confusedem

This story probably starts with my journey as an IC at VMware. I started as an intermediate IC working on a product meant to compete with VMware's main product vSphere. At the time I was one of the most junior developers with everyone being 2-3 levels above me. My initial responsibility was to write an installer for our product and maintain our build system. Through the combination of working on the installer and the build system I got to work across the whole system mostly to investigate build failures. Funny how the first suspect is always the built system rather than the code hat changed. Anyhow it allowed me to get a pretty good overview of the product which allowed me to take on the ownership of the upgrade functionality. About one and a half years in there was a major upper management change that caused a large number of our senior engineers to leave looking for new opportunities. With that I slowly became more central to the product development and thus started slowly climbi

Hi everyone,  this is the first time that I am blogging in a long time. I am slowly approaching the point at which I will have been a manager for longer than an IC. So I figured it is a good inflection point to start writing down my thought about IC work, managing ICs, and how I moved from IC and management. Hopefully I will be at some point able to start talking about managing managers :)  Here is a short overview what I did over the last ten years: Individual Contributor Amazon - Amazon was my first corporate job out of school and worked on two different teams both in the warehouse management area. My first team was responsible for all conveyance systems within a warehouse. The main challenge on this team was the state of the services, when I started (which coincided with the team being reformed the 3rd time) we got paged about every other day. By the time I left the team we got the number of incidents down to one page every other month. The second team I joined looked into automati