Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers and Leaders
Location: Mountain View, CA
Current role: VP of engineering at Quora
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I was born and raised in China. I got my Bachelors degree from Peking University and then came to the US for grad school. I started my first full time job at Google after I got my PhD. After seven years at Google, I joined Quora. In my professional life,
Location: Reston, Virginia
Current Role: Director of Engineering in Nuance Communications
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I am not just an engineer by training but one by heart! After my undergraduate degree in engineering, I started my career in Digital Image Processing / Graphics engineering and in a couple of years transitioned into Software engineering. I spent over a decade designing and developing software products and solutions for a wide range of business domains including Telecommunication,
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Role: Web Engineering Lead
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I received my undergraduate degree in CS from Carnegie Mellon University, after which I spent more than six years as a software engineer at Google, where I worked on internationalization and Gmail frontend. I made the move to Asana because I was ready to learn more and grow as an engineer.
Location: SF Bay Area
Current Role: Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners (aka I’m a VC now)
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
Started my career as a software engineer, worked for a variety of startups, and stumbled into management early in my career. My first job out of college was with a startup; the team was growing quickly and we had very few seasoned managers. I was prone to organizing things around me and taking point on group projects,
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Head of Payments, Stripe
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I first joined Facebook after completing my MS at Stanford in theoretical computer science and AI. I started off as an individual contributor, but transitioned into engineering management after realizing how much I enjoyed leading projects and helping other engineers develop. I got some early exposure to management even as an IC—I was a tech lead on News Feed where I worked on a rewrite of the product and internal API infrastructure,
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Director of Engineering at PlanGrid
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I grew up in Germany and moved to the Bay Area 4.5 years ago to join a small startup. I gathered a fair amount of technical and project leadership experience in my first two jobs, but I didn’t get into people management until I joined PlanGrid at the end of 2015.
Location: Mountain View, CA.
Current role: Senior Engineering Manager at Google for Places API. I am building a team that’s focusing on providing Places data to enterprises and 3rd party developers.
What is your background and how did you get into management?
I moved to America from Russia after high school in 1999. It was the middle of the tech boom and I quickly joined a startup company, Live365, that focused on allowing anyone to create music stations.
Current role: Development Manager and Head of Front-end Engineering at eBay
Location: Sydney, Australia
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I graduated with a bachelor and master of Computer Science from the University of Wollongong in Australia and worked in hands-on technical roles before becoming a manager.
My journey to management is not unusual but not one that I had anticipated or planned for.
At one of my previous companies, I lowered my bar and made a bad hiring. We were looking for a new team member and spent months interviewing. After some consideration, we decided to extend an offer to a candidate who was “almost there”. I agreed with our panel that we could coach the person in the area they were not very strong. This turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes.
My team and I then had to spend the next 6 months to help the individual but ended up letting them go as they failed the improvement plan.
Today begins a new shorter interview series called “IF I ONLY KNEW”. It is just a single question about when you started your engineering management career what is ONE thing that would have helped the most to know.
