Writing Well As A Software Engineer

In this lesson, Philip explains how he transformed from someone who dismissed writing and other “soft skills” into a prolific writer who considers communication essential for technical professionals. He shares how reading great literature changed his appreciation for language and how deliberate practice—especially rewriting and editing his own work—helped him develop his distinctive writing style.

- **To write well, read well.** Philip developed his appreciation for writing by reading exceptional authors and paying attention to how they structure sentences, tell stories, and communicate ideas. He continues to notice and learn from effective rhetorical techniques in other people’s writing.
- **Great writing comes through rewriting.** Many of Philip’s posts went through multiple revisions before publication. Being willing to edit heavily, discard material, experiment with structure, and occasionally seek professional feedback helped him continually improve.
- **Writing creates leverage for technical ideas.** Strong communication allows engineers to share knowledge beyond the people they work with directly. Philip’s Great Posts Explorer extended this idea by helping employees rediscover valuable, evergreen writing that might otherwise have disappeared into the company’s history.

Joining OpenAI

In this lesson, Philip explains what brought him back to the technology industry after leaving Facebook, pursuing nonprofit work, and spending time away from traditional tech companies. Philip shares why he chose to apply only to OpenAI, how his experience at Facebook shaped his preference for working with a market leader, and what impressed him about OpenAI’s exceptionally high concentration of engineering talent. 

- **Recognize major technological transitions and decide whether you want to participate in them.** After experiencing the internet and mobile revolutions from Microsoft and the rise of social networking from Facebook, Philip viewed AI as a potentially even larger shift and deliberately chose to re-enter the industry to be part of it.
- **Market leaders have the freedom to experiment.** Philip prefers working for the category leader because a strong market position creates room to take ambitious risks, tolerate failures, and explore unconventional ideas rather than spending most of the organization’s energy catching up with a competitor.
- **Technical breakthroughs eventually need great products.** Philip was struck by OpenAI’s extraordinary engineering talent, but also observed that as competition grows, technical superiority alone becomes less sufficient. Turning research into reliable, compelling products becomes increasingly important.

Leaving Facebook

In this lesson, Philip explains why he chose to leave Facebook despite having a successful career at the company. Part of his decision came from wanting to focus his energy on broader societal challenges, including income inequality and his early concerns about technology-driven unemployment. 

- **Your value to an organization can change as the company grows.** Philip’s generalist skill set allowed him to make an outsized contribution when Facebook was smaller, but as the company scaled to thousands of engineers, he felt his particular strengths were becoming less differentiated.
- **Generalists can have an advantage in smaller companies.** Startups frequently have work that doesn't justify a dedicated full-time role, making people who can move between engineering, product, hiring, operations, and other responsibilities particularly valuable.
- **Scale creates greater demand for specialization.** As organizations grow, previously fractional responsibilities become full-time jobs. At that point, deep specialists can provide more value in a particular domain, while some of a generalist’s broader skill set may go unused.

Gratitude & Paying It Forward

In this lesson, Philip shares the story behind spending more than $23,000 to buy coffee for everyone at Facebook on his final day at the company. What began years earlier as a simple Christmas gesture became a meaningful way to close out a chapter of his career and express gratitude to a company that had given him extraordinary opportunities, mentorship, and financial success.

- **Recognize the role luck plays in success.** Philip credits hard work for parts of his career, but also acknowledges circumstances outside his control—from when and where he was born to joining Facebook at an unexpectedly transformative moment.
- **Gratitude can be expressed by paying success forward.** After Facebook’s IPO, Philip donated his proceeds to charity, and when he eventually left the company, buying coffee across several offices became another way to give something back.
- **Small gestures can create an outsized impact.** What began as buying coworkers coffee for a day created genuine joy and became a memorable tradition—showing that generosity doesn't always need to be complicated to be meaningful.

Working With Zuck And Other Impressive ICs

In this lesson, Philip reflects on what he learned from working alongside some of Meta’s most influential leaders and senior engineers. He shares what stood out about leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew “Boz” Bosworth—particularly their willingness to seek feedback, continually develop their skills, and make deliberate improvements even after reaching highly influential positions.

- **Exceptional leaders remain committed to their own growth.** Philip observed that leaders like Zuckerberg and Bosworth continued to seek coaching, respond to feedback, and deliberately improve their skills rather than assuming they had finished developing once they reached senior positions.
- **The best engineers can create impact far beyond their immediate responsibilities.** Philip recalls John Carmack quickly identifying technical and performance improvements in a product he hadn't worked on for months, demonstrating the depth of insight that can distinguish exceptional technical talent.
- **The highest-impact ICs are often force multipliers.** Scott Renfro stood out not only for his ability to deliver large, complex initiatives, but for making the engineers around him better through thoughtful feedback, supportive code reviews, and a willingness to invest time in others’ success.

Building A Strong Team Culture

In this lesson, Philip shares how he built and maintained a strong engineering culture while launching Meta’s London engineering office. Drawing on lessons from Meta’s Seattle expansion and advice from leaders who had built engineering sites at other companies, he explains how deliberately choosing the right founding team can shape a new office for years to come.

- **Learn from other teams before building your own.** Philip drew on both mistakes he observed while helping grow Meta Seattle and lessons from experienced site leaders to avoid reinventing the wheel when launching London.
- **A committed core team helps preserve culture during rapid growth.** Philip believes short three- or six-month landing teams leave too little time to establish a durable culture. Having experienced employees commit for two years provided stability while large numbers of new hires joined.
- **Select founding team members for culture, leadership, and technical strength.** Philip evaluated nearly 50 volunteers to choose 12 people who understood Meta’s culture, could bring and lead meaningful work, and would help establish strong hiring standards for the new office.

IC7, IC8, and IC9 Expectations

In this lesson, Philip breaks down how expectations change across senior engineering levels, from E7 through E9. Rather than viewing career progression as a checklist of increasingly difficult tasks, he explains that seniority is largely defined by the **scope, duration, and value of the impact you can reliably create**—whether through leading larger organizations, delivering increasingly complex initiatives, or possessing technical expertise that cannot easily be replicated by adding more engineers.

- **Higher levels are defined by expanding scope and influence.** An E7 might influence the work of roughly 50 people and independently drive long-term initiatives, while E8 and E9 impact expands further through organizational breadth, technical depth, strategic importance, or uniquely valuable expertise.
- **At the highest levels, promotion becomes increasingly qualitative.** There is no universal checklist for reaching E8 or E9. Senior engineers can create exceptional value through different archetypes, and recognition at these levels often depends on whether other senior leaders view your impact as operating at their level.
- **Surround yourself with people who create room for growth.** Being the strongest person on a weak team can limit your development and make it difficult to accurately assess your abilities. When senior role models are scarce, finding an experienced coach who can give candid, qualitative feedback may be even more valuable than finding someone whose career you can directly imitate.

Getting Promoted To IC9

In this lesson, Philip explains what operating at the E9 level looked like during his time leading Meta’s London engineering office. After arriving with just 12 engineers, he helped grow the organization to roughly 400–500 people—a shift that dramatically changed the complexity, ambiguity, and time horizon of the decisions he was responsible for making.

- **Greater seniority means solving increasingly ambiguous problems.** As organizations grow, decisions become less black-and-white, requiring leaders to navigate complexity, competing priorities, and uncertainty.
- **Senior-level impact requires thinking much further ahead.** At E9, Philip was making data-driven decisions about hiring and organizational needs as much as 18 months before their effects would be realized.
- **Scope is measured by both breadth and time horizon.** Progressing to the highest levels means influencing larger groups of people while identifying strategic problems and opportunities that others may not yet be thinking about.

Taking a Step Back from IC9 to IC7 at Meta

In this lesson, Philip shares the story behind his decision to move from E9 to E7 at Facebook after transitioning from site leadership back to an individual contributor role. Rather than viewing the change as a career setback, he saw it as an opportunity to align his level, compensation, and expectations with the work he actually wanted to do—and knew he could perform well.

- **Optimize for the role where you can perform well, not the highest title you can hold.** Philip preferred excelling at E7 over struggling to meet expectations at E9 and believed his level and compensation should reflect his actual contributions.
- **Moving down requires separating status from career satisfaction.** Going from leading hundreds of people to becoming an individual member of a team requires being comfortable giving up hierarchy, influence, and prestige in exchange for work that better fits you.
- **When you leave leadership, you also need to relinquish the authority that came with it.** Successfully stepping back means supporting the new leaders rather than continuing to use your previous influence to shape decisions that are no longer yours to make.

Management vs IC Transitions

In this lesson, Philip reflects on his experience moving between individual contributor (IC) and management roles throughout his career. He explains why he initially pursued management, why he ultimately prefers being an IC, and how he has managed to switch between the two tracks multiple times—even when doing so meant willingly stepping down in level.

- **Choose management because you want to lead—not simply because it feels like the next promotion.** Before becoming a manager, consider whether your team would genuinely want you to lead them and whether you would want to work for yourself.
- **Be careful of turning management into a one-way door.** Moving away from hands-on technical work can make returning to the IC track difficult, particularly if maintaining your title, level, or compensation becomes more important than making the right career move.
- **IC and management skills can converge at senior levels.** Senior ICs often need many of the same capabilities as strong leaders—including communication, vision, coaching, business understanding, and the ability to lead complex initiatives—although highly specialized technical roles may follow a different path.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2JxdjTi_1I**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2JxdjTi_1I)

Becoming Senior Staff IC7 at Microsoft

In this lesson, Philip reflects on his rapid career progression at Microsoft and the factors he believes contributed most to his growth as an engineer. He discusses the value of working alongside exceptionally talented colleagues and mentors, deliberately accumulating experience early in your career, and the role that hard work can play in accelerating professional development.

- **Career growth is a combination of luck, talent, and hard work.** While some factors are outside your control, putting yourself in strong environments and learning from exceptional people can accelerate your development.
- **More experience can compress the learning curve.** Taking on a high volume of meaningful work early in your career can expose you to situations and problems that might otherwise take years to encounter.
- **Hard work has diminishing returns—and real trade-offs.** Longer hours may increase total output and experience, but each additional hour can become less productive, and career acceleration can come at the expense of health, relationships, and balance.

Leverage Your Unfair Advantage

We explain how to accelerate your job search after a layoff by intentionally leveraging the advantages already on your résumé. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We should leverage company brand as an unfair advantage, since recognizable names (Big Tech, well-known startups, or respected niche companies) carry trust and credibility that immediately raise our odds versus the average applicant.
- We can increase our chances by targeting adjacent companies, customers, or competitors where our background naturally fits, instead of applying randomly to roles with no contextual advantage.
- We should confidently lean into domain and product association—using the halo effect of teams, products, or problem spaces we worked on—because perceived relevance often matters more than perfect technical alignment.

Verify Your Severance Package

We explain what to do immediately after a layoff to protect yourself financially and legally, and to reduce unnecessary stress. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Most large tech companies provide severance due to legal requirements and long-term reputational incentives, but layoffs are messy, so you must carefully review all paperwork and verify dates, vesting, and severance amounts.
- Never sign termination documents on the spot; take time to review them, ask questions, and involve a lawyer if possible, especially for severance disputes or visa-related considerations.
- After a layoff, it’s critical to understand your personal burn rate and runway by reviewing your finances, since clarity around how long you can sustain yourself reduces anxiety and helps you plan your next steps.

There Is Nothing Wrong With You

We close by reframing layoffs as a survivable, even formative, career event rather than a personal failure. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Being laid off is not a reflection of your ability or worth, since layoffs are driven by executives making decisions with incomplete information and often feel effectively random from an individual’s perspective.
- There is no value in self-blame or overanalyzing what you could have done differently, because once a layoff happens, the only productive move is to look forward.
- With severance as temporary financial runway, layoffs can be treated as a reset point to reflect, recover, and intentionally choose your next step, knowing this is a normal part of a long tech career.

Build Up Relationships

We highlight why building strong relationships and social capital is essential for career resilience, especially during layoffs. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Relationships are a form of social capital, and having people who know you, like you, and will advocate for you can directly influence whether you survive layoffs or get new opportunities.
- Engineers often underinvest in relationship-building by staying heads-down, but proactively connecting with managers, skips, and peers across teams is increasingly important in today’s economy.
- Building relationships doesn’t require forced networking—it can happen naturally through code reviews, coffee chats, offsites, and one-on-ones if you are intentional about seeking opportunities.
- No matter how senior or skilled you are, everyone is expendable, so you should never rely on company loyalty alone and should continuously invest in relationships that outlast any single job.

Grow Fundamental Skills

We explain why growing fundamental, transferable skills is one of the most powerful ways to reduce layoff risk and strengthen long-term career resilience. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- There is far more to software engineering than coding, especially at scale, where communication, project management, leadership, and relationship-building determine whether work actually ships.
- Over-indexing on a specific technology, language, or product is risky, because teams, systems, and entire products can disappear, while transferable skills allow you to move across teams or companies.
- Engineers who can clearly design systems, think through edge cases, write thoughtful plans, and communicate tradeoffs create outsized impact compared to those who jump straight into code.
- So-called “soft skills” are actually the highest-leverage skills, because they compound across roles, companies, and industries, while technical tools and frameworks inevitably change.
- Focusing your time on high-leverage problems and influence, rather than low-level tooling details, is what drives career growth, adaptability, and durability during periods of layoffs.

Optimize Your Performance

We focus on the most practical actions within your control to reduce layoff risk by becoming a consistently high-performing, high-impact contributor.

- Optimizing performance should be a constant priority, starting with deeply understanding your company’s performance review system and knowing exactly what ratings mean and how they affect your risk and growth.
- Staying calm and avoiding gossip or obsession with layoff rumors is critical, since anxiety and distraction directly undermine performance and effectiveness.
- Maintaining a clear, transparent, and concise dialogue with your manager is essential, because managers advocate for you using only a few high-level impact points.
- Expanding scope and proactively tackling important, ambiguous problems is one of the strongest career multipliers and a key trait of top performers.
- Building a clear professional “brand” on your team—where others can easily articulate what you’re known for and the value you deliver—makes you more visible, promotable, and resilient during layoffs.

Be Deliberate With Team Selection

We explain how team selection within a company can influence both career growth and layoff risk, while stressing the importance of balance and personal fit.

- Team choice is one of the remaining factors within your control, and teams that are important to leadership or closely tied to core revenue are generally less likely to be cut.
- Importance is relative to executive priorities, not just revenue, so understanding what leadership truly cares about is key, especially at companies with strong founder influence.
- Choosing a high-priority team is usually good career advice anyway, since those teams tend to have more scope, visibility, and growth opportunities.
- You should not sacrifice genuine interest or passion just to chase perceived safety, because lack of engagement hurts performance and long-term career growth.
- This guidance is clearer at companies with product-market fit, while earlier-stage startups carry more inherent uncertainty, making stability harder to assess regardless of team choice.

Don't Freak Out

We emphasize the mindset shift that matters most when facing the reality of layoffs and uncertainty in tech.

- The most important first step is not to freak out, even though layoffs can feel shocking and destabilizing, especially for people who assumed big tech jobs were inherently safe.
- Acceptance is key: layoffs are a normal part of professional life, often driven by factors far outside an individual contributor’s control, including executive decisions and market conditions.
- Obsessing over layoffs or drastically changing your behavior can actually backfire, while staying steady and focused on your work is usually the healthier and more effective approach.
- If a layoff is going to happen, the decision is typically already made, so recognizing what you cannot control can be freeing and allows you to focus your energy on what you actually can control.

Signs A Layoff Is Coming

We outline the practical signals that can help you tell when layoffs may be coming, especially in tech companies.

- For public companies, a prolonged and severe stock price decline is a strong warning sign, as companies generally can’t sustain operations when shares remain far below their highs.
- For startups and private companies, stagnant growth, hiring freezes, and an indefinite pause on recruiting often indicate belt-tightening ahead of potential layoffs.
- Companies preparing for layoffs frequently cut perks first, and leadership demeanor may shift noticeably through more guarded communication and changes that trickle down to managers.
- Gossip can surface through internal networks or platforms like Blind, but it’s unreliable and stressful, so the most consistent signal is the broader move into an “age of austerity,” where profitability replaces growth and visible reductions in spending become the norm.

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.