Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers and Leaders
Current role: VP of Engineering, Founder Partner at Planet Argon
Location: Portland, Oregon
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
It’s not conventional. In the second half of the 90s, I began dabbling with open source technologies. In particular, with Linux and Perl. During this time, I was also a high school dropout painting houses for three years.
The idea of working in tech didn’t appeal to me.
Location: New York
Current Role: Codecademy VP of Engineering
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I’ve been working in technology since I was 15 years old and initially started by working with computer networks and data centers. After graduating with a computer science degree, I took my technical skills to build out technical pre and post sales teams. It was early on in my career that I realized it was much more rewarding and empowering to set others up for success and see them achieve their goals as opposed to being an individual contributor.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Current Role: VP of Engineering
What is your background and how did you get into management?
My background in both management and engineering management is pretty unconventional. In college, I started out as a business major. After taking electives my first year, I took an accounting course in my second year and quickly realized that it was not for me. Ultimately, I took a bunch of science and philosophy of science courses that really reinvigorated me so I decided to go pre-med.
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: Boston, MA
Current Role: VP of Product Engineering at Runkeeper / ASICS Digital
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I have a traditional technical background with a Computer Science degree from Northeastern University. When I graduated, I can’t say I thought much about leadership or my career path; my goal was simply to work on interesting projects and solve hard problems. I was tapped for my first management role at a reasonably early stage in my career,
Current role: VP of Engineering at Ticket Evolution
Location: Greater New York City Area
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I’ve been in tech for about 30 years now. I’ve been a Programmer (front and back), Sysadmin, Network Admin, DBA, Technician, and worked the Help Desk. I’ve always loved connecting the dots and understanding how things work end to end.
I slipped into the role of Tech Lead on a number of jobs,
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: VP Software Development, Viscira
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I have always been a leader. From my childhood to today it has been my fortune to see people as they are and deal with them from that perspective. The good, the bad and the in-between. Organizing, directing, conceptualizing, playing. I have always taken a humanist’s perspective.
From Wikipedia: Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings,
Location: Los Gatos, CA
Current Role: VP of Engineering @slackhq
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I’ve been working in the Silicon Valley my entire life. In order, I worked at Borland, Symantec, Netscape, Icarian, Apple, Palantir, Pinterest, and now at Slack.
I got into management at Netscape. Tony asked me to lead a team and I said “Yes” not knowing what he was asking.
Location: Brighton, UK
Current role: VP Engineering, Brandwatch
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I did Computer Science as an undergraduate and then took an interest in compilers, which became the subject of my Ph.D. After completing my thesis, I joined a fairly small company called Brandwatch in my university town, and 6 years and 3 rounds of VC funding later, I find myself as one of the senior engineering managers in the department.
