Career Development

Sherry Umlah, Engineering Manager, Harvest

Sherry covers multiple ways to foster career development, including: • Surveying Engineers About Tooling • Striving for Being in the ‘Flow Zone’ • Cultivating Collaboration • Holding Retrospectives for Your 1:1s • Regularly Reviewing Career Ladders with Engineers She also covers a few things to avoid: • Conducting surveys then ignoring the feedback you receive • Treating career ladders as checklists for promotion

Julie Zhuo, VP Product Design, Facebook

Julie covers: • Your career is defined by your skills and how you’ve used them, not by any external measure of your progress. • Treat your manager as a coach, not as a judge. • Create a mental image of yourself mastering the skills you most want to master, and believe that that is in your future. • You own your career, and you have more of an ability to shape it than anybody else.

Erik Bernhardsson, CTO, Better Mortgage

Erik covers: • Choosing a company • Building human capital vs building superficial markers • Acquiring new skills • Underrated skills

Joe Lynch, VP Engineering, Twilio

Joe explains how there are 2 desired outcomes from a career planning conversations: 1) Clear Goal(s) 2) An understanding of the motivations that underlie the goal(s) He then provides a concrete list of suggestions on how to juggle the cultural and organizational dynamics of providing career advice.

Google, Editorial Team, Google

Russ Laraway, VP of People, Qualtrics

Russ covers: • Why should managers have career conversations? • Problem 1: Imposter career conversations vs. real career conversations • Problem 2: Being too oriented to the short term • Problem 3: Check-the-box mentality • Problem 4: Haphazard and random

Dave Kellogg, CEO, Host Analytics

While Dave is not a fan of many leveling approaches, he is a fan of defining the use of Manager, Director, and VP in job titles: Managers are paid to drive results with some support Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision VPs are paid to make the plan