Ryan Peterman

And I actually think for us, this probably is one of the things that makes, say, MSL more stressful than the other frontier labs, is the sense that it might have layers.

In the sense that I think so far there have been fewer rounds, or at least perceived to be fewer rounds, than some of the smaller startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.

I observed a lot of divisions of meta would really like stop talking about like, well, your comp is why you're here and we pay you good money and you enjoy the work and that's why you stay.

And a lot of people were like, no, the only reason you do anything is because there's a clear story about how it's going to get your promotion.

And you would like, especially, and this was really striking when I moved from data infra, whereas one of the places I was in earlier in infra, moving to AI infra, and I was in AI infra for a while before I came into sort of PyTorch part of AI infra and then later MSL.

One of the things that blew my mind is like, there was not a single person I would meet on any team in AI infra whose first and foremost goal wasn't promotion.

This was a thing that sort of came up in data info, but was not like 90% of people's attention.

And when I started at Meta, it was just like not ever a thing.

Actually, like, you know, I used to manage one of your previous guests, Adrian, and like Adrian and I were talking about career growth back in the day.

And one of the things that was really amazing was like, we started in this org growth that actually had never had anyone above IC7 ever in history.

on the sweet side, to be clear.

There were some other rules that had it, but at least this is what we were told.

I actually don't know for a fact it was objectively true, but we were told this by several people.

I think in that world, you weren't focused on promotion, so it wasn't a big thing.

But then it became a thing where it was like,

This is the thing.

You will, one, get more money, more promoted, but also you'll have a title that you can use for your next job.

And everything is driven by promotion dynamics.

Actually, I would say the org I found this by far most strong in was monetization, which is when monetization would hire people out of AI infra,

it would always literally be like, here is a very detailed plan of work you will do in order to get promoted.