OpenAI & Meta Distinguished Engineer (IC9) On Working With Zuck, Carmack & Career Growth | Philip Su

Philip Su grew to Distinguished Engineer (IC9) at Meta and OpenAI. He has a bunch of interesting stories about working with people like Zuck and John Carmack as well as a ton of advice for software engineers. I was really looking forward to chatting with him and enjoyed this conversation a lot. I hope you find it helpful!

In this conversation, we discussed:

• What Distinguished Eng (IC9) expectations look like

• How he got promoted to IC9

• Working with impressive engineers like John Carmack

• What made Zuck and Boz special as coworkers

• Learnings from switching between IC and EM 6x

• Why he joined OpenAI

• Advice for his younger self

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(01:02) Growing to Senior Staff (IC7) at Microsoft

(06:38) Management vs IC transitions

(17:32) Demotion from IC9 to IC7 at Meta

(20:28) IC7, IC8, and IC9 expectations

(28:58) IC9 promo story

(31:30) Building a strong eng team culture

(36:16) Working with Zuck + Meta CTO

(38:57) Working with John Carmack and other impressive ICs

(41:44) Buying $23000 of coffee in a day

(45:35) Why leave Facebook

(49:25) Joining OpenAI

(55:38) Writing well as a software engineer

(1:03:00) Does software eng performance decline as you age?

(1:07:00) Building credibility as a young manager

(1:10:25) Should you be a generalist or a specialist?

(1:12:43) Advice for his younger self

Where to find Philip:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suphilip/

• Peak Salvation podcast he referenced: https://peaksalvation.com/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/

• X: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ 

• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ryanlpeterman

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman