Moving from Staff Engineer to Management
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