Philip Su grew quickly to a Distinguished Engineer at Facebook and OpenAI. We talked about the psychology behind peaking in a tech career and the pressure at the highest levels. In this episode: • Not wanting IC9 and requesting demotion • How motivation changed across his career • Fulfillment and motivation after FIRE • Why sustaining IC9 was difficult Where to watch: • YouTube - • Spotify - • Apple Podcasts - • Transcript - Thank you to the sponsors of this episode for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at • Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:37 Growth past IC9 05:39 Motivation changes over his career 11:36 Asking to not be promoted 17:33 What made it hard to sustain IC9 performance 22:22 What motivated him outside of promos 26:21 Is career advice useless 29:34 Motivation after you've hit FIRE 36:08 Meaning and fulfillment 38:17 Top book recommendation 40:14 What he would change 43:24 Outro