Engineering Management Q&A and Videos

In anticipation of my , we can collect questions here. I can also answer questions afterward.

Work history

I've worked in leadership positions at companies like Netflix (2013 - 2017), Google (2017 - 2021), and now Disney. I'm currently a Director of Software Engineering at Disney as part of Disney Streaming (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ Star+).

Happy to talk about mobile development, engineering management, and career growth.

Other

I have a deep background in music and audio, having received a Masters in Music & Audio Technology in 2003, and then working with Dolby for more than 5 years.

After I left Google, I took a career break to learn, explore, and recharge. I traveled to Ghana, learned about accounting, became a startup advisor, and read a lot.

I'm on LinkedIn here: .

Which path to choose after spending 5+ years as a developer in product based company??

What are the factors to consider or questions to ask myself before choosing the path??

Please Suggest.

I have 15 years of experience in the tech industry. I joined meta as an E6 engineer in July, following 7 years at Amazon and over 6 years at Microsoft. Afte joining, I quickly initiated and led small projects, progressing to a major project. I utilized my experience to guide and support other engineers, contributing to their professional growth. Our team has another E6 tech lead with deep domain knowledge and currently, he is the face of the team. We maintain a positive and respectful relationship, trusting each other.

However, I observed that our engineering manager (EM) was not effectively providing direction, hindering team productivity. Recognizing this gap, I collaborated with other tech lead to create a project tracking sheet, enabling us to monitor initiatives with timelines and ownership. This significantly improved our team's efficiency and motivation, leading to the successful completion of a major project.

Now, here's the exciting part – my skip reached out and surprised me with an offer for the EM role! While I'm honored, I'm grappling with doubts about whether I have the necessary skills for success. Despite enjoying mentoring others in technical discussions, I'm concerned about potentially losing touch with the hands-on tech work that I love.

On the bright side, my tech lead partner is supportive and believes I should take on the EM role, offering full support. However, I'm contemplating whether I should explore the possibility of a Tech Lead Manager role to strike a balance between leadership and hands-on technical involvement.

I'm at a crossroads and would love to hear your thoughts and advice based on your experiences.  One side me want to try EM path but one side says why take this hassle and stick with what you know better i.e tech. Also, I treat myself as avg communicator. I feel, I am good at empathy, task breakdown and mentoring skills.

Hi Taro,

I'm cross posting this from the premium slack because it was raised that the answers might help the broader community.

I work for a small company - the engineering org is approximately 60-70 people all told. The company is about a decade old, but has grown more recently, and I joined the small SRE/Developer Tooling team within the last year. Historically, the company has operated at a relatively slow pace, and followed practices that are, politely, out of date. Just to give an example of the kind approach the company takes:

• We operate out of a single AWS Region, with no DR or failover capabilities
• infrastructure was provisioned ad-hoc and manually, with effectively no Infrastructure as code
• Developers would typically bypass deployment pipelines to manually update files or run commands, even for production systems
• QA is primarily manually performed for our SaaS application. There is some automation, but this is something that QA runs and checks the output, instead of automatically tracking the output in some way.

In my role, I've been pushing for change where possible, trying to evangelize the better ways of working, such as Infrastructure as Code, logs sent to a centralized location like Splunk, and deploying to other AWS regions to assist in both regional lag and general DR/failover concerns.

Thankfully, there's definitely some purchase there by leadership, at least on a high level, as they're generally receptive to these changes and recognize that they cannot continue with the same old practices. However, this mentality doesn't appear to be flowing through to the rest of the engineering organisation. My team and I are repeatedly asked to revert changes we've made, often because developers are merely used to the way things used to be, or because PMs/teams want to stick to a schedule or speed that was only possible via shortcuts (such as manually provisioned infrastructure). All of this has happened despite repeated public comments by some in leadership against those requests specifically.

What can I do to push for these kinds of changes, when I'm not in any kind of official management or leadership position? I have no official power beyond a general remit by my manager to uphold certain standards for my team.

I just did but we can also collect questions here that I'll answer afterward.

Work history

I recently joined Databricks as a Senior Director of Engineering. Most of my career has involved Machine Learning, and I've managed teams ranging from 2 to 200 engineers/research scientists.

Previously, I was the Head of FB Reels and Video Recommendations (Director of Engineering) at Meta, from 2019 - 2023. Before that, I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead working at Google in Mountain View. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Penn State, and my publications during that time have accumulated almost 9K academic citations.

Some questions I've heard:

• How Fair is Performance Evaluation for Tech ICs vs Managers?
• Can you give some examples of effective communication? What channels are used, level of abstraction, tone, etc?
• Any advice for a new grad to progress faster in their career?
• What are interviews even like for Director+?

Other

I've started writing detailed notes in blogs titled TLDR0. Slightly cheesy, but it stands for Tech Leadership - Direct, Respectful, Zero Ego. See the full details on my .

• Substack:
• Medium:

Hey Taro,

I have a question around how to manage a direct report who I’m receiving performance complaints about.

For context, I’m the team lead for a team that works distributed across vertical teams. We have a new hire who’s been working with us for around 3 months now. He’s working with Team A and has recently been helping them to write App X, a brand new application.

Recently the PM for Team A has reached out to me with some general complaints/concerns about his output. The work this new hire is doing blocks most work for Team A, and the PM feels like they should have finished their work by now, and apparently other members of Team A have raised similar complaints.

Additionally, this new hire has a reputation for working very long hours/late into the night after work. On several occasions he’s posted slack messages at 1am, and the PM is concerned that he’s trying to spend long hours after work to try and make up for his lack of progress.

Myself and my manager have both already had casual conversations with him about his late night work to try and put a stop to this, and myself and other team members have tried to help him with his tasks where we can. We’re in a very small company so while I can try shuffling him around to a different vertical, it’s not like there’s limitless possibilities there.

I’ll be bringing this up with my manager today during our 1:1, but I was also very interested in hearing what the Taro community thinks here.

This is my first time as a manager so I’m very much out of my depth here.

I'm a new people manager - previously I was an IC. I understand that I am now equally responsible for the helping the team deliver business goals and promote people's well being and growth.

How do you balance your time and figure out what's most important to focus your time and energy on? How do you spend your focus time you do have?

I am an L5 TL, of a team of less than 10 people. My manager very recently asked me whether I am interested in becoming an EM (managing most if not all of the people on my team).

I like coding and technical contributions, but I believe I like helping people succeed more, including having crucial conversations where things aren't going well. Those things don't come naturally to me, BUT I get great satisfaction out of those tricky situations. I would also like the opportunity to build a team of amazing individuals who come together around a central goal. Based on this I am leaning yes.

However, I know the EM path isn't all roses. What are the top 3 questions I ought to consider, before I decide whether I want to do this?

I recently became CTO of a small early-stage startup where I'm leading all technical efforts, including by still doing some coding, but am mostly managing other engineers and focusing on the broader technical needs of the company. Previously, I was a technical lead and IC at startups where I had led small teams of other software engineers on product development, but was more in the weeds technically/coding a lot and was not responsible for people management. I'd like to learn about resources I can utilize to further develop my engineering leadership and people management skills.

What resources would you recommend to learn more about the following:

• How to build people management skills as a first time engineering people manager? Are there open source or free trainings or resources that are good for this?
• The latest engineering leadership topics, especially in a startup environment (e.g. how other leaders are tackling common technical and leadership challenges)
• How to meet or connect with other engineering managers/leaders (e.g. startup CTOs, VP of engineering, or technical founders) outside my company to learn from their experiences or share lessons or knowledge with each other

Interested in any types of resources including blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, or virtual or in-person communities or meetups (particularly in NYC) etc. I have some favorite resources so far, but it would be great to learn about what resources others in the Taro community find useful. Thanks!

Context:

(1) My team owns a service for which we're rolling out a new version with a big revamp of all the public interfaces and a ton of breaking changes.

(2) This is a legacy system that is being refactored to resolve some severe issues that its consumer systems have been complaining about for a long time.

(3) This service has many consumers in our org across multiple teams that depend on it for a lot of critical functionality.

(4) We need to migrate all consumers to the new service. My team cannot parallely support both the versions and the legacy system has to be deprecated before the new service deployment.

Challenges:

(1) Originally, the plan was for my team to roll out the new service and migrate all of the consumers to the new service as well.

(2) Now, we've had a huge scope expansion in the refactoring itself due to which the project timeline has extended massively.

(3) My team feels that working on such a long timeline project is risky and prone to further scope expansion if new consumers start using the old legacy system in the meanwhile.

(4) Another challenge with this is that my team has no context or understanding of all the consumer systems.

Questions:

(1) What approach can I use to now change the plan and convince the managers/tech leads of the consumer teams to own the migration of their consumers code to the new service?

(2) In general, what approach would be ideal for such a large-scale migration - Centralized migration by the service provider team vs distributed migration by all the respective consumer teams?

Always been on the fence here whether an MBA helps me boost my visibility, help me learn more business skills and builds a well rounded profile than "you're just another average software engineer" which could help me get into management track and above faster than my peers?

In other industries, having an MBA is a requirement, but not so much in tech yet, apparently.

Happy to hear back thoughts form folks about this with some recommendations

In my current role, I might get an opportunity to transition to a people manager (engineering manager) as against continue the path of individual contributor (IC).

Since I have always been an IC, I am not sure if this is the right career move for me. How would I make a decision one way or another?

I have spoken to a few team members and the sentiment towards being a people manager is negative. One has to be able to deliver through the team and hold the team accountable, one has to be detached from coding to a large extent, one has to solve inter-personal issues, one has to worry about attrition, one has to be able to hire good candidates (sell your team), one has to fight for challenging projects for your team etc.

What are some frameworks to think about this?

Hey,

I have 12+ years of experience and would like to move to management ladder. I have been working with my manager for over a year to get there.

Couple weeks ago I got to know that my manager is leaving the company. I am worried that with his departure all the effort I put in over the last one year would be wasted. My manager mentioned that he has recommended me as his potential replacement to his skip(Director) but he(manager) is not sure if the company will back-fill the position or not.

My departing manager gave me the following suggestions so that I stay on track with my career goals:

• Have regular conversations with the skip(Director) and VP so that they know I am very much interested in moving to leadership positions
• Keep HR folks in the loop too, so that they can spot/help me with any managerial positions opening up outside of my org(different team in the company)

I have monthly skip level 1:1 & have mentioned this interest of mine(moving to management ladder) to him.

I am not sure how frequently should I talk to VP & HR as well as how to bring this career aspiration of mine to their notice. Should I have monthly sync's with VP & HR personnel too?