The Peterman Pod23 Mai 2025

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

To hear more, visit www.developing.dev

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(68)

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

Philip Su grew quickly to a Distinguished Engineer at Facebook and OpenAI. We talked about the psychology behind peaking in a tech career and the pressure at the highest levels.• My ergonomic keyboard...

21 Sep 44min

Casey Muratori: Surprises In Computer History And Where Bad Code Comes From

Casey Muratori is a video game developer and programming creator also known for his talks about the history of software and computing. We talked about surprising parts he found while digging through c...

14 Sep 1h 57min

How Anthropic Builds And How Engineering Will Change Soon | Thariq Shihipar

Thariq Shihipar is an engineer on Anthropic’s Claude Code team I asked him how Anthropic makes the most out of the models for engineering and how the industry will change soon.• My ergonomic keyboard ...

7 Sep 1h 10min

Creator of Scala: Comparing Languages And How AI Will Impact Them | Martin Odersky

Martin Odersky is the creator of Scala and I interviewed him to compare different languages designs (Rust vs Zig vs Python vs Scala) and how AI will impact programming languages.• My ergonomic keyboar...

31 Aug 57min

Sergey Levine: Current State of Humanoid Robotics, China & Future Predictions

Sergey Levine is one of the world's top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Chinese robotics ecosystem, and ...

24 Aug 57min

Creator of TypeScript: 10x Faster Typescript, Why AI Won't Replace SWEs | Anders Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of TypeScript and C#, and I asked him about how the TypeScript compiler got 10x faster through a rewrite in Go and his thoughts on how AI has impacted software engineer...

17 Aug 1h 5min

Creator of Lean: Handwritten Math Will Change Dramatically | Leonardo de Moura

Leonardo de Moura is the creator of Lean and the Z3 theorem prover. I talked with him about how Lean works and why LLMs plus Lean will fundamentally change how we write software and do math.• My ergon...

10 Aug 1h 8min

Creator of Lua: Scripting, Programming Languages, Predictions | Roberto Ierusalimschy

Roberto Ierusalimschy is the creator of the Lua programming language. I interviewed him about Lua's unique strengths, programming language design and predictions for how AI will impact programming lan...

3 Aug 1h 5min