Engineering Management: Interviews & Hiring ft. Google Engineering Director

hey everyone i'm here today with dave renson super excited to talk about engineering management dave is a former director of engineering at google and amazon and he's now the senior vp of engineering at pendo dave do you want to introduce yourself i mean you pretty well covered it jacob but i'm dave recently of many years of google before that amazon before that uh lots of startups some some awesome some less than awesome and now the svp of engineering independent i'm really happy to be here thanks for inviting me um so today we're going to talk a little bit about engineering management and engineering manager interviews um dave and your experience just to kick things off um what do you think makes the difference between a great engineering manager and a good engineering manager or a bad engineering manager if you want well okay a bad engineering manager is a manager who either doesn't consistently doesn't deliver on time you know doesn't fulfill the promises his teams make or uh is consistently losing people like one or both of those will make you a bad manager um a good manager is you know or an acceptable manager is one who's roughly keeping their promises delivering on time and and you know not not losing their people a really good manager however a great one the ones i want to hire and the ones i want to grow and the ones i want to invest in are actually the ones who are spending a lot of time thinking about how to work themselves out of a job like who on their team are they going to grow to take their job over the next couple of years i tell my managers everyone i've ever managed you know it's true that you can only ever optimize for one thing at a time subject to any number of constraints but you only really optimize for one thing at a time what i want my managers to optimize for is the growth of their people working themselves out of a job because if you can work yourself out of a job then i can find something really interesting for you so you optimize for working yourself out of a job subject to the constraint of you know doing a pretty good job keeping your promises with your deliverables that's so that's how i think of the difference between bad you know sort of passable and really good engineering managers awesome thanks yeah i think that sort of brings me to like maybe two different questions here one would be um how do you assess for that so how would you sort of go about identifying an engineering manager who really brings those qualities to the table and then maybe after that we can talk a little bit about as an engineering manager on the job how do you sort of cultivate that sort of culture of growth and learning okay so let's take the first one first so there are two points of assessment right there's the assessment when one of your engineers comes to you and says well i think maybe i want to try management you have that conversation that's one assessment and there's the assessment when you interview someone like an external candidate when when an engineer comes to me and says hey i think maybe i want to try management i only really have one question which is why and i'm looking for one answer and only one answer or something very close to it i want to hear the engineers say that they get a great deal of personal satisfaction from growing other people like they want to build people they get the same satisfaction from building a person they do from like whatever shipping shipping a great product i want to hear something like that you know they have a real enjoyment of mentoring because managing is hard like there's a lot of tax you have to pay performance management and compensation review and all the hiring and all the firing sometimes and all the stuff if i don't hear something like that um then my answer is well let's find another way to grow you that isn't management because they're not suited to it and i don't want to like i don't i don't want to bother with it um if i'm interviewing candidate um that's actually really easy to detect i'm going to ask every candidate tell me the person you're most proud to have ever managed and how you grew them and why you're proud and people who grow people and are are like look at that as an accomplishment like so and so started very junior and now you know she's really awesome and now like she could do my job or whatever like we know all that stuff it's top of mind for us and we can just we can spit that off top of my head you know off top of your head rather and so that's what i'm going to ask a manager and you know if they think more than like five seconds about it that's kind of a red flag for me people who are really kind of passionate about that have that list in the top of their head awesome are there any other sort of major questions any favorite questions you have to ask engineering management candidates um yeah that skill or others yeah i mean uh i'm gonna ask every candidate to tell me about how they deal with jerk employees you know everyone anyone who's ever managed for any period of time has had an employee has had an engineer who was an excellent engineer like super individually productive but was kind of a jerk you know was mean to people or dismissive or just not not a good person to work with let's say and so i wanna you know i'm gonna ask a lot of questions about tell me about a time when that's been true for you and then tell me how you managed it and did it resolve and didn't it resolve and how long did you have to wait before you finally figured out this person wasn't going to be worth it wasn't worth the friction and you you know had to encourage them to seek another opportunity like that kind of a thing i think that's a pretty common question i think every engineering manager should be expected to tell a story about how they resolved conflicting uh you know business goals two groups who needed something that were just you couldn't do both at the same time and how did they resolve it i think every engineering manager should be prepared to talk about a time when they couldn't deliver on a promise and what they did about it or if they had to step into a dumpster fire what they did about it and even if it didn't resolve well i think every i think everyone who interviews generally should be ready to talk about their biggest personal or professional excuse me uh failure so as a manager where where did you fail most where have you failed most in your career and and what did you learn from it i mean that's what we're all really looking for we want to know is this someone we can trust with other people you know that's going to be good to them we want to know that it's not so much you can't prove to me that you can deliver on time not in an interview not really you can tell me stories about how you did but whatever um but you can prove to me that you can learn from mistakes and learn from failure and that's really the thing i care about because you know it's not so much that i don't want you to make a mistake i just don't want you to make the same one twice i tell people all the time like the sin is not in the failure the sin is in failing to notice so you know i want to know that you're good at noticing and correcting yeah okay um going back to this idea of sort of growing people um do you have any any lessons there any recommendations for how to do that well as an engineering manager a couple of things so um if there are things you don't like to do there's actually a pretty good bet that that's a growth opportunity for someone else on your team you should just ask like i have this thing i have to do which i don't really love doing is there anyone here who would like to learn how to do it and you know very often you'll find a volunteer because they're like great i would love to learn i mean maybe it's not they want to do all the time but i'd love to learn how to do it um i'll tell you that it i have weekly one-on-ones with my directs and at least bi-weekly one-on-ones with my skips no matter how big my orgs um and those meetings have nothing to do with any of the tactical things of their job i don't want to hear about project updates or any i mean if there's some really burning thing i guess we can talk about it but that time is about like how are we doing growing that person and then in turn i expect every week or every other week or whatever that person to tell me how much closer they are to working themselves out of a job you know jacob are you any you know were you able to get any closer this week to figuring out who on your team is going to eventually succeed you even if that's in two years well i've narrowed it down i think to three candidates tell me about them and then you know we'll talk about them and tell me why you think that great now tell me what kind of growth opportunities do you think are on the horizon that you could give them to test whether or not you know who would be appropriate right like we're going to have that conversation pretty much every week are there any other criteria that you're thinking about when you're evaluating an engineering manager well those are the big ones like i want to know can you grow people and um can you recognize problems and learn from them and those are the big things kind of everything else i feel like if there's a gap we can train you sort of a thing you know i really am looking for three things when i'm interviewing somebody whether it's an engineering manager or an individual contributor or anyone i'm really looking to measure three things because they're really only three things you know all successful people have some combination of three traits um they're conscientious they're intelligent and they're naive meaning they have enough naivete left that they're willing to walk into a hard thing without really realizing how hard it is otherwise most of us would never try something hard conscientious enough not to run away when they discover what they've really taken on and smart enough you know just smart enough to eventually figure it out to figure it out in time um you know we all want to work with the smartest people and all that good stuff but you know actually i i want to work with the best human that's really who i want to work with when i work with people who are ruthlessly honest with themselves about how they're doing and are willing to be ruthlessly honest with me about how they're doing and how i'm doing and then you know opening to open to adjusting and growing because then then you can just invest in people at that point yeah um when it comes to sort of showing humanity um when you're thinking about failures that you're being asked about how would you sort of talk about your biggest failure in a way that sort of shows that you have learned something or that um that you're you're trying to improve things over time well i mean there are there are a lot of ways to do it right i mean if you're an engineering manager the easiest way to do is to talk about a promise you made that you couldn't keep yes we gave an estimate of x and it turned out we were wrong or we lost somebody on the team or whatever and but we were wrong it was our fault and we're going to be three months late how long did it take you to discover that it took me you know whatever three weeks then what did you do well i went and talked to my boss and i talked to my stakeholders and i gave them the bad news okay well now they've lost some trust in your team how did you rebuild that trust well we had dashboards and weekly updates and face-to-faces if that's what was required and you know you have to show people that you can earn it whatever okay tell me about the postmortem you conducted like or the retrospective or whatever the terminology your organization uses what did you learn what action items did you get like are you gonna ask a lot of a lot of pretty pointed questions which will show you pretty quickly whether that's a real example or something that's sort of making up on the spot awesome um it's super interesting that you're sort of talking about some of these uh frameworks or actions that engineering managers take you mentioned one-on-ones you mentioned post-mortems and stand-ups and things like that um what are what are the most important ones in your mind that every engineering manager should sort of know about or be able to talk about and sort of take from one organization to another um i will tell you that i think the biggest mistake managers make well people making general organizations make the managers particular is they're too quick to schedule meetings i tell my teams meetings are a bug not a feature the only legitimate purpose for a group meeting not a one-on-one one's a different 101 is a different thing because you know then let's say you and i are having a conversation about your growth but um the only legitimate purpose for like a group meeting is to make a decision or resolve a dispute do everything else in a dock um because hey it's durable and it's searchable and you know editable and remixable and that you have to recommend recognize that the majority of people who are going to have to live with the consequence of your decision aren't going to be in a meeting and probably won't even be at the company right now and so i do think that's the biggest mistake people make is they should really be more aggressive about slashing meetings from their calendar did you get all that yeah that makes a lot of sense um yeah we got all that um so in terms of the uh most important qualities you mentioned humanity um it sounds like communication maybe is also another important one in terms of the way you communicate with your team the the manner in which you do it or the frequency with which you do it um are there any other sort of like big buckets of things like for example like how important do you think technical competence is for a manager and does that vary based on um the type of team you're managing or sort of the level at which you're managing people uh you know they're different views on that particular topic my particular view is every manager in an engineering organization has to maintain some technical competence it doesn't mean that you're going to code every day because you're not like i can't code every day in production it's just not possible to do but i in my opinion i can't be a good leader if i can't have a principled conversation with my teams about some architecture they're proposing like if i can't stand in front of my ceo or our vcs or whoever and explain in pretty simple language how what we do works and then how it connects to the user value and then how can you know what it costs to do those kinds of things um then i'm just pushing paper at that point so in my opinion this is my philosophy and other people disagree there are some people who are very much in favor of pure people managers as managers but i'm not one of them i think every engineering manager every manager and engineer organization has to maintain some technical confidence the other reason is every really good engineering manager that i admire you know that i've looked up to in my career and admire at some point in their career usually a couple of places has stepped back and stopped managing for six months or a year to just go be an ic on some really complicated thing because they just needed to flush out their brain and reset and you know that's not an option that's available to you if you're a pure people manager who drifts away from your technical moorings let's say um the other thing that you know to to the question first part of your question the other mistake i see managers make new leaders really it's actually not that hard in my opinion to be a manager if you inherently care about people they're just a few basic rules and one of the rules is you know you want to work with smart people so don't them just don't do it every question you get asked can be answered with with exactly one of three things you know the answer if you know it i don't know if you don't or and this is the hard one that people don't like to do i know the answer to your question but i'm not going to answer it or i can't answer it because dot dot or some combination they're in like i can answer your question up to here after this i will acknowledge i know more but can't tell you or won't tell you because of whatever valid reason but never hand wave your employees just don't do it it doesn't make sense they're smart they all know that you're doing it it just makes you look bad another good i think rule of thumb is if you discover you're wrong you should really try to be the first one to raise your hand and admit it you should try to do it in the context where you made the mistake like if you and i are in a meeting let's say it's just you and me and not people watching and i in you like x and i go no actually i think it's y and then i discovered that no you're right it's x you're going to get an email from me like hey dude guess what you were right i was wrong a text and if it's you me and three other people then you know the five of us are going to get an email saying that and if it's an accompany all hands the company's getting an email and so forth so you know i'm gonna try really hard to not say something that turns out to be wrong on this youtube uh recording otherwise uh you know i'm gonna have to come back just so i can apologize yeah we'll have you back on to uh fixing yours um do you have any recommendations for people who are either you know in the midst of an engineering management interview or who are considering transitioning to engineering management and are curious about how to do that oh those are two different answers if you're in the midst of an engineering interview if you're interviewing with some company um those things we talked about earlier like tell me about a time you failed what did you learn and those things you should have five or six examples you have thought of ahead of time and you should not recycle them during the interview nothing looks worse in an interview for a manager if you're leaning on the same one or two examples for everyone you're talking to even if they're applicable because it just shows up in the written feedback like you're an inch deep um and if you've been doing it more than a couple years you should have a bunch of examples of all the different things so that would be my my first that's an easy thing for people to trip over that you're not sort of shooting yourself in the foot don't do that um if you're an individual contributor and you're thinking about becoming a manager uh my advice to you is you should talk to whoever it is you have to talk to your manager or hr or whoever it is who has to prove it for you you should talk about it as an experiment and you should think of it in those terms i would like to try this i don't know if i will be good at it and you don't know if i will be good at it because i've never done it before so how could you and i want to make it easy for me to go back to being an ic if if i don't like it and for you to tell me to go back to being an ic if you think i'm not good at it so why don't we just go in and structure this as a six month experiment and and describe it that way to the team you know that you're gonna give me or whatever and then in six months we'll sit down and have a very frank conversation and ask how did the experiment go um i really do think because you know i think a lot of of engineers when they think about management think they're making a permanent choice you know like having a kid or whatever it's something you can never on you can never not do uh once you've done it and that really isn't true um but the best thing to do is you know is to have that conversation up front with with the person you're talking to you know because you want to make that transition and also make it easy and low cost for them because it's a risk for them too you've never managed people before they don't maybe you've been a tech lead maybe they've even seen your mentor people but they've never seen you have a hard performance management conversation or a compensation conversation or whatever so you know you should make it easy for them to to have an off-ramp too if it's not working out well that's just good for everybody so that's my i think my generic piece of advice for for the ic who who thinks like maybe she wants to become a manager yeah it makes a lot of sense and i think it also gives both people sort of a trial run too right it lets you sort of test out whether you actually enjoy management because sometimes it's not always exactly what it seems it never is right but that's part of being naive yeah um awesome well thank you so much dave um do you have anything uh that you'd like to to end with or any other thoughts um either about engineering management or anything else i don't think so i mean i i'm sure i have tons of thoughts on things i'm one of those people who has an opinion about everything especially the things he doesn't know anything about so um you know i'm on the usual places you can follow me at twitter i guess i'm at d renson or uh and you know other places to them and medium and whatever um and it's been it's been awesome to talk to you and i don't know i hope folks uh i hope folks find this useful all right thank you so much dave and good luck to everyone out there on your interviews thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out hundreds more videos just like this at tryexponent.com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview

Channel: Exponent

Views: 12,144

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Id: Yk5XC6ZMsf8

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021