The Peterman Pod

Ricky (Google Engineering Manager) and I were recently invited to give a talk at UCLA for the UPE/ACM clubs. We wanted to share the industry secrets that college didn’t teach us about the tech industry, career growth, and more. Students were able to submit questions in advance that we prepared slides for. We received a bunch of interesting questions that should be helpful to any college kids looki...

Jia Chen is a 21 year old that won 21x hackathons and co-founded her own startup, all while being a content creator. She’s worked hard to succeed in tech despite attending a non-target school, and has recently dropped out to work on her startup, Sprint.dev . We discuss: • Winning hackathon strategies • How to stand out as a college student • Content creation • Dropping out to build a startup • Col...

Steve Huynh became a software engineer at Amazon with a Liberal Arts degree. He started as a Support Engineer and eventually became a Principal Engineer (top ~1% at Amazon) before starting his own career growth YouTube channel, A Life Engineered. We discuss: • Why most interview prep advice is garbage • Why most people don’t become Principal Engineers • Amazon’s performance-based layoff culture •...

Evan King went from Junior (IC3) to Staff (IC6) at Meta 3 years out of college. After that he quit FAANG to start a few companies that were each acquired. In this conversation we go over his career growth, his transition to startups and what he learned along the way.  We discuss: • What got him promoted to Staff in 3 years • What stands out in Meta’s culture • Creating and leading a new team at IC...

Rahul Pandey (@rpandey1234) grew to Staff at Meta through a few interesting legs of his career: • Stanford to Startup - He joined a startup that one of his professors was starting right out of college. This startup was acquired within a year by Pinterest. • Junior to Mid-level @ Pinterest - His promotion was rejected twice. He appealed the second rejection and got the promotion. • Senior to Staff...

Ricky (@findingricky) went from Junior (IC3) to Staff (IC6) at Google by 28. He doesn’t consider himself the best engineer, instead crediting his blend of technical and soft skills for his ability to land promotions quickly. In our conversation, we discuss: • Managing your manager • Finding good projects (and rejecting bad ones) • Imposter syndrome • Switching from IC to engineering management • W...

Zach Wilson is an engineer who grew to Staff (IC6) at Airbnb by age 26. He worked at Meta, Netflix, Airbnb and more recently has started his own company. In our conversation, we discuss: • His promotion from Junior (IC3) to Mid-level (IC4) at Meta • What blocked his promotion to Senior (IC5) at Meta • Job hopping to Senior at Netflix instead • Burning out at Netflix when given Staff scope • Negoti...