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 climbing the career ladder. As we hired more and converted interns I also became the person that onboarded the vast majority (about 80 engineers) or new hires (funny enough it was mostly due to me being the first one in the office).

To add to the exodus of a majority of our senior engineers we added a product change and pivoted our product from a boxed offering to a SaaS offering. This enabled me to lead the fixes of our cumbersome and often broken build process and replicate the CD pipelines we used at Amazon. It took me several discussion with my VP to get two junior engineers to help our with setting this up for five services resulting in a deployment experience that reduced breakages from every other day to once a month. With that success I got two more engineers and we started building a team around owning the operational story for the product as well as other parts that I mentioned in my earlier post.

At this point I was more of a TL than a manager but at some point I looked at my calendar and saw that on an average week I might get to code for 2-3 hours and with the lack of engineering managers I figured I could try myself at people management.

After I had a deep conversation with my VP at the time about what it means to be a manager and how important it is to avoid the trap of still trying to code as much as possible we agreed that it is a good idea to move forward with my transition to management. Overall nothing much changed other than that I now started to move more of my IC responsibilities to my reports in an effort to grow them into senior engineers. As much as this freed up time it all got consumed by working on performance reviews and promotion planning.