Amazon VP On Promotions, Getting Fired Twice, Working With Bezos | Ethan Evans
Ethan Evans went from being fired twice because of poor soft skills to getting promoted to Vice President at Amazon with a team of over 800 engineers. I asked him about everything he learned along the...
1 Aug 202553min
Tech Lead for Meta's Most-Used Programming Language (Promotion Story)
Dwayne Reeves is a Senior Staff Engineer (IC7) at Meta who is the Tech Lead of the most used programming language (Hack) at the company. He started at the company as a new grad from MIT and shared the...
25 Jul 202546min
GoogleX Chief Scientist On Imposter Syndrome, Career Growth, Project Taste
Carey Nachenberg was a Chief Scientist at a GoogleX moonshot, a Fellow (senior most eng at Symantec) and a professor at UCLA. I interviewed him about his career story and we discussed:• Story behind h...
18 Jul 20251h 11min
Meta Senior Staff Eng (IC7) On Zuck Stories, Rapid Career Growth, Code Machine Archetype
Michael Novati got promoted to Senior Staff (IC7) Eng at Facebook by the age of 27. He did it while the company was still called Facebook so he had a bunch of interesting pre-IPO stories. In our conve...
11 Jul 20251h 26min
26 Year Old Meta Staff Eng (IC6) On Promotions, Redefining Expectations, Secret Equity Bonuses
Simon Kindström is a Staff Software Eng (IC6) at Instagram who joined the company as a new grad and got promoted every year. He also achieved the highest ratings ("Redefines Expectations") twice which...
4 Jul 20251h 17min
Instagram Principal Engineer (IC8) on Promotions, Breaking Prod, Tech Leading | Jake Bolam
Jake Bolam grew from Staff Eng (IC6) to Principal Eng (IC8) at Instagram. He had some hot takes about diff reviews and risk (he accepts diffs that’ll break prod). He also shared interesting stories ab...
31 Mai 202550min
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 en...
23 Mai 20251h 20min
Industry Secrets We Wish We Knew Before Graduating | Staff Eng Talk @ UCLA
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 industr...
2 Mai 202547min
