The Peterman Pod - Industry Secrets We Wish We Knew Before Graduating | Staff Eng Talk @ UCLA

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

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

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

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

You know, my way's usually right, and I make a bunch of money, and they're like, okay, actually. We hosted a Q&A style event, and we received hundreds of questions, some of which I really didn't expect to see. How do you make as much money as possible? I would say, and others I expected to see, but hopefully our personal stories were helpful.

So I feel like Ryan scammed me. because I got really lucky and I got all the offers at every place I interviewed at, except for one. Like my mom, she was my hater. She believed I wouldn't succeed without an MBA. Here is the full video. I'm excited to be here, everyone. My name's Ryan. When Ashley reached out, I was excited to talk to you all because I feel like there's so many things that we learned in industry that no one tells you until you actually fail and you get into industry. and I'm hoping that we can tell you a lot of that today.

Do you want to introduce? Yeah, hey, I'm Ricky. I'm really excited to be here too. I feel like so much of my success postgrad is from everything that I learned at UCLA and all the people that I've met. So really excited to be here and kind of give back. Before we get started, when I, right before I got into industry, I knew nothing about the levels. And so like, what even is staff? Like when I got promoted to staff, my parents thought it was lower than seniors.

So it doesn't sound that good. So this is just to give you a little idea. This is like Levels.fi. Of course, when you get promoted, you make more money. But also, I feel like your work becomes a lot more interesting because it becomes higher level, more impactful, and it's a lot more satisfying. I'm just showing this to you so that when we say junior,

mid-level senior staff in this talk, you know what it means and what it refers to. So I'll give you a little bit of an explanation of what each level means right because you look at it and you're like you know what does it actually mean so at the junior level so this is usually where new grads are right here the expectation is just for you to be able to kind of code and um you know push out some stuff with a decent amount of help whereas once you get to the mid level there's an expectation that yes now you can kind of do more do more things on your own but you still need help here and there and usually from junior to mid level i think on average

it takes people maybe two to three to four years and then from mid-level to senior at the senior level so we say that senior level is terminal because a lot of people will get to senior and just stop so there's usually no expectation to go beyond senior it's more like do you want to but there is an expectation for you to go from junior to mid-level to senior so mid-level to senior it takes around maybe also like two three four years at the senior level the expectation is that someone will give you a tax and you can kind of finish it on your own and you don't need that much help. And then at the staff level, so again, this is if you actually want to get to that level, it's a lot more responsibility.

Some people say that, you know, it's not even worth the pay increase because you probably have to work a lot more in terms of your, you know, your hourly wage, right? Like how much you make per hour. But at this level, the expectation is that you're setting the strategy for the team, you're really thinking about the direction that the team should go and and kind of leading all the you know senior mid-level junior folks so hopefully that was helpful i thought you know i had no clue what all of these things were when i first started at google so you know hopefully this gives you a better view of what all the levels mean uh i was

like is it true at google that terminal level is actually l4 because i've heard that somewhere i wasn't with time not really um so there definitely is more and more of an expectation that you you can eventually get the senior. But I think other companies are more aggressive. So other companies often have a policy called up or out. So if you aren't able to get to that level, then bye, bye. But I think at Google at least it's a little bit more relaxed and it's not as aggressive of a policy.

Yeah. Yeah. And the up and out policies, by the way, they're not meant to be intense and scary like 90. I don't have the exact, you know, data, but it's like 90 plus percent, probably, you know, make it to those levels. So it's actually kind of like, I guess, an upper bound of how quickly you'll grow. Go ahead, Bill. What's the mix of technical and supervisory responsibilities that you had as you're going up those levels?

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

That's like the high level. How accurate is levels FYI say during this? It's pretty accurate except the fluctuations in the equity. That's actually, yeah, so I just pulled these numbers today. The meta's numbers on the left. Like why are they so much higher than Google's? Well, meta stock has been. like ripping recently. So like that's why, but generally it's pretty it's pretty accurate.

So yeah, let's get into some of the prepared questions. Before we got here today, you know, in the RSVP, there's the ability for you to submit questions. We'll go through those and we'll kind of answer with various stories. Maybe Ashley, you can MC. A lot of people in the audience have internship plans and we're all wondering, how do we succeed as an intern? The rubric at different companies, it fluctuates slightly, but it's somewhat similar. When you get a, you get, you, into that internship, they're going to give you a project and they're going to see how quickly you can get the project done. If you can do that project in half of your internships time, obviously that's going to be really good. So they're going to be measuring your productivity. That's a big part of it.

Another thing is the quality of your work and you can measure that by how many times your code needs to be reviewed until it's submittable. So at the beginning of the internship, you write code and then it's trash and it needs to be reviewed many, many times because you don't know the code base yet. But ideally by the end of the internship, your code should be reviewed with NITS and landing with one or zero revisions. So that should be changing. And then lastly, you should be communicating and, you know, pushing, like, after you finish that project, what is that thing that you do afterwards? If you propose improvements on top of your project, maybe you propose a new project entirely, like, that that's like a really strong internship performance and so that was that was a lot that's pretty intense but that's what it looks like if you want to really crush it and for sure get i would say i

definitely agree like most of the time internship projects should be pretty well-scoped like there's kind of a defined end so that's not usually true more at the higher levels when you know when you're a full-time employee the problems are a little bit more ambiguous the solution is a little bit more ambiguous but usually as an intern they're I feel like they're really just trying to see if you can like you know do some basic coding kind of finish a basic task but your your project was actually not like that right yeah so that story maybe yeah yeah so during my junior year um my internship was at google and my internship i only wrote 800 lines of code which is really low and i was really stressed out because I looked at my peers, you know, my other UCLA friends that were Google interns.

I was halfway through the internship and I had submitted like 300 lines of code. And I look at my friend and they've submitted 11K lines of code. And I'm like, oh shit. But in the end, it was fine. And the reason was because while lines of code is definitely, you know, part of the metrics that people might use to value your productivity. They also look at other things. So for me, I really took a lot of time trying to. understand the code base. I wrote a really complex design doc that explored a lot of pros and cons of

different approaches. So the design doc itself was very technical and that's how I was able to show my productivity and that I was able to kind of find a solution to this problem at work. You know, even though at the end of my internship, I still only wrote 900, 900 lines of code. I did get a return offer. It was really nice. So that's kind of what happened in my internship. Next questions. After we hopefully all get our return offers in the working full-time. We're all wondering, how do you be successful and how do we get promoted? So how did you guys get promoted so quickly to staff engineer in your 20th? You know, going back to the levels that we saw earlier, right?

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

mid-level project. So what is actually more impactful is for you to do, you know, one mid-level project that solidly shows that you're at that level. So I think what Ryan and I probably did really well is that we were really able to think about what is the next level project how can I do it and how can I get there so we were really focused on making sure that we weren't spending too much time on projects that wouldn't necessarily get us to the next level you'll hear this keyword your manager will probably say it a lot which is behaviors which is that the things that get you promoted is not just doing a ton of work at your current level like I say your junior

engineer you do 10 times as many features as a junior engineer that will get you a a really good rating, your performance review will be good. But when your manager is looking to fill out like the rubric for the next level, for instance, none of the things will be checked off. There's nothing about, you know, initiative or doing anything that's expected of the mid-level. So like the thing that gets you promoted quickly is really understanding the next level's behaviors and going and taking initiative and finding projects that fit that. And so I remember when I was like, you know, I was really, really eager to get promoted. And so I was constantly talking to my manager, like, you know, as soon as I got promoted to one level, I was like, okay, what's the next level?

What can I do? Maybe that was annoying for my manager, but he was really helpful in teaching me what were the things that I needed to pick up so I could continue to pick up next level opportunities. And I think that's a big part of why my promotions were as fast as they were. Next question. How much of your success in self for engineering? sharing and getting promotions is just luck. Although luck is a big part of it, you can actually do things to increase your luck. When I think back to a lot of the projects

and things that got me promoted, there was some level of initiative where I went out of my way to find something. I'll give you an example, like actually, you know, actually when I graduated UCLA, I went to Amazon and I was floundering, like I was not doing well at all. But after I was there for like eight months,

I realized like this is, I'm not learning. I don't know what the growth the next level looks like. And so I just took matters in my own hands and applied to a bunch of different places. I got really lucky and I got all the offers at every place I interviewed at, except for one, which if you're curious what that place is that rejected me, maybe I can tell you off camera later. But, you know, like I ended up getting to meta and that kind of like set up my career for the rest.

And you could say that it was lucky that I got the interview, but also, you know, I grinded to like you know apply to all the places, grinded leak code and like that really increased my luck. A good part of its luck, no doubt, but also you have a lot of agency. And so I think that's, you know, really important too. Definitely agree. I think the way I would frame it is that luck is two parts, right?

One is the opportunity coming and the other part is you being prepared for that opportunity when it comes. Because if you got an interview, right, that could be luck. You're right, maybe you talk to the right person at the career fair and they're like, oh, you know, why not, you know? and they give it to you, but you're not prepared, right? You're not like studying and preparing for the interview, and then that opportunity is gonna pass you by.

And I feel like that is really true, you're not just when you're finding a job, but also at work. And in Ryan's case, right, he is setting himself up for more opportunities by leaving Amazon. And of course, like, he was prepared and ready when those opportunities came to him. If you had one piece of advice to give us,

what would it be? I love this question, because, I, a lot of people have asked me this and if you don't take anything from today's talk, I hope at least you take this part. I would say that the one piece of advice is to ask tons of questions. Keep asking questions when you're at work. I mentored a lot of interns and one intern mentee I had, she at the beginning of her internship, she asked me, you know, Ricky, if you had one thing, one piece of advice, what would be?

And I told her, ask questions, keep asking questions, keep asking questions. And at the end of her internship, I asked her, okay, so is there anything you wish I told you at the beginning of your internship? And she was like, I wish you told me to ask questions. And I was like, no, no, no, I definitely told you that. I'm 100% sure I told you that. And she told me, yeah, Ricky, you did, but like, you didn't mean it, you know? I really want to emphasize it to you. So I think a lot of people, you know, me included, when we start at work, we're like nervous and a little bit scared.

And for me, I thought if I asked too many questions, they're going to think I'm stupid, right? But I ended up kind of like trying to be, you know, delusional as possible and just be like, okay, you know, I deserve to be here. Like, I have to ask questions. And I also kept trying to remind myself that it's better to ask questions and learn and for them to think you're stupid than to not ask questions. Never learn anything, you know, and stay dumb, right? I also remember thinking, I'm just going to try to learn as much as I can here. And if I get fired, I get fired, but at least I learned. So definitely try to ask a lot of questions.

I think, you know, I have mentored and grown a lot of engineers. And what I think is the biggest differentiator between those that like really succeed really quickly and the ones that don't is how quickly they're able to start asking questions, learning, being curious, unblocking themselves and really taking that initiative to figure things out. One thing I can add to that is I've had five interns at meta and some of them were rock stars. Some of them were not. when I think about the ones that were rock stars, they had the audacity to propose improvements, even though obviously I'm the more senior person. They had the audacity to ask questions, propose improvements. Sometimes they weren't right, but I could see the logic. But many times they were.

And when I think of the low performers, I remember oftentimes they were like quieter. I didn't know exactly what their progress was. I could tell they were trying really hard to figure things out without my help. and then time would pass, time would pass, and they're making no progress, and then, you know, at the end, they're not going to get a return offer. So asking questions, especially when your junior, is really important. What if I feel like I'm asking too many questions and I feel like I'm not a good and bad, very? So my perception, really successful software engineers were in college, was that they were just like the super genius, you know, they're probably the one setting the curve in the class

in my CS classes, but that's actually not true. Like, I think what makes a really good software engineer is having a decent level of technical skills, of course, but also having a decent level of soft skills, you know, learning how to persuade others, how to influence others, because if you think about what you're doing at work, it's like this giant group project, right? And, you know, I'm sure you all have had group projects. And you probably also had tension at times in a group project, right? You want it, you want things to be done this way, but this other person is like, no,

And at work, if you just tell, you know, whoever you disagree with, like, your idea is trash. You know, we should do it my way. They're not going to listen to you, right? So a better way to kind of communicate that message is, hey, you know, I see that you're pretty frustrated, you know, I see your point of view and why you would want this solution. Perhaps we can compromise and find, you know, negotiate like some in between or some middle ground. What do you think? They're much more willing to buy into your idea.

and you're ultimately able to kind of ship things and get things launched. And that is, you know, I would say just as important as being a really great coder and understanding the technical parts. Yeah, definitely. I think one thing that surprised me, which I never thought would be true until I got to the industry, was that how little of the job was actually the code. So code is really important too. So they're both important. But I think when you get into the industry, you'll see there's all this other stuff around the code that matters a lot.

Obviously, the people are important because it is kind of like a giant collaborative project. Like there's thousands of engineers working on the software. But there's all these other things too. Like you have to write a ton. Like I hated writing in high school. Felt like not objective. Like not as I don't know. I just didn't like writing.

But when I got into industry, like I realized writing is the job. it's how you influence others. Every code change has all this writing around it. Like you got to write design doc before you start, you know, get feedback. Then when you actually writing the code, you write a description of the code. Then when you land it and it has results, you write results, you know, write about the results and, you know, share that with the group. So there's, there's so much around the code that you need to do that it's about people and communication. And I think if you're not, is this a common term, Gigacad,

gig a chad coder. But if you're not a giga Chad coder, you should be fine. I think everyone in this room, if you're going to UCLA, you're smart enough to be writing code that matters. And then a lot of what's going to make you excel is actually not about the code and your technical skills. It's related to that, have you guys ever gotten imposter syndrome? Imposter syndrome, my best friend, been with me my whole career. So I think a lot of people get an imposter syndrome. I think it's very normal. I think a majority of people actually do get imposter syndrome. And I think it's a little bit odd too because I remember when I first joined Google, right? I pass the interviews. I did my internship. They gave me a passing grade on my internship and then I got there and I was like,

oh shit, you know, like everyone, everyone look, everyone's a good chat coder here. How am I going to make it? Surprisingly, even after I got promoted, after I got promoted, I was still like, maybe like they promoted me wrong. Like maybe I got promoted too early. And then after I got promoted after that, I was like, oh man, this, well, maybe not the last promotion. Maybe they, like, screwed up this promotion. And I had it a lot during my career. And, you know, it's pretty normal, right? The best way I kind of got around it is, you know, again, going back to that mindset of,

all right, even if I'm, like, not meant to be here, like, let's try to learn as much as I can, do the best job I can. And, you know, if I get fired, then at least I learned a lot. But, you know, I never got fired. but imposit syndrome definitely still comes here and then in waves too but you know I think eventually you get over it and everyone it's really an experience that a lot of people have so don't feel stressed out if you ever feel that way it worked did you ever have any feedback that made you feel because you must have been yeah just

getting good marks like how do you how's it possible that you felt not good even though you were getting all this praise I was just an anxious little kid you know I was always stressed out about work. And I remember one time in a one-on-one with my manager, he looked at me a little bit. He was like, you need to chill. You know, like, you're doing okay. You know, calm down.

And I was like, are you sure, though? Like, you know, seems sucks. I think part of it was also because, you know, when they say you're doing well, and I'm like, I was, but is this like a C passing doing well? Or is this like an A plus doing well? You know, like, and I think, Eventually I did kind of learn, you know, through talking with a manager and understanding the expectations for myself of like kind of how I was doing and I was a little bit less stressed after that.

But yeah, I was pretty stressed in the beginning. How do you advocate for yourself while at work? This will be helpful for your whole career. But if you're also going into internship, this could be helpful. In order to get promoted, there's kind of like two pieces to it. One is you do good work. That's obvious. Like we all know do good work, you're going to get promoted.

But actually, promotions are ultimately decided by people. They need to know about your work. And if you go and build this amazing feature that nobody knows about, it doesn't matter how good it is. No, you're not going to get any recognition for it. And so, you know, how do you advocate for yourself? After you've done great work, which is the hard part, there's just this last step that you got to do,

this last few percent of your time where you, maybe you either write about it, or you present it in a meeting or something like that where you say, hey, hey, let's say you're out of internship. You have your intern project. You hit a big milestone. Rather than just like quietly moving on to the next step, maybe in your one-on-one, you tell your intern manager like, hey, I did it and it's like a few weeks early. I'm ready for the next thing. Like that kind of puts the thing in the idea in their head. Also, maybe you make a post internally. You write an email or something that says like, hey, you know, update on my project. It's done. I'm killing it. Look, all the good results here. And you can write about it in a way that

matters to the audience. If you do that, people are going to get a sense of, okay, this person's killing it. And it will be kind of surprising if you didn't get a return offer if you were doing so well and people knew that you were doing well. So this is like specifically that last step. And I think a lot of people miss this, especially if they're more introverted or they're more quiet, it's taking that last step on after the good work, you got to tell everyone about it. And writing is one of the best ways to do it, but maybe, you know, it depends on your specific team setup. Maybe you can talk about the work and stand up or, you know, whatever meeting. The term that we often use at work is visibility.

So you want to have visibility for yourself. It could be doing it by yourself as Ryan said, but can also be doing it through an up. other means like through your manager or through, you know, whoever else you're working with, like a PM, they can also help you get visibility. But it is really important. I forgot, but there's some analogy where it's like, oh, you know, if a tree falls in a forest and no one sees it, did it really fall? So I also think of, I often think about that, you know, like just because you did a project,

people, you also need to get people to know that you did that project, right? Otherwise in the future, like, you're trying to get promoted and you're like, oh, I did this. And whoever is helping you get promoted is like no one knows like how is anyone supposed to know. So it's definitely important to get visibility for yourself at work. So I think a lot of people are interested in this post-gride, which is better, big tech or startups? Yeah. Okay, actually I'm curious. What do you guys think?

Okay, so between big tech versus startups, if you had both options, if you would pick big tech, raise your hand. Okay, that's like the whole room. Okay, and then anyone, startups? How about for startups? All right, we got a few people. For anyone who's going to or would want to go to a startup, are you willing to answer why? I'm kind of curious.

I'm about first mover's revenge. So like if the company gets really big, you'll have a lot of that for you. You fail, but it'd always go work for big tech. Yeah, I see another hand raised. Yeah. whoever changes you do more unfacing and like make more of it back like proportional to the company yeah because I think the impact is probably going to be smaller because of the scale of big tech but proportional to company it'll be bigger I'm sure yeah

okay yeah that's that's really interesting so okay big tech versus startups before saying like the answer that I would give I think there's some differences right like you know big tech versus startups one of the biggest thing is the prestige or like the some people call it like brand equity if you go to a name that is known and then anyone sees that resume it's you're at least that good you're at least that bar so it makes it a lot easier to get hired so if you go to a startup that people don't know then you wouldn't have that prestige there's startups there's a whole range of startups so there are very well-known startups too like imagine a company like perplexity or something you know that's a hot startup maybe you would still get some of that prestige but i definitely remember i went to amazon

which was i guess the lowest tier of the fang ones at the time probably still true i don't know but um after i went there like my lincoln was blowing out and i was not writing on lincoln or anything just so many recruiters just coming in random emails so i do think that's where something for sure the the first mover advantage that's interesting one thing that I'll say is generally true for big tech versus startups across career growth a cost your compensation is it's a trade-off between high expected value versus high variance so what I mean by that is if you go to big tech you're in the average case you're probably going to be doing better but you will never

have a moon up or a moon down scenario. So if you wanted to like, you know, the jobs we work today will never be like rich rich. Like you, I mean, you'll make a good amount. You make a good amount. It's a good amount. I'm very happy. No, no, that's great. But like, when you want like 10 million dollars or something, you know, I can get like that level of rich by, you know, working in big tech. Whereas at a startup, you can, you know, boom or bust. You could, your company can be dead tomorrow you could also be you know making you know eight figures or nine figures in like some crazy cases if you're a founder so and then that's also true for your career if you were there early and it moons you you'll be you know like a director really fast you'll you'll go on like VP like some

crazy thing where you know you can never do that in big tech so it kind of depends yeah i personally chose big tech. Like at the time I had a couple of startup offers and I also had a couple big tech offers and as part of the reason is I'm just lazy you know I'm a good work life balance like I sold my soul to Google so that I can live a good life. Um so I'm so glad I chose big tech because you know some of my friends they are at startups they're working so hard and in some cases I think some of them did moon you know go crazy and some of them did not so crazy and you know I'm very happy I chose big tech. It's actually really interesting because at UCLA, it seems like there is, there's a

lot of, there's a big portion of people that want to go into big tech much more than other colleges. And I've always wondered why, because I've also talked to some recruiters from startups and they say, yeah, we always go to UCLA to recruit, but no one seems to want to join, so we kind of stop going. Which colleges are the startup colleges? You know, like Stanford, I think they set a lot of Ivy ones. So I'm like, is it just because, you know, like they're rich so they don't need to make money immediately after college?

I don't know. You know, these are just like guesses. Yeah. One last thing I would say is the learnings can be different. So in big tech, you're learning from the industry best practices that are already set. So it's kind of like you're not going to have a lot of variance. you're going to learn the good stuff. It's all there. Like, you know, all the best practices. In startups, it can vary widely. Like, your role could could be even less code. It could be maybe

more PM stuff. It can be more a bunch of things. Whatever the startup needs at the moment, depending on how small it is. Yeah, I think it's, I guess it's similar to the variance thing. You could learn a lot, too, from the crazy startup trajectory. But also, there can be a case where it crashes and burns and you don't learn as much. So. So yeah, I mean, you know, in conclusion, I picked big tech and I would recommend big tech, at least for the first few years of your career. You get just huge jump in prestige. You just lock that in.

And then you can do whatever you want after that. Just learn all the basics and big tech, get that early signing bonus. And then, you know, rest of your life, do it. You can go, you know, do whatever. And as interns and as future new. grads, how do people, managers like you guys, measure by impact? Impact is just another way of saying the concrete measurable outcomes of your work. And the tech industry is great because you're not compensated or rewarded based off of the time

you spend or like your years of experience. Like literally, you know, how much money did you make or how much, you know, how much faster did you make that important customer flow or whatever, whatever. it is. And so when we talk about impact, it's specifically that. And so my answer to this question would be it really depends on the team you're on. If you're working on ads, it's going to be money. If you're working on some infrastructure team and maybe it's the cost of the database or maybe it's the latency of the database. If you're working on like a growth team, it might be like daily active users or a percentage of people that sign up on some critical customer flows.

So it really depends. I think the main thing is like wherever you go, you should 100% learn this from your team and your manager because this is how you're rewarded. Yeah, like if you write like 10k lines of code and it's all fixing typos in a code base, there's no impact, right? Like, you know, I mean, there's a little bit of impact

the tiniest fit, but it's nothing compared to, you know, for example, if you were somehow able to 2x the revenue of the company, right? That's probably something that people care a little bit more about. Yeah, like, one line code change that makes a 20% improvement and something that matters versus like hundreds of thousands of lines doing random things no one cares about always want the one line change and that's true pretty much at every company. Do you need an NBA for engineering management? Yeah, so this is an

interesting question. I remember when I was in college I had the same question because I didn't know. And I think you just learned from maybe the older generation that MBAs are good for some reason. I don't have an MBA. I'm a manager. You don't have an MBA. You're a manager. But actually, I was working on some research

with some company to answer this question. I actually have this graph kind of interesting. So this company basically scrapes LinkedIn to pull data. And you can see here,

they pulled like a few thousand data points from LinkedIn about directors and hire. And you can see with and without MBA it's comparable. And actually, without MBA is even lower. So yeah, you don't need an MBA.

Yeah, it's really odd. Like my mom, she kept telling me to get an MBA. Like, I had to get an MBA. And I didn't understand why. But I think also it's because, like, my mom's, you know, an immigrant. And she was like, oh, UCA's not good enough. You need an Ivy. You know, like Stanford.

You got to go Stanford. You got an MBA at Stanford. And she always like, I don't know why. She was my hater. She believed I wouldn't succeed without an MBA. Now she's a little bit like more chill because I got the staff right and then she's like looking on Xiaohongshu like little red book and she's like oh shit wait that's kind of good and I guess we're all suffering through this right now so we're wondering for you guys how was college

recruiting who definitely wanted to have a black hole swalleled me at times college recruiting was definitely you know hard I'm sure all of y'all have have kind of endured it. I think one of my recommendations or like a story I like to share with y'all about my college recruiting experience is with yelp. So I had a I had a technical coding challenge with yelp right they sent me I don't know it's a hack and ring thing and I opened it I was doing C++ plus because you know how we all learned C++ to start and that's all I knew at the time god forbid and it was it was a merge step of a merge store right and I just had to complete it and like I did it I put it together I'm pretty sure the code is right but I was getting a seg fault and I did not know why I kept checking my work and I really didn't get understand why I was not able to compile the code and it was a 15 minute coding challenge and then I failed and you know the Yelp recruiter came out and I was like okay Ricky so goodbye and I even hold her back and I say come on like I knew this I knew this hackeryag it was the MERS set of a MERT store tell your interest

to look at it because I'm 100% sure it's right. And she did and she said the engineer took a look at it. It looks correct. Actually, here's another coding challenge to do again. And that one I passed and I was able to move on to the interview round. So that was an example of me preserving through college recruiting. So, you know, it's worth it to kind of push back sometimes and advocate for yourself during the college recruiting process. Yeah.

your first role, that's the hardest one, no doubt. You have to be scrappy. Like what you did there, like you literally got rejected and you said, no. Like, look at it again. And so, yeah, you kind of have to do stuff. Once you get the first one, it's a lot easier. But yeah, definitely want to be scrappy. And I think like, yeah, my first role was like some random company.

I don't even put out my resume anymore, but it helped me get some experience. So then the next time, my resume looked a bit better and then I could shoot some shots at some better companies. Yeah, I think it's tough the first one, but if you can get a little scrappy or like take on some companies that are not as desirable, that can help a lot. People's number one motivation as much of money as possible. This is interesting because I feel like I didn't, I have no idea about money when I was in college. Like actually my life goal at some point was like, oh, I want to make 200K one day eventually. And then I have some people, yeah, actually I was eating, I was eating lunch with Daniel. And you were saying, you look behind you.

And you're like, oh, 200K is like minimum wage in the Bay Area. So, yeah, but it's interesting that you guys ask this. How do you make as much money as possible? I would say that it depends on how much money you want to make. If you want to be rich, rich, then you don't do what Ricky and I are doing. Yeah, if you want to be truly rich, you probably go to big tech for a few years, and then you start your own company. Because that's like the only way to make, you know, super crazy amounts.

I mean, would you say something different? It's like if you want to be like 50 mil rich, right? you probably have to go crazy with something. You gotta join Open AI as employee number 50 and then you can probably make it. Me and Ryan, maybe if we work hard for another 20, 30, 40 years and we get promoted three more times, yeah, maybe we could get there and the stock market,

whatever, continues to do well. But if you're just having, if you're just looking to have, have like a good life and you know just buy the things that you want and you know go on vacation whenever you want i would say definitely go into big tech and just do a good job there um as me and ryan did so we have some last words for you um and what i'd like to impart with you guys is that work is not everything you know like even though we're here talking about our careers and we look back at work hard careers and we're very proud of what we did when i look back on my 20s, you know now I'm in my late 20s I don't the happiest moments for me were not when I was like

working all the time or when I was getting promoted right the happiest times were like when I'm at Coachella and I really drunk and my shirts off and I'm having fun with my friends um those are the most memorable moments for me in my 20s right so even though you should work hard right and hopefully you can do a good job at your job definitely make sure to also go have fun you're in tech you'll graduate and then you'll have free will I don't know go see a Beyonce or Taylor Swift concert go travel if that's what you want to do but make sure you're definitely a multifaceted person

you're not just you know like if I made Google in my life and I got laid off you know I'd probably be crashing out right but if Google lays me off one day I'll be fine because I know I'm so much more than just you know some computer science guy so that's advice that I want to part with y'all. Yeah, I mean on that point too, I guess another way to look at it is in every aspect, every area, there's like this general curve of like diminishing returns where if you put in a lot of extra stuff into some area that little by little the gains are going to go away. And so actually

if you're truly a maximizer, you go everywhere where you can get more returns before it starts to diminish. So I guess that could be another way to look at it as well. But yeah, thanks for for having us here. That's like the prepared questions. If you guys have any questions too, we like let's get into those two. We don't need to to end it and we're happy to continue to answer. But those are the end of the slides. Yeah. So we're going to open it up to audience questions. I guess like one of your current goals like career or like false wise. Is this like pretty successful? So it is like my story is So I feel like Ryan scammed me because I actually like in the beginning, I was not that career driven. But then, you know, Ryan and I were roommates and we're still roommates and I feel like he would kind of like whisper in my ear and be like, oh, but what if we got promoted, bro?

Like, don't that be dope? And then I was like, oh, maybe I guess. And you know, but I'm really thankful to Ryan, right? Because I think back in the time, back in the day when I saw these things, levels, we also had data about, you know, how long it took to progress from each level, right? And I was like, oh, you know, I'll just take my time kind of doing it. But then Ryan, I was like, oh, well, what if we went faster than that? And I honestly didn't even think that it was possible, right? So, but then I kind of asked my manager. My manager was also supportive of me

and also kind of helped me. And actually got promoted a lot quicker than average. I obviously tried, Right? I obviously put in the work. I don't know how many of you guys are from the barrier. He's from the barrier. He went to one of those intense high schools. Whoa. He says that I tricked him. No, he has something good side of him.

He's pretty competitive, I'll say. Griding is kind of fun, but do you guys know where Mono Vista is? It's a Mono Vista kid right here. But I've been trying to get the Montevista out of me. It was kind of like, oh, why not, right? If I'm gonna if I can like why not try to do it so I did put in the effort and I did kind of succeed But I wasn't I definitely wasn't like I don't know giving up all the other things in life that I wanted to do just to kind of Continue on with my career so it seems like you guys have stayed at your same job for the most of your career

At least for now and I'm wondering like what your guys's perspectives are on switching jobs every two three years for the money or for like more responsibilities promotion yeah so i think i'm a really special case where since i have joined google i've been on the same team and basically under the same manager and i really have not changed any teams but that's not to say that i haven't like looked for other teams right i think what usually happened is i would look around and i would see that my grass is indeed greener. So for me at least, I stayed on the same team, but there's definitely this aspect of survivorship bias, right? Maybe other people on my team, they left because they weren't having as good of a time. So I think it really depends case by case. I definitely think it's worth

thinking about, you know, every six months, do I still want to be here? Are there still the right opportunities? Does my team support me? Does my manager support me? And, you know, depending on your answer to those questions, you can think about leaving or staying. I've done a lot of research on this topic actually and it's it's kind of interesting. It's a little bit nuanced. So actually maybe the level thing. Okay so actually job hopping the common take you here is like job hop for promos, you know no brainer do it. Actually it really depends. So like if you want optimal career strategy, it would probably be that you aggressively try to job hop in this area while you're trying to get

promoted and you just take the faster path because here like momentum does not matter that much you're just trying to get to the next level and so you know if i would put it simply you probably want a job hop in this area but once you get down here job hopping is actually counterproductive because first off you're not no one's going to hire someone at e7 or l7 if you're in l6 it just does not happen if anything they're going to down level and you hire you here So it's not going to be an effective strategy. But also a lot of the promotions at this level come from building credibility and trust and having a track record. And so if you're just job hopping all the time, you're not going to have that momentum and people are not going to know you.

So I would say, you know, optimal is like aggressively job hop, especially if things aren't good. Just go to some place. They'll give you a promo if you can get one. But then here you got to be a little more thoughtful. One last thing I'll add, which is kind of interesting, is I've seen. I saw someone job hop from E5 to E7. I also saw someone job hop from E5 to E6. And I think the way that they did that was really interesting.

If you're in a well-measured ladder like I am, you all know I'm right here. And the recruiters know that too. No one's going to put me here. At best, they'll put me here. But if you left here, like let's say I left and I went to start my own company, I'm like in this probability cloud somewhere, you know, like no one knows what I am. And so then you can come back in somewhere if the work you're doing matches the expectations of these levels,

which is really rare. It's like an unusual thing you'll never hear anyone say, but I've seen some very rare data points of that. So if you ever leave the ladder, now you kind of created some leeway here. But it's very rare, though, to do something. I think that guy that went from 5 to 7, he left Google at 5, he joined a startup, he wrote a book as well on JavaScript, and then he came in at Meta as an E7, and then he continued to get promoted. Ricky, what team are you in at Google? I'm in ads. I describe my job as making ads pretty.

Y'all have definitely seen my ads, even if you've had Ad Blocker, I'm sure. Maybe afterwards I'll show you my beautiful ads. I've seen videos of very prolific people in the industry coughing about how AI is going to be like a low to mid-level software engineer. I was wondering how like the implementation of AI and she's going to affect hiring for like entry-level. As far as we see it today, I think, you know, it's hard to say in the future, maybe in 10, 10 years, 5, 10 years. In the short term, though, for all of you, even if you're first year, I still think that it's not going to completely change things. There are still some things that it's difficult for LOMs to do. And if anything, we just see that LOMs just empower engineers.

So, you know, it's something that we use as a tool. And there's a lot of non-AI tools that we use at work that write code for us as well. And that doesn't scare anyone. This is just like a little bit further. In conclusion, I don't think it will. majorly change things and I wouldn't change your strategy like don't just change major from CS because you're worried that there's not going to be any jobs at least for for the people in this room if you were maybe a freshman in high school or something I'm not sure yeah I think

my perspective on it is there are always going to be people who have to kind of like tell the AI what to do right tell you know the AI is got to build in this way and then kind of like verify that it's like correct. So even though even in like five, 10 years in the future, I am still imagining, right, maybe like an entry level software engineer, they're not coding as much because the AI is going to do it for them, but they're still kind of like figuring out how to, you know, get that AI to do what you want, you want it to do. Because AI is always going to be a tool for us, right? And also people got to build the AI. So that's kind of my

perspective on things.