Job Responsibilities
Managing a team of Software Engineers both in San Francisco and
another outsourced team in India. Weekly meetings with the team
in India and in email contact.
Project Management of new projects
Writing requirements for upgrades and patches to the software
Managing troubleshooting of our production environment from the
software engineering side of things - producing patches etc.
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Job Requirements
I did my undergraduate degree at University of Auckland in New
Zealand. (I have dual citizenship between NZ and the USA
because I was born in the US but my parents are New Zealanders)
I did a dual degree. A Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
and a Bachelor of Commerce in Information Systems.
My bachelors degree in New Zealand seemed to be a lot harder
work than getting my MBA at NYU. This job description refers to
what I did before getting my MBA.
Education requirements aren't so important in Software
Engineering as experience and knowing how to do the job. I
worked with a few people who didn't finish high school and some
who didn't finish college. For me education was how I learnt to
be a programmer and it gave me a lot of skills to be a manager.
And obviously I valued education enough to return to school to
get my MBA.
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Uppers
I love being a manager and helping people solve problems and get things done.
People in a small, young software company tend to be very energetic and they want
to build things that will change the world. I loved the energy and the sense of
ownership of job responsibilities.
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Downers
Working for a young company (started in 1997) requires a lot of
flexibility. The corporate strategy changes every few months
and often is accompanied by a reorganization. I managed to stay
with the same manager through several reorgs but some people had
a different manager every few months. You have to be
responsible for your own career path. I didn't really
comprehend what it meant to be responsible for my own career
until I started studying for my MBA (which I just graduated
with - May 2005)
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Lifestyle
Some people travelled occasionally to the offices in other cities but I was
always based in San Francisco and never travelled even though I had engineers in
other cities including a team in India. The company had regular social events
such as drinks on the balcony once a month. These events were great chances to
talk to people about what was going on and you could find out all sorts of useful
things that would help you in your job.
The dress code was mixed. The corporate excecutives wore business casual or
suits, the software engineers wore jeans.
Software Engineering seems to attract people who have a very diverse set of
lifestyles and it seemed very open to accepting that you might want to have blue
hair, piercings in your lip or not wear shoes to work.
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Compensation
I started as a QA engineer in 1998 at $64,000 and finished as a
Software Engineering Manager at $100,000 which I reached in 2001.
After I got my MBA my latest job has similar job
responsibilities but I'm taking a $20K pay cut over what I
earned before school. I think this is mostly because of the
technology bubble and salaries were too high.
I also got stock options which were worth some thing at one
point but after the bubble burst became worthless. Even though
the company is still traded on the NASDAQ.
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Advice to Jobseekers
If you understand the inner workings of computers and you also
enjoy and are good at managing people then you may be one of the
people who has a rare mix of skills that is good at being a
software engineering manager. A lot of engineers just want to
be left alone to write code and don't want to manage people.
There are a much smaller set of people who can both write code
and manage people.
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