Ryan Peterman

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.

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.