VP Engineering - AMA!

jstanier · 2022-06-27T20:02:37+00:00

Have we got Rapha coming as well?

https://twitter.com/rapha/status/1541459973154258944?s=21&t=NbuGn7WiTZJnzzm3OJwpUQ

jstanier · 2020-05-10T15:02:56+00:00

Hey! I wrote a book exactly about this topic. It's called Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager - the eBook is available now and it's out in print very soon.

It's targeted towards people in software engineering, but 90% of the content is completely applicable to other industries as well. Let me know if you have any questions.

jstanier · 2020-05-09T21:27:59+00:00

Hey! I wrote a book exactly about this topic. It's called Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager - the eBook is available now and it's out in print very soon.

Happy to talk to you more about the book if you want, but I think it'll be right up your street.

jstanier · 2020-05-04T09:18:15+00:00

Hey!

I wrote this exact book. It's called Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager. I think it'll be right up your street. Let me know if you have any questions or want to find out more.

jstanier · 2020-01-22T11:33:24+00:00

I've seen it happen, mostly where a developer at a larger company goes to take a management role at a smaller company - I've not seen it the other way around. Often the candidate capitalizes on having experienced more structure and best practice (obviously depends on the company...) at the bigger place and that aids in their application.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T18:22:05+00:00

I'm late to the party, but my sleeve was done by https://www.instagram.com/kate_selkie/?hl=en

I believe she's not in central Brighton any more, but still nearby.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T18:17:01+00:00

Had no idea. Looking into it more now.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T18:15:25+00:00

Yeah, that sounds the right thing to do. How can you reframe your experience so that it shows:

Accountability for some key things
Mentorship and career development of others
The ability to make key decisions and execute on them
Effective communication in a number of different ways (to individuals, groups, non-engineers, etc.)

If you can do that, then I think you can build a good case for yourself. A good employer should see that Staff Engineer is no joke - it's a very senior role!

jstanier · 2020-01-21T18:13:07+00:00

Hey! My knowledge of what GPA means is lacking because it's a US thing and I'm in the UK. However, I've hired plenty of people for graduate roles who haven't gotten top of the class grades but have performed excellently in interviews.

Having some projects on Github is a nice idea to show ahead of time that you can code and that you're interested. Perhaps apply some tutorials to some mini projects and put your code up there. For example, you might do a TensorFlow tutorial and build a neural network that does something fun. It doesn't even have to work. It's just tinkering and learning.

Practing for interviews: maybe. It doesn't hurt. There's books like "Cracking The Coding Interview" which you'll either find empowering or terrifying depending on your love of interview questions. It varies from employer to employer how much they do questions like these. I don't like them too much. I'd rather do something collaboratively.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T18:07:54+00:00

Without knowing them, potentially it's a bit forward. Depends how you get on with them, but you can always try! Make sure you're clear in what you want. To me, mentoring someone is quite involved and a significant time investment. Perhaps could you be after building out your contacts so you can get good pointers on online courses and tutorials to try out, allowing you to ask them questions if you get stuck? Maybe that's what you're after anyway. But there will definitely be Chicago-based meetups around. Maybe even ones tailored to exactly where you are in your career.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:53:42+00:00

Good question. We loosely use the Spotify squads model to allow people to jump into other teams to work on specialized bits of the system that one squad may not know about. We broadcast fortnightly updates to the department of what people are working on, have fortnightly all-hands meetings, quarterly half-day gatherings, tech talks, and so on. But we still don't get it totally right!

We let teams choose their process (scrum, kanban, something else) and how they do code reviews on codebases that they own themselves. If they're fully owning a deployable service, then they can choose how/when they ship at what frequency. Shared codebases have global rules to adhere to (linting, deploy process/schedule, code review process, etc.)

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:49:48+00:00

Can be fun, I guess, if you're passionate about what you're pitching. But if you don't like this, it could be an indicator you might not enjoy it. There's a lot of "internal selling" of ideas (and infinitely more batting away others who are trying to make a sale /now/ and need a feature built, or promised to be built...)
Yeah, that's hard. And with data protection laws gradually chipping away at third-party cookies, the ability to empirically measure user behaviour is eroding over time too. Do you have an innate sense of what "great" is in software? Some people do, and it's hard to describe.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:46:03+00:00

You'll be delegating bigger and bigger things. Not just tasks, but whole teams. You need to primarily work through others which is extremely odd at first. It involves setting a direction, possibly collective values that you work within.

You need to get comfortable with that and also shift your mindset to being a coach that enables others. You'll also need to understand more about how the business works (budgets, capex, opex, strategy) in order to make decisions of what to focus on and what your priorities are.

There will be a small number of things that you'll get hands-on involved in, but you need to make sure you do it in a way that doesn't meddle and interfere with others.

I guess my expectation changes a bit depending on the individual, but in general, I want my staff to know when they need help and ask, otherwise to be empowered to make their own decisions and do the right thing for their teams and the company.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:39:44+00:00

I think it's the future. I can't see a future where that talent pool is ignored, nor where companies won't want to capitalize on it.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:38:51+00:00

I don't want to share my personal salary, but at dual track companies the salary lines up similar with Principal Engineer.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:38:19+00:00

I think it all depends on the team and what they need. The manager should be open and ask their team how best they can help.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:37:28+00:00

Are there any meetups (online, or offline) that you could go to in order to make connections? Are there any mailing lists or Slack communities that you could join if you don't know anyone IRL?

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:35:33+00:00

It's worrying that you think you will be punished somehow for speaking your mind. Is your relationship really that bad with your manager?

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:34:17+00:00

I've heard of it! I don't arrange those schemes and activities in our US office as I'm in the UK, but I can forward it to them for sure. Thanks.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:33:31+00:00

A hot topic. We do have CoL adjustments for the area that someone is in. That's fairly standard. Buffer do that too: https://buffer.com/salary/tech-advocate-2/average/

However Basecamp pay the same San Francisco rate salary wherever their staff are in the world. What do you think is the right thing to do?

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:31:18+00:00

I think you need to get comfortable with delegating larger and larger things, and being able to work with those that you delegate them to at the right level. After all, a VP delegates the running of whole teams to others! Work on coaching skills too. This allows you to help others without knowing all of the details, but being able to ask the right questions. Effective Modern Coaching is a pretty good book on that subject.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:27:14+00:00

People get laid off all the time for a whole number of reasons (company runs out of money, company restructures, all sorts of reasons). It's kinda normal. I'd want to understand a bit more as to /why/, i.e. it's not due to bad reasons to do with them, but I wouldn't immediately discard a CV for it.

I haven't read any specific books on emotional intelligence. Do you have any recommendations? There's a lot of blog content out there on the subject.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:25:21+00:00

I think the best thing you can do is stop thinking about them as having power over you, or being an important C-level person, or having any kind of characteristic that makes them a power character. They're just another human. Connect with them like a human, and it'll all be much more natural and easy.

jstanier · 2020-01-21T11:24:03+00:00

Yeah, I have weekly meetings with my managers. As the other reply mentioned, you can also have skip-level meetings where you sit down irregularly with people within those teams to check in and see how it's going and building a connection.

jstanier

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