Ryan Peterman

It had new managers.

I actually wound up really liking the new managers, but that was still a source of churn.

But then a few months into it, someone who actually was on the data science infrastructure team, which is particularly what's amusing, but attributed his team to being core data science because he perceived that to be sort of the team he really was on when he wrote this paper, published this paper in PNAS, the Proceedings of National Academy of Science, called something like Emotional Contagion in Social Networks.

that wound up just becoming the absolute singular worst piece of PR for Meta as a business that year.

Just absolute disaster.

I was really, really trying to prevent this from happening, but I didn't have the authority to prevent it.

But at least people perceive I was on the side who was not happy with this decision.

But it meant that I was on this team

where I was doing the data science infrastructure work that was sort of very inward facing and very safe, but I was affiliated with a more researchy division that was publishing these papers that went from becoming sort of a PR win to a PR nightmare very rapidly.

And that team, I think, was one of the most my formative experiences I've met up because it really was like,

Well, what happens if this team just gets fully disbanded?

And this was in a world where there weren't layoffs.

It was like, well, Meta doesn't do layoffs, but this team maybe has got itself to a state where it's going to get laid off.

And the guy who wrote this paper wound up having to do a company-wide Q&A where effectively he sort of just apologized to the entire business as his Q&A.

it was really just like a mind-blowing experience and it was actually it was like one where it's like you know i came as an ic4 and all of a sudden we were like in these meetings were like you know the head of legal being like well why did you guys do this uh and you know having to have these discussions with them on a regular basis and really trying to figure through like what was the future of our team um but it was great um

That blew over, for what it's worth.

And then I spent several years just working on our experimentation tools.

I was one of the main developers of Deltoid 3, which is, I think, now just called Deltoid, because I think it's been Deltoid for so long, they just referred to it as Deltoid.

But at one point, it was the third iteration.

And I worked a ton on that.