Managers Club, Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers

Vidal: Good afternoon. I have with me today Ravi Bhim. Hi, Ravi, welcome to the show. RAVI: Thank you, Vidal. Nice to be here. Tell us about Yourself Vidal: Ravi, maybe you could tell people a little about your role and what Beautiful Code does. And by the way, I love the name, cool name. RAVI: Thank you. Yeah, so I am the founder of Beautiful Code. I set up Beautiful Code in 2013. And the company basically sets up and fully manages remote engineering teams for our clients. Vidal: Ravi, a lot of companies struggle with remote teams. At some companies I’ve even worked at, they don’t allow it. They have this term, “face-to-face culture,” which basically is a nice way of saying we don’t want any remote teams, we can’t deal with remote teams. So do you have any quick advice for engineering managers on the remote team? RAVI: Right, great opening question. I think it’s natural that people want to interact in person. Definitely, that has the highest quality quotient in terms of communication and coordination. Remote teams, I believe, is more of an evolution, in general, of how people want to work and how, in general, technology is transforming and making people capable to work remote. So it’s a trend, I believe. Let me take that back, it’s not really a trend any more. It started off as a trend, but it’s going to be inevitable for companies to be remote-smart and even distributed-smart. There are few companies that have gone a hundred percent distributed. We are not even talking about remote. If people are skeptical of what remote can do for them they probably could learn a different perspective. Not to say this is going to work for everyone. They could learn a different perspective by just observing fully distributed engineering teams. Coming back to the advice – you don’t have to buy into the remote or the distributed set-ups. But if you spend time to understand, then you can kind of get another perspective of how some of these new-age leaders are basically taking up remote and distributed teams and making it work. Vidal: Interesting. So you said they can observe to understand… How would be a way if someone’s at a company where they don’t have remote, that they could observe this? I’m just curious what would be your advice on that. RAVI: Yeah. Some of the companies have been pretty vocal about this. Buffer is a great example.  I interviewed Katie Womersley, who is the VP of Engineering at Buffer a few weeks back and I’ve learned a new perspective on distributed team management. Thought leaders such as Katie are actively helping evolve this new style of workforce management.  And there are other companies who are in general gone 100% distributed or 100% remote. Stripe notably has made a big kind of commitment to go remote in recent times. Talking and preparing ourselves for Remote is fantastic because this is not an area which has been formally researched, unlike for example software development processes. We have the agile methodology, right, which was fairly researched and studied. There’s not a lot of formal study that went into Remote. But I think that’s just due. It’s a matter of time before people are going to share their best practices ...

Vidal: Hello, my name is Vidal Graupera and welcome to this interview on Managers Club. Today I have a special interview with my friend Akshaya, Director of Engineering at Bolt. Among other things, we are going to deep dive into context switching, task management and some of the special things he does to stand out in recruiting which you may find interesting if you don’t work at a big name company like Google or Facebook. So without further ado, here we go! Vidal: Good afternoon. Akshaya welcome to Manager’s Club. Thank you so much for taking time to speak with me today. AKSHAYA: Hey, Vidal! Thanks for inviting me to have this conversation with you. I’m looking forward to the rest of the call. Vidal: Great. Maybe we just start out, you could share a little bit with people like where you’re currently at, maybe your current role, that you do. AKSHAYA: Sure. I am the Director of Engineering at a company called Bolt. I’ve been at Bolt for about three years now. It’s a company that is focused around changing checkout for all of E-commerce. Checkout is what drives commerce and what we have noticed is, it’s a pretty fragmented technology with every business doing their own un-optimized way of doing checkout and our whole focus is on trying to bring more value to our merchants by building a hyper-optimized checkout and fraud management services. What’s your background and how did you get into management? Vidal: Could you share a little about your… how your background was before Bolt and how you got into management? AKSHAYA: I started off my career back at a hardware silicon company called Marvell Technologies. I was building a lot of software there and I quickly realized that I was doing all the right things, but I wanted to do it at a software company. And so my next gig was at Twitter where I spent almost four years building their ad technologies as one of the earlier engineers there. I saw… I mean I did get an opportunity to manage early on, but I kind of opted out of it and wanted to learn a little more technically before I started managing. And so I was laser focused on trying to improve my technical skills. Four years later I wanted to do something really small, very very early stage startup and Bolt came on my radar. AKSHAYA: It was a company of 4 to 5 engineers in all, so I just jumped with both feet in and as soon as the engineering team grew to about eight or nine people, I became the first manager and now I lead a team of about 30 to 35 engineers. Vidal: Do you have any managers that report to you? AKSHAYA: Yeah, sure. I mean it would be impractical if I had all 30 engineers report to me. I have about three to four managers who manage about six to eight people. I also manage a bunch of individual contributions directly. So in all, you know… we have our hands full as managers and leaders on the engineering side of Bolt. But in all we are making it work. What are the biggest challenges you face? Vidal: All right. That’s a good segue into my next question. Could you describe what are some of the biggest challenges you face?

Location: San Francisco Bay Area * What’s your background and how did you get into management?* What are the biggest challenges you face?* What is your approach to hiring?* What’s your advice for managers who are just starting out?* What’s your workday like and how do you manage your time, emails, etc.?* What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?* Share an internet resource or tool that you can’t live without.* If you could recommend one book to managers, what would it be and why?* What is your approach to mentoring and coaching members of your team?* Where can we go to learn more about you? Vidal: Libor, hi, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Maybe you could introduce yourself, say a little bit about where you’re located, and what’s your current role. LIBOR: My name is Libor Michalek and I’m the President of Technology at Affirm. I run our engineering, product, operations, and people teams. What’s your background and how did you get into management? Vidal: All right. I was looking at your background. I know you worked at Google, YouTube and different places like that before. Can you maybe tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into management and engineering leadership? LIBOR: 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. LIBOR: The first startup I worked on was in enterprise software followed by consumer web, and data center networking hardware. Then back to consumer web with a foray into social. At YouTube, I ran the infrastructure engineering teams. And, finally, into Affirm, which is solving financial technology problems and building products in the financial space. LIBOR: I was always really excited about building and solving problems that were interesting and having the software background, that was the avenue for how to solve those types of challenges. In fact, one of the criteria for each one of the things that I worked on was always that software and technology had to play a vital strategic role in solving those problems. LIBOR: The transition into leadership and management was something that happened for me multiple times, not just once. In each of these organizations with no real management in place or required given the size and scale, I’d go in, roll up my sleeves and write software. Then, as the organization grew, I would ultimately take on a technical leadership position, then a management position. And as the companies grew, I’d move into senior management positions. LIBOR: I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go from individual contributor to tech lead, to manager, to manager of managers, director and vice president. Not only going through the journey multiple times but also taking lessons and applying them to the next opportunity.

Vidal: Well, thanks. Good morning, Juan Pablo. Thank you so much for speaking to me today. JUAN PABLO: Morning, Vidal. How are you? Vidal: I’m great, thanks. Could you maybe start, maybe tell people a little about your current role and where you’re located? JUAN PABLO: Sure. I live in New York City. I moved here from Colombia about 10 years ago. I’m currently the VP of Engineering at a company called Splice, which we like to say we’re a music company with a technology team. We build tools, software, and services for musicians and music producers. What’s your background and how did you get into management? Vidal: All right. I know you have a little bit of an unusual background. Could you share with people your background, and how you got into management? JUAN PABLO: 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. JUAN PABLO: I had to make a living, so I had dabbled in the culinary arts. I have a diploma in World Cuisine. I went back to the kitchen. I led the kitchen for an Italian restaurant, about 15 people, in Fort Lauderdale for a while, until the real state crisis also crashed us. And then, had to find a way to pay rent. So, I ended up making websites for people. I had already built a couple of Myspace pages and dabbled in HTML and CSS because I had a band back home. This allowed me to start paying the bills and I discovered there was a tech industry. I joined a startup in Miami, which was my first startup experience. It was a long distance startup. We offered free long distance in exchange of hearing ads and that was tailored towards Latin America immigrants, mostly. Vidal: Got it. JUAN PABLO: From there, I discovered an actual industry and realized that Florida wasn’t necessarily a center for technology, so I moved to New York. Since then, I’ve worked for a comic startup, for a advertising and publishing startup, for a ride-sharing startup and lately a music startup. In addition to that, around halfway through my tech career I kept bumping into leadership positions without really wanting them. As being someone who liked to be in the back of the house, the kitchen, I really didn’t … I like to say I didn’t like people, but it wasn’t the case. I wasn’t seeking to be in charge, but I kept running into those opportunities. JUAN PABLO: I think when I was at Onswipe, which was this publishing startup, I embraced leadership. I said, “Okay, I keep finding myself here. This means something, I’m going to take these roles and I have to learn about it.” And that’s when I switched careers and took my management position as a … I saw myself as a junior manager and I started trying to see who I could learn from and how I could learn from, the same way I already learned JavaScript. What are the biggest challenges you face? Vidal: Okay. That’s really inspiring, the way you came basically from being a chef to VP of engineering now in Splice. I saw your talk at CodeClimate recently. You were talking about using data and all data.

* What’s your background and how did you get into management?* What are the biggest challenges you face?* What is your approach to hiring?* What’s your advice for managers who are just starting out?* What’s your workday like and how do you manage your time, emails, etc.?* What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?* Share an internet resource or tool that you can’t live without.* If you could recommend one book to managers, what would it be and why?* What is your approach to mentoring and coaching members of your team?* Where can we go to learn more about you? Vidal: Thanks for speaking with me today. I really appreciate you joining the call LIOR: My pleasure. What’s your background and how did you get into management? Vidal: Just tell us a little about yourself, maybe your title, where you’re located. LIOR: 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. Vidal: Well thanks. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into management? A lot of people are interested in knowing how they get into management. LIOR: I originally did my bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and I’ve worked for several years, both for larger companies and smaller companies, startups that is. I did all of that back in Israel, where I grew up. And then at some point I wanted to learn more about management. I went to Stanford to get an MBA and I learned many good leadership principles – it was a really, really good experience. It brought me here to Silicon Valley and I actually decided to start a company, to join friends and start a company with them right after. It was called Sookasa. And Sookasa was really where I first kind of took my first steps with management. When we started out, the team was pretty flat and we all worked together. LIOR: But over time, I found I was taking on more and more responsibilities and I really, really wanted to win and wanted to drive our success and our product, so eventually my co-founder, who was the CEO, asked me to officially take the VP engineering role. And so that’s how I first became a manager. We were a small team of five engineers. We later grew to 10 and got acquired by Barracuda Networks, which is where I work today and within Barracuda, it was essentially the same story. So I was always trying to take more responsibility and to make the team more successful. And so over time, I was asked to take responsibility over an increasingly larger team of engineers, by now there are probably 70 or 80 engineers in my organization. It’s been a path that was very enjoyable for me and where I learned at times, just starting out as an individual contributor and taking on increasingly larger teams. Vidal: That’s great. How long have you been in management? How long was that transition from when you started to here? LIOR: Probably seven years since we first started Sookasa and I took on a small team. It took four years until we got acquired and then three more at Barracuda Networks. Vidal: That’s a great growth trajectory. That’s awesome. LIOR: Thank you. What are the biggest challenges you face?