Ryan Peterman

And I think people came and were happy for that reason.

So I do think people just have agency in that sense, which is like, yeah, within the context of that machine, you got to follow the rules.

But it's not like you're forced to be in that machine.

There were other roles.

Not everyone would get them.

And PyTorch was very choosy.

But I think many people could, and it was worth doing.

I think the alternative there was also was like, even within a team, managers can differ a lot in how much they push on this.

And I have personally at least been a person who I think mostly benefited from actually trying to bet on, be on the stable team that will gradually succeed over time and will have a healthy culture and not collapse and not do things like over level ourselves.

But it does mean that you get promoted slower.

And this is where I think I do struggle with this a bit, which is I think if at the end of the day what you really want to do is do something like compute your total sum of earnings over your entire lifetime, it may be better to be in the orgs that get promoted really fast and get fired really fast.

But there are a lot of those orgs at Meta where people are like, well, they're the stars.

Oh, actually, no.

It turns out they're terrible and lied to us, so we got rid of all of them.

This happened a bunch of times in the year at Meta.

It might be that that is actually economically rational, I'm not sure, but certainly I think for myself about emotionally rational and feeling like I enjoy the craft of stuff, being on the teams, and PyTorch was like this.

I mean, one of the challenges actually PyTorch had with hiring was actually the perception that PyTorch held a higher bar.

People would be like, oh, I've heard you guys are actually like much tougher about promotions, and I'd be like, yeah, honestly, we are.

Honestly, R8s are as good as you're going to get anywhere in this whole world.

And if you want to be the best engineer you're ever going to be in your entire life, you should work with them.