did at Meta, every negative feedback you need to get better, every great win is all cast in stone.

1:02:20Not only do I have that, 2 ,000 years from now when they're unearthing, like they find Meta hard drives, they find my stuff. They're going to know what I did at Meta, right? That's how important Meta takes individual achievement. And I think that, to me, it's one of the best things about the company. There's a lot of great things about Meta. I feel like I had always heard horror stories about, oh, the PSC, performance, curves, everything else. And then I got into met and I was like, you know, this really matters. And so at the end of the day, being able to, the greatest joy I ever had was having one of my direct reports and handing them a redefines expectations rating.

1:03:02There's nothing as a leader, it didn't matter that my rating was meets all. I had like two REs on my team over like over the course of a year. I mean, this is like, and I have GEs, but even the ones that were not doing well, and I had to give them like, hey, you know, they're below expectation, you know, trying to work with them to get back up. That all is so important. It gets back to the people thing, right? And so I really valued that work. That's what I learned at Meta more than, I mean, I learned a lot. I learned, I used to think scale was, you know, I read books and took classes and XYZ sharding, partitioning, and microservices.

1:03:39And I get to meta and all those books, these guys don't know, they're good books. They really don't know what they were talking about. Nobody understands scale at that level, except for a few companies that are dealing with billions of users. And all the, so anyway, these are the two big things I learned. And to me, the most valuable one. And the one that I think that I got from meta that I would bring to the next job if I was to take a full-time job was how to establish a system for objective planning, review, and performance. Is there a top book that had an impact on your career? And if so, what is it?

1:04:14Yeah, so I'm really going to date myself here. But the book that immediately came to mind when I saw this question was 12 Secrets to Microsoft Success. This book came out in the late 90s. And there was really some radical thinking. I mean, we look at Microsoft as a very different company than it was in the 90s. In the 90s, everybody thought Microsoft was going to own the world and everybody was, you know, Windows everywhere. But there was some really radical thinking at that company, right? And they're baked into their culture, right? The concept of betting the company, right? And I saw that at Netflix, right?

1:04:54Amazon, Meta, right? You see, it's not like you're doing a casino bet all in. But you see a big opportunity. You're literally betting the company on it. The whole thing of like, you know, let's quit saying failure is bad, right? There is such a thing as good failure, right? And you expect it. And if a company's executing well and healthy, things are going to fail. Projects are going to fail. People are going to fail. Engineers are going to be working on something that's not going to work out the way they want it. And the takeaway from that, right? You can fail on a big engineering investment in Meta.

1:05:30It's not that you fail, it's how you fail, what you learned and what you bring forward so that people can see that, yeah, this was a rational bet, was a reasonable bet. And they did it and it didn't work. And they've really handled it well. They managed the risk. They got out early. So failure can be success, right, based on how you manage it. Microsoft was the first company to publicly state a policy of hiring the top 5%. Their target was to hire the top 5 % of all software engineers in the world. And they set up their interview and screening, which is kind of a predecessor to what we do now at the fan companies.

1:06:08And I think that that was really revolutionary. Dogfooding, right? The term dogfooding was invented by Microsoft. They talk about that in the book, right? before people would work on products they never saw, they never ran, they never tested, they didn't experience bugs. You know, when Bill Gates forced everybody on the NT team that the whole company is going to shift to NT server when NT server was failing badly, put all the bugs in this OS in the, like, 95, 96, in front of the entire company, and all of a sudden this operating system that couldn't ship started getting fixed, moving, moving, moving.

1:06:44And then the crazy thing that they talked about in that book was somewhere between Windows 95 and when the book was written, when Microsoft was growing leaps over bounds, Bill Gates instituted a company-wide hiring freeze. And it's like, what? You know, it shocks you. Well, he felt they were hiring too many people too fast and they were investing too much money in things that didn't matter. And if you're too old for this, probably, but Encarta, Bob, if you remember Microsoft Bob, these silly little animated icons, all these silly things that Microsoft was doing that were pointless. And as soon as he instituted a hiring freeze, he forced his executives to start killing projects and putting the people on stuff that mattered.

1:07:32Because he felt like hiring was getting out of control. We're hiring too many people. We're just putting them everywhere. People are working on things that don't matter. We're losing control of the company. and he instituted a hiring freeze that basically they ended up cutting the bottom 20%, which they should have done anyway. Healthy businesses, and we're actually much better at that now. Meta's pretty aggressive at cutting projects that aren't proving out. That didn't happen back then, right? The company's like, once you've got this established team and people and your little, things just didn't get cut.

1:08:05So that was pretty radical. So I think Microsoft introduced some engineering leadership concepts that really I don't believe existed before Microsoft. And, you know, Amazon, Google, as much as we all tried, Netflix, as much as we all tried in the early days to not be evil like Microsoft, we ended up taking a lot of their, that was Google's motto, by the way, don't be evil, because Microsoft was considered the evil empire, the dark side, you know, whatever. But we all took, they actually were the ones that kind of established some of the early model for modern engineering. Microsoft brought us some of these engineering.

1:08:50Amazon brought us the concept of rather than having very expensive, highly reliable hardware, let's have really cheap hardware and design around failures. You know, and so these things we all kind of Google brought, we all picked that up and it all kind of worked together. But I feel like Microsoft was the first one. And that book I read just stuck with me all this time. Even when I see like before 2022 and the big crash, I was just looking, I was like, we can't keep hiring people at this rate. It doesn't, the math doesn't work. Right. It wasn't just us. It was everybody. Because during COVID, we were all like, yeah, we're growing higher, higher, higher.

1:09:28And everybody accelerated their hiring. But it's like nobody decelerated. And it's like, boom, right? All of a sudden we had that contraction and boom. So everybody had to reset. So I think that had all the FAANG leaders read the 12 secrets to Microsoft success, they would have recognized in like late 21 that the hiring was out of control and maybe we need to slow it down. When you look back on your career, is there anything you regret that maybe other people could learn from?

1:10:01A few regrets. I think my early years, I think my first six years out of school, which is actually a long time, was wasted at very large failing companies. Even if the, like General Motors spun off Hughes, but Hughes failed. IBM sold off the division I was in to Siemens, but that division failed. So, I mean, I think that the only regret I think would be like, you know, I was making a good salary. I got an easy job, whatever. Not really thinking about like, I was only thinking in the moment. And I really feel like I kind of wasted that time. I wasn't really thinking about growth. And I do think we need to think about growth.

1:10:45We don't need to stress about it. We don't need to be like ambitious, like I'm going to be a vice president in like 10 years or whatever. But as software engineers, especially, I'm only talking about software engineering now, not leadership. Everything we do is going to be obsolete five years from now. When I joined Meta, the boot camp, the whole system for the dev environment, everything is completely replaced. I went through boot camp as a director. It was pretty proficient. And when I go to IC, it's like, oh, what is this? Everything's changed. So everything's going to be obsolete. They're getting new technologies.

1:11:17And the only way, and this is what I believe I have been successful at, you know, is always pushing forward and trying to stay to the edge and always learning more, learning new things, new engineering skills. And the last thing I want to ask is if you could give yourself advice at the beginning of your career, knowing what you know now, what would you say? Try to work on hard problems. Right? If your job is an engineer, if your job is not difficult, you're not growing. so you know maybe if you've been working on something and it was really hard now it's kind of flat line enjoy a little bit of rest think about it and then you know and i'll be speaking like if you're a meta for example where it's very easy to move if you've gotten to where you're feeling your current role is not very challenging there's so much going on at the company go find something else get back into a hard problem right and and and push yourself forward because it's the hard work, the hard problems that move us forward and help us grow.

1:12:19And then I think to a young engineer joining companies, the size of the company is irrelevant. Sometimes everybody should work for a small company at some point in their life, I believe. Startups, everybody should try a startup, right? Especially it's easier when you're younger than when you're older. but be careful not to get too enamored by the technology. If you join a small company, a startup, or even a big company like Meta, I mean, Mark is an incredibly visionary leader, and he's navigating this world and trying to make decisions and keep the company focused. Right. So and Reed Hastings was an incredibly visionary leader.

1:13:05Right. But Reed Hastings was a visionary leader in 1999 when Netflix had four people. So really what you want to do is make sure you're working for visionary leaders and not just visionary. They need to be able to execute as well. So vision is good. But if you can't execute against that vision, you got nowhere. So any company you're working at, make sure your leadership is really looking forward, thinking forward. And again, to Reed Hastings' point, making you dream of sailing the seas and not just cutting lumber for a ship. Again, work-life balance. You're out of school. You just started your new job.

1:13:48you need to plan and be intentional about not working about taking time off about making sure you're you're you have a life work-life balance right it's work it's life their intention we have to work to have a life but we have to live in order to work and so you want to try to keep the balance is trying to keep those two where one doesn't dominate the other and and and actually find as an engineer because we love working on problems when you get to that place you're actually doing really good work. You love what you're doing, but you're also enjoying time off. You're enjoying your family or whatever it is you like to do in your time off.

1:14:23And the last thing I will say, which is complete, this is for anybody. When you get out of college, when you're early in your career, this is the last thing I would have talked to myself about, is your financial planning should start on day one. Because Because what's going to happen, not just an engineer, but anybody who's successful as a technical leader, a contributor, a leader, is over time you're going to make more money. And if you don't have a thoughtful plan about how you're going to allocate your spending, living expenses, car, recreation, short-term savings, long-term savings, then as you make more money, you're not going to know where it's going.

1:15:10and you're going to miss the biggest opportunity you have, and that's that to bake into your DNA this whole model of spending, saving, spending, and thoughtful financial management. And if you're thoughtful in your 20s with just small regular contributions to long-term savings and managing your budget and not getting over your skis in terms of extended credit or debt, by the time you're in your early 40s, you won't necessarily be able to retire unless you got lucky, like you joined a Facebook or Netflix early on. But you'll be financially independent to the point where money's not an issue anymore.

1:15:53And you could take a lesser paying job. You wouldn't have to worry about what about the mortgage, what about the college, or what about this or that. But it all starts from your first day on the job. The last thing I will say is be really, really smart and thoughtful about your finances from day one and make sure you're ready like when you're getting into your late 40s and early 50s that you're actually feeling pretty good about your financial future. Like, hey, I could retire. Or if I lost my job, we'd be okay, right? I could go do something else at half my salary and we'd be okay because we've set ourselves up for that.

1:16:27But if you get into your 50s and you haven't planned, it's not your 401k alone is not going to do it, right? And social security is certainly not going to do it. If you haven't planned, then you get in this situation. It's an unfortunate situation where a lot of people I know have found themselves where you're kind of stuck and you're having trouble getting new jobs. You can't work with the energy level you used to have. And you're not sure, you know, my joke was always that if I didn't get retirement right, I'd be a greeter at Walmart, you know, but it's not really a joke, right? But, you know, you'd be surprised how many engineers have been working and making a good living, you know, and they're now in their 50s and they have not had any rational plan for retirement and they're in no position to retire.

1:17:11And there's really, as an engineer, there's no reason for that. If you're a good engineer and you're gainfully employed for 30, 35 years, there's no reason why you should not retire very comfortably. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today, David. I really appreciate you sharing your career story. It's been a great conversation, Ryan. Thanks for having interest in feeling like I have something valuable to share. So thanks a lot. Absolutely. And is there anything you want to direct people's attention to at the end of the conversation? You can find me on LinkedIn. And I'm happy to have, especially for younger people, I'm not a financial planner.

1:17:49I'm not going to plan your finances, but I have about 10 slides I put together to give you a starter. And if somebody wanted to talk about finances, I would give them a few, my thoughts on how you could start making smart financial decisions as a new graduate, you know, young. And even if you're in your 40s and start, early 50s and starting to stress out about your prospects for retirement, I could talk to you about that. if you're working, you know, if you're a people leader and you want to talk about performance, planning, reviews, hiring, firing, happy to have those conversations. If you're an engineer, happy to have those conversations with you talking about your career growth.

1:18:29Awesome. Okay. Well, I will put your LinkedIn in the show notes so people have that. So again, thank you for your time, too. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to help out with the podcast, you can support by engaging with the content on YouTube or on Spotify. If you want to drop a review, that'll be super helpful. And if there's any guests that you want to bring on to, please let me know. I feel like sourcing very senior ICs. There's no well-studied list out there on Google that I can just search this up. So if there's someone in your org or at your company who you really look up to and you want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll reach out to them.