Management and Hiring with Jon Emerson

Engineering managers start out as engineers. Eventually, there is a fork in their career road where an engineer can choose to move up into management or continue on as an engineer in a more senior role. Changing to management involves an increase in responsibilities, a different set of goals to focus on.

Jon Emerson was working at Google as an engineer when a project he was working on started to get more attention. He moved into management, and spent several years at Google as a manager. Today, he works at Hired as a director of engineering, leading four different teams. Full disclosure: Hired is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but this episode is not about Hired itself. We do start out with a discussion of the hiring process, because of Jon’s domain expertise around hiring, but most of our conversation focuses on the role of a manager, and the role of a director.

Most of the episodes of Software Engineering Daily focus on the day-to-day life of an engineer, so it was interesting to get a perspective from someone higher up the management chain, who has more visibility over entire software projects.

Sponsors

IT Pro TV has online training for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and many other topics. Go to itpro.tv/sedaily to get started with a free 7 day trial of videos. You can use the promo code sedaily and get a 30% discount.

Wealthfront is the automated investment service that manages your investments online. Check out wealthfront.com/sedaily to get your first $15,000 managed for free, as a listener of Software Engineering Daily.

Jeff