Ryan Peterman

Yeah, I mean, it would come out flat out in opportunity chats where we tried to hire someone and they're like, hey, PyTorch is cool, but aren't you guys really underleveled?

That would be the first question people would ask and have to be like, maybe, or maybe we're holding the right levels.

You got to decide where you want to take a chance on us.

But I think the flip side is that we really did train people.

A lot of people who were in PyTorch really learned to be remarkably good.

Well, I came into a wild ride, which was actually, honestly, an amazing experience.

Some of my happiest years of my life were my first two years at Meta, but also some of the most fearsome and scary years were also there.

I joined the team that I signed up for.

And when I signed up, it was supposed to be called Data Science.

Before I arrived, because I asked for a six-month leave to work on Julia, the programming language I was one of the core contributors to, I asked for a six-month leave between finishing grad school and going to Facebook at that time.

And during that six-month period, the guy who hired me quit.

And then the team that was called Data Science that I was hired into got split into two teams, one called Core Data Science and one called Data Science Infrastructure.

And then that itself became really tricky, because I wound up joining Creative Science, but really loving collaborating with the data science infrastructure people, who were the ones who owned the experimentation tools.

Working in the experimentation tools was, honestly, I think to this day, the most people who know me from that are like, oh, yeah, John was really helpful for that stuff.

I actually think almost nothing I worked on as an IC ever went anywhere close to being as valuable to the business as the experimentation stuff.

And I don't think I was ever as good at any of the other stuff.

I really loved being in that space, and I think it was really influential to the business.

That said, I was on this core data science team that was like an insane ball of stress.

I joined.

It was radically reorged.