How did you get into engineering management?

I studied Computer Science in Caracas, Venezuela. Before finishing college, around 2009, I was working part-time building mobile applications for BlackBerry and Android using Java and PhoneGap (currently known as Apache Cordova). Building things that others found useful was thrilling. I treasured this experience because it served as a good introduction to understanding that “shipping” a product is more than coding.

I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I’m an engineer by training and I worked in a few organizations, including one famous one – Solyndra. Since then, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to interact with several different departments, such as marketing, operations, manufacturing, and sales.

I spent the first decade of my career chasing global scale challenges related to databases and distributed systems. In every position, my curiosity kept me deeply engaged with operations and infrastructure. Which lead me to BAMTECH Media – then MLB Advanced Media – as a software engineer helping a company achieve the ever-coveted “DevOps transformation.”

Two years later, I was offered the opportunity to take on a leadership position. My response, had you asked me then if I wanted to be in management? Of course not: I was intent on spending my last professional breath inside of vim. But then I thought about it.

I did my Ph.D. in Computer Networking and joined Bell Labs. After a few years, I realized that I have a lot of passion for building products. This took me to Bay Area. Becoming a manager was quite organic. I proposed a project and was soon leading a team of engineers as a Tech Lead. I did this for a couple of years till the line between being a Tech Lead and Manager blurred!

When I started my own company, I had the responsibility for building the first product which organically translated into VP of engineering. I enjoyed the job ever since and I often switch between CTO and VP Engineering role on as needed basis!!

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. I started as a product engineer, and expressed interest in taking on a leadership role, and became a program lead. In that role, I had interns and discovered I really enjoyed the mentorship aspect. I asked to be a manager, which I’ve been for three years. It’s an adjustment from my years of writing code, but the mentorship and coaching aspects are things I…

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.

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, partly because of my diverse experience. Becoming a leader was never part of my plan. I always wanted to be an Architect. Building the systems I architected required teamwork. I seemed to have a knack for getting people motivated and passionate about what we were building.

I am a technologist at heart, with a startup mindset.

Currently, I oversee key aspects of Analytics Ecosystem and Platform at Teradata, a leading provider of business analytics and data solutions.

I come from a software engineering background, but I’ve always had a passion for product and business. I’m a serial entrepreneur: I co-founded BillMonk in 2005 (tracks informal debt between friends, like roommates splitting bills; company was sold to Obopay) and the I co-founded Precision Polling in 2010 (self-serve IVR phone surveys; acquired by SurveyMonkey). At SurveyMonkey, we created a new business called SurveyMonkey Audience. This is a market research tool that lets you find the right people to take your survey, e.g. 350 responses from 18-45 year-olds who rent their home and own a dog. I coded the first iteration from scratch, then…

I’ve had the immense privilege to be born in a pretty tech-savvy family. Both my parents were hobbyist developers in the early ‘80s and my dad even started a software development firm back then. Argentina in the ‘80s wasn’t the best time and place for that so it didn’t prosper, but nonetheless, I grew up surrounded by computers and programmers. I wrote my first few silly BASIC games at age 5 in my father’s lap, and I’ve been programming ever since.

I had the privilege of managing lots of part-time staff in college (poorly, I might add). I discovered early on that while I did not naturally manage well, I had a desire to get better in order to help others grow.

In my first full-time job, I was managing a team of part-time staff within six months. Another year later, I was overseeing a quarter million dollar business with full P&L responsibility and a team of full and part-time direct reports.

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, Financial regulation and then Healthcare. It was an enriching experience that helped me broaden my perspective and get into technical leadership roles. I knew there was so much more to learn, and I endeavored to learn. I went to graduate school and earned my MBA.

My first management job was at Okta. I started as one of the first engineering hires and developed an expertise in a particular domain. I eventually became a tech lead, and then I moved into management.

People sometimes ask me, “What’s your advice? I want to get into management,” or “I’m interested in engineering management. What should I do to try and move in that direction?” Usually, what I tell them is to try to pick a specialty or something that they’re interested in and passionate about, that they can connect with and really engage with. Then aim to go deep in that area.

I went to MIT for undergrad and grad school for computer science and joined Box right after. At Box, I was on the Platform Integrations team as an individual contributor. I loved the culture at Box; it had a lot of highly motivated, experienced engineers. I learned a lot about how to ship production code, write tests, work in a large engineering team, and think about scale. After that experience, I wanted to build an application from scratch and have first-hand exposure to setting up web-services and dev-ops. So I joined DataFox. At the time the company was about 10 people, 4 engineers, so I got to experience all the glamorous tasks of…

I have a really typical for engineer manager path. I worked more than 20 years as an engineer. Honestly I didn’t really want to go into management. I was really happy to be one of lead engineers and working hard on engineering challenges. At the same time I was kind of pushedinto management position. Pretty typical where a new engineering manager would say, “Oh, you know what? You want me to be a manager? Fine. I’ll continue doing engineering and I do some management on the side.”

Yeah. I’m a software engineer by trade, went to college at Arizona state, earned degree in software engineering. And then from there I worked as a software engineer for a couple of years and then it was on and off of doing my own business and managing other people obviously didn’t do so good at first and then it got better and better until I became CTO for a payments company here in the Bay area and then I went to be VP of eng for a couple of months at another startup. And then I joined as a software engineer here at Airbnb. And about a year into it I transitioned into management, engineering manager, which in Airbnb it’s not really a…

Before joining Badger, I worked for the City of Phoenix as a software engineer and architect specializing in web and mobile technologies. I have a Masters degree in Geographic Information Systems and periodically taught university-level GIS programming courses.

When I started at Badger, I architected and developed the software product from its MVP days (using lean principles) to market and beyond. Since I’ve been with the company from the beginning on, I was in charge of managing the engineering team once we started hiring more people. I really enjoy working with our agile team and still stay involved in day-to-day coding as a manager.

Originally, I’m from Hungary, where I was the co-founder of RisingStack, a small consulting company, focusing on JavaScript and DevOps. Early on, I took on the responsibilities of the CEO – I’ve always enjoyed helping others grow and succeed, so early on I’ve found joy in it. I’ve been leading RisingStack for a bit over three years – during that time we worked for companies small and big, as well as created the company’s SaaS offering too. Currently, I live in San Francisco and working at Uber as the engineering manager responsible for our design system, called Base Web.

I did go to 3 years of University for Computer Science but eventually dropped out. I had real trouble finding a job (this was the post-bubble tech world!) and ended up taking odd jobs for several years, but I kept developing as part of my passion for making and creating things. I originally got into management kind of by accident. I got my first real developer job, and things were going great. Apparently, I was good at it! The managing partner of the company left, and I ended up taking over some of the roles of managing the business, because there wasn’t really anyone else to do it. To me, the goal is always the result and the impact it has…

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. I have always considered myself to be entrepreneurial and I had co-founded a startup and ran my own consulting business before so I always thought I’d work for myself one day than climb the corporate ladder and take on a managerial role.

My transition to management was natural. I was the tech lead at SlideShare on the team that managed the upload and playback experience for a couple of years, and then, led the team that built SlideShare’s iOS app (LinkedIn’s first Swift app). I was also the tech lead on the desktop rewrite of the LinkedIn Feed on Ember.

I started my career as an engineer at Amazon in payments many years ago. After a few years in the role, I started to have more leadership responsibilities. One day my manager pulled me into his office and asked me, “Hey, Jerry, I need your help. I have a team in China whose manager is not performing well. He’s actually going to be transferred out, so can you go back and manage the team for me?” Without even thinking, I said, “No, I don’t want to be a manager. I never thought about that” Then he said, “Well, I understand, but can you do me a favor? Can you run the team for a few months until we hire someone?” I said, “Yeah, I can do that.”

I have an MSc in Medical Physics and a PhD in BioEngineering. I was first employed in medical device research and then, through a variety of economic changes, acquisitions, reorgs and whatnot, I found myself in a System Engineering role in a different company. The nature of the ideas that I advocated got me promoted to Director of Product Management, my first leadership role with people reporting to me.

Sure. Yes, it is more unusual than it tends to be. I do not have any formal Computer Science training, other than when I got my computer at 13 and started discovering the phreaking books, and the hacking books, and the \[inaudible 00:01:05\] books, and just playing around with those. I pursued a career in Pharmacy, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and when I was … I think I was 23, I moved to the States to finish my degree in Pharmacy, it was around the time where the economy went crashing.

I just celebrated 7 years at Target Corporate in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a lot of exciting technology initiatives and projects. A couple of my favorite projects include an app refactor to prepare for the launch of Cartwheel, integrating various systems after Target’s acquisition of cooking.com & chefscatalog.com and helping my team build a homegrown API Platform to support the hundreds of APIs that exist within our ecosystem.

I started my career as a tech entrepreneur. A friend and I had an idea for a new way for people to collaborate and ultimately ended up starting a company called Increo our senior year at Stanford. We took funding April of that year, graduated in June, and ran the company full-time for a couple of years. At that point, we had a document preview technology that was particularly interesting for a number of companies in the document-collaboration space. We ended up deciding to sell that technology and go work for Box, which was also just a startup at that time, with about 40 people.

Sure. I graduated from India after completing my engineering from computer science in one of the reputed colleges in India. I joined as a software engineer in a services company and, after a quarter, realized that I wanted to work for a product company. So I moved from the services to a networking product company and continued to work there for about three and a half / four years. Later, I moved here and continued with the same company, which was headquartered in the Bay Area, and continued to grow from an individual contributor to a manager.

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, I have two passions: applying machine learning to solve product problems, and building, motivating, and scaling high performance teams.

After a career in finance, arts, and media, I got into tech. I started out in marketing and key account management in a small SaaS company, and at age 26 co-founded my first software company and became a CEO. As part of a longer-term consulting project with our company, I started managing distributed, fast-scaling engineering teams, quickly realising that this work was really appealing to me, and was a good match with my prior experiences and background. Ever since, I’ve been supporting distributed engineering organisations around the world, helping them scale quickly, learn steadily, and deliver great products in inclusive teams.

Certainly. So a lot of it actually came out of necessity. I went to school at University of Illinois, got a computer science engineering degree there then went straight into writing software. Pretty quickly, I moved into helping as an engineer, early engineer or first engineer building a variety of startups, in a variety of spaces. I was always very excited about software as something that enables a new business and new idea to come to fruition across really a variety of domains.

Sure. I am the SVP of Engineering of the Email Protection team at Barracuda Networks. It’s a cybersecurity company. Our office is in Campbell next to San Jose. I live in San Francisco, happy to be here today.

I’m Margaret Schmitt, Senior Director of Business Performance in the Systems Business Unit at ANSYS, a leader in engineering simulation technology; prior to this role, I served as Chief of Staff to the CEO at ANSYS. I have 20 years’ experience in semiconductor and electronic systems design, and I specialize in the areas of low-power and power/thermal management. I am currently focused on enabling ANSYS solutions for Autonomous Vehicle development, and I’m a strong advocate of mentoring programs and expanding women’s role in technology, which I do through women’s groups at ANSYS. Academically, I hold a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering…

Over 20 years ago, I learned to write code for The Two Towers LPMud. I designed features, wrote code, worked with a completely distributed volunteer staff, and took on leadership roles there for 17 years while doing other significantly less technical things in the real world. The last 4 of those years were while I studied for my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I left the MUD world to take a paying job as a QA Analyst, then another as an engineer, and then accepted my boss’s offer to become a QA Manager and build a team.

Like most Programming Managers, I started my career off as a programmer (after graduating with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah). Even on my first job, I rather quickly became the Tech Lead on a massive project developing a real-time computer system to manage robotic conveyors and cranes in a 6 acre warehouse. I then went on to be co-developer of a real-time 3D graphics library for one of the first available 3D computer graphics systems at Evans & Sutherland (E&S) – a pioneering 3D graphics company. At E&S I fell into managing my peers and naturally grew into a software manager and later manager of all their 3D…

I was an individual contributor for the first 10 years of my career. I loved writing software, especially network software, wrangling with complex problems in pursuit of the simplest possible solutions. While I was a good (not great) software developer, I suspected I might be a better leader. Being an individual contributor, I was often frustrated with the environments within which I typically had to work, not being effectively supported, not knowing what was expected of me and not necessarily having what I needed to be successful. I sensed there had to be a better way and told myself if I was ever given the opportunity to lead, that I would…

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.

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism and empiricism) over the acceptance of dogma or superstition.

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. I worked as a build/release engineer before leaving to go to Berkeley to get my bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After graduation, I worked at Yahoo as a Software Engineer while completing my Masters from UCLA at the same time. It was at Yahoo when I first got a chance to lead big projects. I enjoyed working with other engineers and figuring out how to manage the work in order to deliver projects on time. In 2012, I…

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.

I’m a programmer. I always liked computers and from the time I was a kid, I thought programming was just the coolest thing.

I went to school for comp sci, then got a job at a big defense contractor, because if you graduate with a comp sci degree in the DC area that’s just what you do. After that, I started a company to help restaurants manage their web presence.

Yeah, so I am an engineer turned product manager. I started out my career as an engineer working at Google, worked on Google search infrastructure. And then after a few years I wanted to tap into my, I guess, inner superpower, which I think is connecting different ideas and really strong empathy to human beings. And I thought I’d try out product management. And it’s been, I think I’ve been the product manager for probably close to 10 years now. And I started managing, I think, five years ago. I was in a startup after I left Google. And as the company grew, I had the opportunity to manage, starting with one person, and that was a really great…

My background is engineering and continuous improvement. I started working in training development and then moved to continuous improvement project management, and then ended up in technology where I had the opportunity to lead teams. And that’s how I ended up in management.

I think like probably a lot of us, back in the early days, you do system administration work and you continue on. Then there’s a recognition that there’s a need for actually having a team instead of just an individual or a few individual contributors. Part of it was the first position that I actually had was at a small K-12 school. I hired a couple of people to be assistants for me and also actually utilize some high school students at the time in an unofficial capacity where they just were interested in technology. I really started accidentally essentially get into management from that perspective. Then it was just more intentional about…

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, I mentored bootcamp classes, and led the women in tech community. Throughout my 6 years at Facebook, I contributed to the redesign of multiple platform infrastructural systems and worked on core product areas…

I’ve always been a people person. My academic background is a blend of business and tech tech: mathematics, information sciences, and organizational theory, though I contribute my multi-disciplinary background to a complete lack of focus. I just couldn’t choose so I decided to do them all.

I studied Electronic Engineering in college but quickly realised it wasn’t for me. In my first full time role I worked as a Systems Admin for Ireland’s first Internet Service Provider. This is where I cemented my love for computing and the Internet.

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. I equated that with working on a tech campus, in a small cubicle, in Silicon Valley. It was an environment that I was familiar with; my father did (and still does) work on a tech campus, in Silicon Valley (in hardware).

Like most of us in management, I suspect, I’d put in a good stint in programming, during which I was able to make some real impact: I helped invent and coded some popular products, I was awarded a few patents, I wrote a couple programming books. But I was curious about what management might mean. I was programming in a boutique consulting shop – just 2 and sometimes 3 of us – so no management to be had there. Apple was the only other company I really, really wanted to work for. Our little consultancy had got a lot of attention and kudos when Apple hired us to code the “attract” app for its latest model to demo itself in Apple stores…

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. I graduated with a neurobiology degree and I was on track to go to medical school. Then I realized that to do what I really wanted to do which was brain surgery would probably require another decade of school after undergrad!

I have 6 years of engineering management experience and prior strong engineering background. I started my career as Consultant for British Telecom, AT &T, Stanford Health & Apple. Earlier, I built products in telecommunications, computer-aided engineering, and education domains. Now, I work in a financial services company.

I was a software engineer for most of my career. At my first job in a small startup, I grew my team from 1 to 20 in 1.5 years in India and San Francisco. My manager at the time strongly believed in my leadership and put me in front of our main customers, and helped me scale the team by giving me opportunities to stretch and grow my technical leadership. At the consequent companies, I joined I transitioned from being an IC to Engineering manager and joined Slack 3.5 years ago an Engineering Manager. I currently manage two teams of 15 engineers – frontend and backend on the Platform Pillar at Slack.

After finishing my BS and MS in mechanical engineering, I went to work for a firm that works on large-scale energy efficiency projects. It was at this firm that I was given the opportunity to work on all aspects of these projects from the initial walk through & calculations/design, to the construction & project management, and the measurement & verification process. This really opened my eyes to all parts of these projects and I realized that my end goal was to go into the business/management side of things, but still have a hand in the technical processes.

I was a software engineer for 14 years when I decided to get into management.

I love writing software and yet I decided to venture into this arena. There were 2 thoughts that drove me:

I know how to build good software. Am I capable of building a good team? This seemed like a good challenge to tackle. I was wondering if my number of years of experience would start working against me. I thought of learning an additional skill of management where I felt that more number of years of experience works in favor of the person than against.

I come from a software engineering background. Prior to joining DoorDash, I worked at Esurance where I was promoted from developer to senior developer and finally manager over a three to four year period. I had a wonderful female boss who showed me my strengths and encouraged me to be a mentor and manager, myself. I grabbed the opportunity and was thankful for the support and faith. I lived the role and proved my skills first, prior to being promoted officially as a manager.

It may sound like a cliche. I became a manager by accident. I started as a shipping and receiving for a local system integrator and from there moved into the help desk and a couple of years later I joined a small company Brio Software again as an individual contributor, and after two years Brio was acquired by Hyperion.

I studied computer science at Stanford starting in 2003. Originally, I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D. and did research at the AI lab, but ultimately the research work felt too slow and abstract for me. After undergrad, I started my career working at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management. Clarium was incredibly fast moving and chaotic at times (perhaps the opposite of research in a lot of ways). I actually learned a good amount from the chaos – especially the importance of understanding the big picture and developing a sense of how to create impact.

I went to college in France in the early 90s, in the beautiful city of Lyon. I studied computer science and management. In those years, I witnessed the Internet’s leaving the academic realm and its discovery by businesses and the greater public.