Industry Secrets We Wish We Knew Before Graduating (Staff Engs Talk at UCLA)

Ricky (Google TL/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 looking to get into tech. You can look at the timestamps below to jump to whatever questions you’re most interested in.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:47) Primer on SWE levels
(06:12) How to succeed as an intern?
(09:13) How did you get promoted quickly?
(11:36) How much of success is luck?
(13:32) If you had one piece of advice, what would it be?
(16:11) What if I’m not a gigachad coder?
(19:12) How to handle imposter syndrome?
(21:36) How to advocate for yourself?
(24:20) Big tech vs startups for new grads?
(30:28) How do people measure impact?
(32:17) Would an MBA help for eng management?
(33:45) How was college recruiting?
(36:10) How do you make as much money as possible?
(38:00) Parting words
(40:10) What are your current goals?
(42:02) Thoughts on job hopping?
(45:49) What Ricky works on?
(46:06) Thoughts on how AI affects engineering?

Thank you to Jordan Nguyen (ACM), Ashley Cheng (UPE), and Lune Chan (Videography) for hosting and helping produce this event!!

Where to find Ricky:
• YouTube:    / @findingricky  
• Instagram:   / findingricky  

Where to find Ryan:
• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn:   / ryanlpeterman  
• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram:   / ryanlpeterman