1.2 Becoming an Engineering Leader

Your Career Development

Your career development is your responsibility. If you are lucky, you can find a mentor or a professional organization from whom you can get valuable help but the ultimate responsibility is still going to be yours. At each stage of your career, you must learn the skills for your current position and start discovering the background needed for your next position.

One of the most valuable things is simply having an understanding of the roles of other positions. Nothing could be worse than fighting to get to a job you dislike. In a perfect world, you have a close role model for your next “target” position. You can observe that person in action; learn the rewards, roles, responsibilities, and challenges before making a commit-ment. At each position, there will be more than one way you can proceed and it is important that you explicitly choose the direction you want. One of the most fundamental career choices is to stay technical or choose the management path. It is presumed that you have selected to read this book because you have already chosen the management route or simply because you want to understand what make a senior engineering manager tick.

Reviewing your resume is one way to evaluate how your efforts are aligned with your goals. A resume should tell a story. If the story that your resume represents does not match your goals, you should try to identify the missing points typical in positions for which you want to be hired.

Advancing your Career

The pace at which you develop your career depends on a several fac-tors including:
•    Prior experience – Have you built a solid foundation for the next career change?
•    Is the career change in a new industry?  – If you have been a software manager and are considering a Di-rector of Systems position (hardware, software, and ASICS, among others), ask yourself, “Am I technically prepared for the new chal-lenges?”
•    State of the industry – It is generally easier to take risks when times are booming. Hir-ing companies are a little more forgiving when the talent pool is tight. Likewise, in difficult times (after the bubble), your risks are greater because you are signing up for more responsibility in a time when business success is more difficult and your backup plans are more limited.

You also need to examine your personal risk tolerance:
•    You need to consider the cash flow needed for you to operate as a person or family. Career advancement means taking more risks. If you do not have any financial protection against unplanned situa-tions, it is going to be very difficult for you to be focused.
•    Are you making a risky career change in order to gain valuable expe-rience? Is the risk worth it?
•    How much of a stretch is this position for you? You can gauge this by mapping your “experience/skill” history against the detailed job de-scription (make sure you get one for any position you interview). As an example, one of us has not even considered interviewing for sev-eral high profile promotion positions. This is simply because of a few lines in the job description that at that time would require traveling extensively, being an industry evangelist, or becoming active in a standards committee that requires a degree of political skill beyond their comfort level.
•    Are you willing to live outside your comfort level for the next one to two years or more for the potential monetary rewards and personal recognition?
•    What are the downsides? Can you predict or tolerate the potential impact to your well-being, relocation, and valuable family time?
•    Do you have a backup plan if this fails? (Maintain your networking contacts)
•    Have you discussed the pros and cons with your family?
•    Is there an easier way to get to your goals? If your goal is to get to a senior management position quickly, it may take longer at a larger company. Thus, you may consider going to a startup if timing is im-portant to you.

Becoming a Senior Engineering Leader

There are many different paths one can take to get into senior man-agement. Before we cover these paths, let us look first at what makes someone qualified (in order):

1. Strong interpersonal skills
2. Solid leadership abilities
3. Good organization skills
4. Decent technical background

Note that technical skill is a requirement but not a strong one. Also, one can imagine these four items as ingredients for a position and try to identify the ones that need improvement and work on these. A good rule of thumb is to reevaluate your situation every two months.  Review your progress in improving in the areas required to position yourself into the next level and seek advice from a trusted peer(s) who can give you an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses in these four areas.

Now how does one get there? There is no formula. But the following outline summarizes a typical progression. Note that many of the skills discussed are precisely the things this book will teach you about, so you have found the right place!

Desire

First, you should have the desire to become an engineering leader. A big part of assessing that is your understanding what the role is about. It has a variety of different challenges and demands, as you will discover from reading this book. It is not for everyone, so be sure you understand what it means before deciding you want it.

Start as a Real Engineer

More than most other disciplines, having experience being an engi-neer helps one to effectively lead an engineering organization. You need to have worked on real projects from start to finish and learned all aspects of the job. You need real experience with the many different ways things can go wrong and the many different ways things can be made right. Learn from your peers on how to be a good engineer, how to build things that meet requirements as well as customer expectations, and how to estimate the time required for a task. Watch and learn from your managers and their managers and think how you would handle the many challenging decisions they make. Listen to the vice-president that you work for. What information do they present? How do they present it?

Your First Management Job

At some point, you will lead a team and/or manage a group. This is when you discover that you can no longer spend 100 percent of your time on pure engineering tasks (i.e. individual contributor). Success will come from delivering projects on time and within the budget. The proper way to accomplish this is by getting the most out of your team by keeping them focused, clearing potential roadblocks early, and making the right decisions along the way. The wrong way to do this is by jumping in as an individual contributor and by trying to rescue the project when things go wrong. The “hero” approach does not scale and will not work when you are managing managers.

Managing Managers

From your first management jobs, you should have learned how to get things done by assigning tasks to people. A big part of your job now is getting things done through a layer of indirection. Just like in your first management job where you learned not to act as individual contributor, you should resist the urge to act as a first line manager in your first mid-management job. Success here will come from helping your managers make the right decisions and not from doing their work for them. At this point, you will also find that your peer interactions most often will be outside of Engineering, most commonly in Product Management and Sales. These interactions are important for advancing your career, so give them the attention they deserve since you will also find yourself interacting more with “upper management”. You have to learn how to communicate with them effectively. This means providing directed and actionable answers with no more detail than what is necessary. Learn to admit mistakes but provide remedies so they will not occur again. Learn to assess risk and call it out early so there are no surprises.

Once you have successfully managed managers, you are ready to take on a more senior role, assuming you are at a small to medium-sized company. That may happen through a promotion with your current em-ployer or it may require changing jobs. Almost certainly, it will require someone who knows you well enough to place that confidence in you. So make sure that along the path of your career, you have made the effort to stay connected with your colleagues and bosses who would be willing to trust you with that responsibility.

Our Gigs and What We Learned

First Story

I started working at Acme Corp in 1980. What I learned from Acme Corp. was to spend approximately 10 percent of my pro-fessional time (which is different than 10 percent of my working time), making sure I was staying current. If I were to concentrate solely on doing the job and none on maintaining technical currency, I would eventually lose technical edge, currency, credibility, and relevance. That piece of advice from a senior engineer was very valuable to me. Another one which I felt was very appropriate and valuable was that of all the skills I could be acquiring, the most use-ful one was to get good at estimating the size of a task. That also has held me in good stead over two decades.
I moved to Acme2 Corp.  in 1982. What I learned there was that your first job pegs you as a junior engineer. One almost has to switch jobs to shake off the title “Junior Engineer”. While at Acme2, I eventually moved to a position where I had responsibility for peo-ple (Department Manager), customer (Marketing/Sales), and budget (Project Manager). In retrospect, this was perfect, as I could operate as a mini-company supported by the infrastructure of a very large company. I learned in this gig the value of “intrapreneur-ing”— making something happen in a new business area but inside a large company.
I started my first company in 1993 with a friend of mine. The lessons I learned here were many. One was to understand that venture capitalists are more interested in managing their portfolio rather than making a specific company successful.
I joined Acme3 in 1997. Acme3 was a challenge. I learned there how a top-down organization stifles innovation and creativity bubbling up from the ranks. This can work in the short term, but not long-term.

Second Story

I started as an engineer out of college and was quickly pro-moted to be a director of a software engineering position. Unfortu-nately, I had not learned the basics of management at that point and was ineffective at it. Feeling frustrated, I started a consulting company with some friends. That was the time when I learned the basics of running a business. When the dotcom boom happened, I left the consulting firm to work for one of our customers to get real stock. At that company, I bounced around in various management jobs until I formed a good connection with a boss who was kind enough to promote me to VPE. The key to my breakthrough was to learn how to build the right kind of relationships with others in the company, and make myself successful even in a relatively politi-cized environment. Once I had grown into that new role, it was easy finding an appropriate similar job at a much bigger company, tak-ing advantage of a mutually known recruiter. More than ever, I have become convinced of the importance of building and main-taining strong networks of support inside and outside the organiza-tion, both to succeed at a job and to find the next one.

Third Story

I guess I am in a somewhat similar situation to story #1. My last position was as a VPE for four and a half years and I am now juggling the possibilities.
VPE at startups
There seems to be more money now than a few years ago so there are more startups. But I think there has been a change in the climate for VPEs. Of course, this is a small sampling but I have run into quite a few positions where the business types are not sure they need a VPE and are considering getting by with a Director level or a just someone in Product Management to manage outsourcing. An-other trend I have seen is companies with a CTO seemingly looking for a VPE to “make the trains run on time”. You can almost read their complaints about the CTO in the job description! There is also the return of the undergraduate taking a leave of absence from school and somehow getting venture capital funding to start a com-pany. I had thought that went away with the dotcom bust, but I am seeing it again.
Starting a company
I am working with some friends to investigate doing a startup. The positive side is the excitement and the ability to influ-ence things from early on. Of course, there is always the struggle for funding or revenue. I will say you learn a lot about people when you work together with them this way. I have already had one potential startup blow up before there was even any money involved. It is in-teresting to see how egos and personalities can be an issue even when there is no investment or revenue and people are just getting started.
Going to a larger company for the experience
Another thing I am considering is going back to larger com-panies after having spent nearly 10 years in startups as a way of learning new skills. I have found that there is so much scrambling in early stage startups that you often do not get to concentrate on any one topic for very long. It tends to give a very broad but not so deep experience, unless you are in a very technology-driven startup. I can see how working at a different capacity at a larger company could give me a chance to focus on new skills. However, it would have to be the right company.
Consulting
I am doing consulting as it comes up but I do not think I have the network to do enough of this to make it full time. I have found it a good experience because it changes your perspective to be a “hired gun”, rather than management or an employee.

Fourth Story

I started working with computers early in my life. I had good experience working with different projects and getting a feel-ing for what computers could and could not do easily. When I graduated from college, I took my first full-time position. I was quite surprised to see a global name-brand product that was worked on by an engineering team that could literally all go to lunch in one car. School did not prepare me for this reality. My ini-tial onramp into the organization consisted of a mentoring period and a simple project. The simple project and the mentoring were both done within the first two weeks. My second project was to re-write the installation for this program from scratch. While this was a very successful project, it pigeonholed me and the company kept reaching out to me when installations were in trouble anywhere in the organization. I finally ended up asking a VPE if I had to leave the company to get out of installs. He responded affirmatively. I updated my resume and was gone in weeks. Let this be a lesson for all the aspiring VPEs.  Sometimes, you are best served by using someone other than your best at solving a particular problem.  If you do not rotate who you call on, you can quickly alienate top tal-ent.
In my first company, I gained some valuable technical and business experience and a lot of credibility.  I also managed to earn a master’s degree while working full-time. I then joined a dotcom company and quickly became a technical expert and started to grow. By gaining an excellent mentor who was on the VPE track, I quickly gained key skills and started to grow an organization by having a track record of consistent quality deliveries.
I decided then to leave and go found another company when I was on the verge of getting on the VPE track. Now I have proven delivery at a company where I was clearly leading all of En-gineering.  Sometimes, going to a startup entails less money and re-sources but far more control. Startups also have less existing product to move along and adapt to new technologies and tech-niques.
As a warning to those looking to rise up in the ranks, it is very important to learn to manage and work well with others. A BS degree and an MS in Computer Science and Engineering did not teach me to project plan, manage down, manage up, or collaborate with peers.
Conclusion
Back to the topic of Career Development, there are many different experiences that could help a person become an Engineering vice-president or director. You need to manage your career by choosing the best option at each junction and then making the best of the opportunities you have. During the dotcom boom many individuals rose quickly to high manage-ment positions without spending any significant time as a line manager or even as a senior developer. For a time, they were rising stars but the bust left them without a firm foundation to get another executive position and their job title made potential employers concerned about their dedication to a more modest position. The lesson here is that the vice-president title is not a goal in itself; you must also want to develop the skills and the experience to manage the people and the technology at a company.