Zuckerberg Taught Him How to Beat 99% of Software Engineers
In this episode, I sit down with Philip Su, a former Distinguished Engineer at Meta - one of the rarest engineering titles in the industry. Philip worked directly with Mark Zuckerberg, helped ship foundational products like Web Messenger, and later joined OpenAI in its earliest days.
Try out Temporal → https://bit.ly/4sHNJ4L
Philip’s Substack: https://molochinations.substack.com
Superphonic, the iOS podcast player that Philip is writing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/superphonic/id6444668430
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Working with Zuckerberg & pushing first-principles thinking
0:44 – Who is Philip Su and how he became a Distinguished SWE Engineer
2:14 - How he reached one of the highest engineering levels at Meta
2:54 - When did Philip join Facebook?
3:24 - What do Distinguished SWE Engineers actually do?
4:47 - Why most engineers don’t think like owners
5:53 - How to stand out as a junior engineer?
9:00 - Compensation at the top: salary vs stock reality
11:01 - What Mark Zuckerberg was actually like to work with
12:51 - Learning directness, feedback, and hard conversations from Zuck
13:20 - What can aspiring SWE apply from Zuck?
14:52 - How Philip made hiring decisions
16:16 - What AI will realistically do to engineering jobs
17:08 - Staying in the top fraction as the bar rises
18:23 - Are computer science majors cooked?
21:18 - New roles that emerge as AI replaces code writing
22:32 - Why humans may struggle to compete with AI
23:41 - Should students still pursue computer science?
24:55 - If you were a student right now.. What would you focus on?
26:39 - Will there be jobs after the "AI Takeover"
28:13 - Where human engineers still beat AI today
29:40 - One career decision Philip would change looking back