5Ps of Engineering Management

1. People 
2. Project  
3. Product 
4. Processes
5. Partnerships

Auxiliary

1. Strategy
2. Org structure
3. Operational excellence

Framework to decide between jobs - 3 Cs

1. Career
2. Compensation
3. Commute

Engineering Manager Interview Question - What would be your biggest challenge while onboarding if you join the team ?

This is one of my favorite questions that I use while hiring Engineering Managers. How would your rampup look like and what can go wrong/what would be your biggest challenges?

The reason this question is interesting is because it gives me insight about how well this candidate understands about the team and the role. It gives me a signal on engagement and how invested they have been in the process. It also gives me insight into how effective our interview process has been in terms of explaining our role, opportunity and challenges.

From the interviewee manager's perspective, it also gives them an opportunity in terms of showcasing how seasoned they are on all the manager dimensions : people, project, product, process. At the director level, I also look for signal regarding cross-org collaboration and setting right team structure.

A key quality of a good leader is to anticipate problems(in all the above dimensions) before they arise and to evaluate all possible options on an ongoing basis. While ramping up on a new team, it is very important for managers to absorb as much information as possible from team, partner teams, PMs and all other cross functional POCS. Even though it may be prudent to hold onto judgement quickly, it is important to detect and diagnose pain points effectively and analyse.

Based on my experiences hiring and onboarding managers and from my friends/colleagues who have onboarded as managers in the past, I have developed a thick skin. Gray hair has taught me to believe in Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" , especially in every dynamic and fast growing workplaces.

I will cover each of the manager dimensions in more detail in future posts. In the mean time,  if you have interesting manager rampup stories, would love to hear from you in comments below. 

Pro tip : for EMs interviewing for new roles, this is a great question to flip around and ask the hiring manager. With an element of surprise, this question can be a great tool to get some insights about the team. 

Engineering Managers Book Reading List

1. The Manager's path
2. Managing Humans
3. Five dysfunctions of a team
4. Mythical Man Month
5. Radical Candor
6. First, break all the rules

Bonus Blog :

1. http://katemats.com/ - Kate Mats who is a director at Google
2. https://rushabhdoshi.com/ 
3. 
   

Difference between PM and TPM roles

The goal of the PM(Product Manager) is to answer the "what". The PM is the customer advocate. The PM works with "Customer Research" to formulate customer needs/pain-points into product requirements which feeds into the product backlog. The PM owns the goal to measure progress against the product vision and strategy. The PM works with Engineering to create/define metrics to measure progress against those goals. The PM is responsible for prioritizing the backlog to make sure the most critical items are being executed on.

The Engineering Manager(EM) is responsible for the "how". This is about how to build the right engineering solutions to achieve the goals. The EM is responsible for determining cost estimates, identifying dependencies from other teams, risk mitigation, project sequencing and planning needed to hit the goals. This is effectively the roadmap which the EM and PM builds together.

The TPM(Technical Program Manager) is now responsible for driving day to day execution. In some companies, there is a specific TPM role for this. In some companies this responsibility is shared by the PM and EM. TPMs are more useful where there are multiple teams involved and it is a huge cross organization collaboration effort. Often times infrastructure, services and platform teams tend to have TPMs and consumer facing teams tend to have PMs. However, these are more of heuristics than rules. 

States of dysfunction in an organization

The reason it is important for both Engineering Managers and Product Managers to be aware of these states is because this finally leads to poor customer experience. Listing the common states of dysfunction in a team/organization. 

1. Shipping the org chart
2. Optimizing for output metrics and solving sub-optimal problems
3. Under-investing in user research - outdated customer demographics
4. Fear of conflict and everyone making compromises on the product
5. Not having well defined metrics
6. Measurement systems to track goals being error prone
7. Lack of ownership and accountability
8. Lack of psychological safety
9. Too much firefighting and poor operational efficiency as a result of moving too fast(team about to go bankrupt due to tech debt)
10. Too much politics in collaboration

Will soon publish posts with examples illustrating the not so common ones like Shipping the org chart and Fear of conflict and how it manifests in the product and affects the customer. I am planning to include tips for senior leaders about how to plan/structure their organizations so that some of these dysfunctions can be prevented/mitigated early. 

In the mean time, would love to hear stories about the states of dysfunction that you have seen in your product/team/organization. 

Amazon is playing the infinite game

What is the difference between finite game vs infinite game ? 

Here is the difference quoted from wikipedia from James Carse, the author of the book finite vs infinite game

"There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants..."

The difference between business and sports is that business is an infinite game. The quarterly results are not an end goal, getting to x% market share is not an end goal. The end goal is to stay relevant and keep adapting. So how can a company play an infinite game ?

For a company of Amazon's scale(750k employees), how does a company manage to make sure every employee/project plays the infinite game. Regular companies are often plagued by short term decision making and thinking. EmployeesManagers laser focussed on getting a launch, moving that metric by x% and so on. There is one thing that Amazon does differently and that is ingrained in their culture.

No wonder the saying goes

Culture eats strategy for breakfast - Peter Drucker

Difference between input metrics and output metrics

Amazon focuses on the concept of input metrics rather than output metrics. Let us take an example to understand this better. You start a business of writing a blog which is currently generating 10k yearly revenue. Your northstar goal is to attract enough readers to the blog so that you can run ads and generate 100k in ad revenue from the blog. You are super motivated and you decide to dedicate 2 years of your life to this cause. In order to track your success, you decide to measure your progress at the yearly milestone. As you can tell, I have reduced this to a finite game so that it is easier to explain. We will see how the strategy plays out based on the cultural focus on input metrics vs output metrics.

How does the strategy differ in both the cases

If you obsess for output metrics, this is how your goal setting will look like

• Year 1 Goal : reach 40k revenue by end of year 1, growning revenue by 300%
• Year 2 Goal : reach 100k revenue by end of year 2, growing revenue by 150%

If you obsess over input metrics, this is how your goal setting will look like

• Year 1/2 Goal : Increase your content categories in the blog to 10 from 1(of course based on your strategy) by increasing blogs publication per month by 300% and measure per category revenue
• Year 1 goal : Diversify into 2x more categories, invest in ad revenue goals in the top 5 categories and focus on improving article quality in the bottom 5 categories
• Year 2: Take goals on getting to 100k revenue in the top 5 categories, invest the profit = revenue - expenses, into continue expanding to 2x more categories

Analysis of the strategy

Though I didn't break down the Year 1 goal into sub-goals in the first case(output metrics) deliberately, I wanted to show a point that you can achieve the goal by just focussing on the existing category. You may end up hitting your goal and have a hugely profitable blog, you may reach a dead end if other categories become more popular.

In the second strategy(where you focus on input metrics), you will always be in a dual mode of exploring and exploiting levers. You will never run out of levers as you are always evaluating new levers. At the same time, you will have a list of the top levers you have identified which are waiting to be exploited.

By obsessing over input metrics rather than obsessing over output metrics, Jeff Bezos is making sure that the entire company plays the infinite game. In computer science, there is the term called breadth first search and depth first search. Breadth first search makes sure that Amazon will find the shortest distance path to revenue and will always have multiple tentacles out there.

Example from Amazon's shareholder letter

Here is an example from Jeff Bezos's 2010 letter to shareholders demonstrating the same

Shareholders understand this and reward Amazon among the highest PE ratio of all the trillion dollar companies as of this writing.

References

1. The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon
2. Finite and Infinite Games
3. The Infinite Game

Build vs Buy Tradeoffs as Managers

Cultural Tradeoffs
A lot of the companies in the valley have a strong sense of purpose backed by a mindset of innovation and research. Fear of being outmaneuvered by the next startup or not being able to on top of the latest industry trends may be some of the underlying deep rooted reasons. This spurs innovation, new research keeps happening, engineers and scientists keep publishing papers and patents. Like any completion funnel, some of these research ends up getting productized leading to revenues and the virtuous cycle of investment on in-house research keeps going on. Some other advantages of building in house and open sourcing

• Brand building
• Leverage open source community
• Engineering recruiting
• Innovation and product development
• Strategic value development

This is all great. But there are always two sides to the same coin. Taken too far, this leads to the Not Invented Here(NIH) syndrome. The deep rooted fears behind this may be ingrained in the organization : defensive mindset, lack of objectivity, tribal territorial fear, touch of arrogance, complacency. NIH has several side effects like : "re-inventing the wheel", huge recurring maintenance costs, loss of focus as an organization, weak prioritization and goal setting, increasing costs.

Corporate Examples
At the time of this writing(2019-early 2020), companies blinded by "Capital as a moat" strategy pursued by VCs(read softbank), are subject to these states of dysfunctions. The typical path of misfortune while building for the wrong problems looks like : founder raises ton of money -> head count -> hiring ramps up to show growth and progress to the VCs -> NIH syndrome -> build everything -> engineers love this as they have opportunity to grow -> more senior engineers needed -> team grows -> managers get bigger teams -> becomes senior manager. This kind of bloat doesn't end well. As Warren Buffet calls it, "Only when the tide goes out you know who is swimming naked".

From internal conversations with Googlers, I feel Google was also plagued by NIH from 2010-2014. During this phase, there was a culture of arrogance that Google has the best technology and scale and they didn't even treat AWS as meaningful threat. They practically missed the essence of AWS and software as a service. This is why AWS had a huge headstart even though this was playing out in the public markets and everyone was aware of what AWS was building.

What can manager's do
As managers it is super important to be aware of the state of the company/organization/team relative to both external and internal technology/products. We need to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in either direction. As managers, raising capital(VC money/head count) is important, but it is also super important to ruthlessly prioritize and build the right products and the right culture within the teams.

Exercise for the readers : Often times companies make big acquisitions. Only some of the times are these acquisitions successful and the acquired company is successfully integrated into the mothership. What are strategies behind these successes with examples. Please leave your thoughts in comments. 

The subtle art of not giving a f* : debugging suffering

If you are on blind and really frustrated with your job, you need to read this post

Questions to ask yourself about your suffering

• Dont ask "How do I stop suffering". Ask "Why am I suffering : for what purpose" ?
• What emotions am I feeling ? 
• Why am I feeling them ?
• Why do I consider this to be success/failure ? How am I choosing to measure myself ? By what standard I am judging myself and everyone around me ?

Onoda's value of loyalty to the Japanese empire is what sustained him on Lubang for almost 30 years. But this same value is also what made him miserable upon his return to Japan. 

Mustaine's metric of being better than metallica likely helped him launch an incredibly successful music career. But that same metric later tortured him in spite of his success. 

Pete Best got kicked out of Beatles, but he maintained a happy family life which the other Beatles members struggled to do. This is because he changed his values and the metric by which he measured life success. 

You need to be prioritizing the values that are important to you. Your happiness will depend on that. 

Earshare is the new mindshare

As Andresson Horowitz is predicting one of the latest trends in consumer tech is the explosion of audio consumption. Monthly active podcast listeners and weekly active podcast listeners are on the rise. There are several factors driving this trend :

• Wireless earbuds allow us to listen to audio on the go
• Smart speakers at home make audio consumption available and accessible round the clock
• Connected cars and internet make sure audio is available when we are driving

There are various ways that this trend is playing out in publicly traded companies. Let us take 3 examples from big tech

• Hardware : Apple is already leading with exploding growth in the wearables division. One of the prime drivers of this growth is wireless earbuds. You can read more here : Wearables made $10 billion in Q4, 2019 alone. Apple also sells Apple speakers but they are not as popular as the earbuds. 
• Google and Amazon are also great ways to play this trend. Global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year with shipments of 146.9 million units, up 70% over 2018. Nearly 70% of owners of smart speaker devices in the US own Amazon Echo devices. 

Monetization

At this point hardware sales is the biggest stream of monetization in this market as companies vie to gain marketshare. 

There are two ways this trend could be monetized. 

•  Voice ads
• Voice shopping

How to build trust with engineers in your team as an Engineering Manager ?

Trust is often the key requirement for a successful relationship to blossom. This is true for personal and professional relations alike. As an Engineering Manager(EM), you are leading a team of engineers and trust is essential for the functioning of the team. The goal of this post is to debug what trust looks like for the EM<>Engineer relationship, what EMs can do to establish and maintain trust and to educate engineers about what to expect from a good EM so that they can grow their careers meaningfully.

What makes trust important
In hypergrowth companies, change is the only constant. Most likely in the course of a year, project priorities will change, roadmap will change, project scope will change, collaboration partnerships will change, requirements will increase, there will be re-organizations. Sometime you will be prepared as a team. Sometimes things will catch the team by surprise. Sometimes the team will make wrong decisions along the way and then they will need to course correct. A core responsibility of an EM is to help the team navigate through these transitions and facilitate in a way so that the journey seems smoother and less thrashy. I described the above from a team perspective. Let us break this down into how it affects the engineers in these teams and their individual career growth.

From an engineers perspective, imagine these situations. You may have faced one or the other at different points in your career:

1. An engineer likes a project, which needs to be paused because priorities changed. 
2. An engineer needs to do some grunt work, which no one on the team enjoys, but is a critical business need
3. An engineer needs to get better at collaborating with partner teams with shared goals 
4. An engineer needs that critical career feedback, that will enable them to get to the next level
5. An engineer needs to understand how to develop a better working relationship with the PM when priorities are changing
6. A Tech Lead needs to be able to deliver more meaningful and actionable feedback to a junior engineer, so that they can make meaningful changes and progress in their careers

All the above situations would need the EM to work with the engineer to help them improve. That would involve 1:1s, diagnosing and explaining the problem/context/business, sharing the feedback/decision/priority to the engineer, helping them understand the situation, giving them actionable steps to get to the next phase. Trust is the glue that enables all this and makes it easier. 

Debugging trust dynamic further

In a relationship where there is mutual trust, there is a win win dynamic. The EM is invested in the career growth of the engineer and is helping them get better. The engineer trusts the feedback and learns and improves. This is a positive feedback loop. Together both of them improve, the relationship improves, they solve bigger problems, build bigger things in the future. 

In a relationship where the engineer doesn't trust the manager, this often ends up in a vicious cycle. The engineer doubts the intentions of the manager, feels threatened, doesn't pay attention to the actionable feedback/decision/priority change, doesn't act to make changes and the situation gets worse. Often times the vicious cycle doesn't end well. Hence, it is very important for the EM to maintain the trust. 

Now that we have established why trust is every important in todays dynamic work environment, comes the critical question that we started with : how does an EM build trust ?

The meaning of trust from the dictionary stands at : firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Below I break down each of these dimensions into more granular questions, that engineers on the team would ask to tick the boxes. This by no way is exhaustive, but paints a picture of what the process of building trust looks like for the Engineer <> EM relationship. Trust is not a snapshot at an instant of time, but is a regular process that needs to be worked on proactively to maintain. 

For an engineer reading this article, it is a good way to keep your EM honest and accountable. Not all these boxes may be ticked all the of the time because management is not binary and more fuzzy, but you will know when you have a manager whom you can trust with your career :) 

1. Reliability : what makes an EM reliable ?
• Do they make false promises. They promise project A and we end up in project B. Priorities change once in a while, but is that the norm rather than the exception ? 
• Is their feedback actionable, quality and timely. When the feedback misses any of these dimensions, it is bad feedback
• Would they allocate 1:1 time for me every week and would they be invested in my career growth ? or would they drop the ball on me ?
• Predictable/no surprises during performance reviews
• Are they both invested in my career growth and will they hold me accountable. 
2. Truth : 
• Does the EM come across as authentic when they are talking because lack of authenticity is a trust killer
• Fairness : Is he/she fair while judging performance across project complexity/functionality/workstreams and attribute effort and ambiguity proportionately
3. Ability : what questions does the EM need to answer to demonstrate ability to build trust ?
• What is the background of the EM ?
• Were they rockstar engineers in the past ? 
• Do they have experience in top places(Google, Facebook, Apple) and did they build world class products/infra/platforms/teams in the past ?
• What does past success look like ? Would an engineer say that they would like to work with you once they meet you ?
• Are they knowledgeable
4. Strength : The EM is awesome. How are they putting all that ability into play in the current setup and what are their strengths ?
• You may be a junior engineer or a tech lead. Can the EM help me grow/rewarded/promoted from your current level?
• Can they unblock the team, pushback against unrealistic demands, shield the team from thrash or are they pass throughs? Can the team focus and deliver?
• Can they and are they aligned with the org priorities ?
• What are the team goals and how is the team currently executing on those goals ?
• Can the EM develop the team roadmap, strategy and mission for short/medium/long term ?
• Is the team growing ? Is their continued investment ?
• Is the team's impact/contributions well understood in the org ? Can they navigate org complexity ?
• If strength axes is not there, often times engineers end up telling their managers, you are great as a friend and i like you. But I will take my career growth elsewhere, to someone who can make things happen for me. 

As an engineer, trust on the EM is one of the biggest factors in choosing a team that enables them to grow their careers meaningfully. Of course there are several other factors that determine engineering happiness and to strategize on right team selection, but those will be the content of another post.

Thank you for reading. Would love to hear your thoughts/stories on anything that stands out for you that makes you trust/distrust your EM. 

Good manager interview question : what are things that you think could go wrong that you would find out if you were to join the team ?

Question

What are things that you think could go wrong that you would find out if you
were to join the team ?

This is a question I often ask while interviewing managers. I like it because it is open ended. Often times tenure as manager is treated as a proxy for gaining management skills. The regular hypothesis is that you become better as a manager with years. I believe this is only a part of it. What also matters is what you put in those years. This question helps to dissect that. There is no one good answer for this question, but gives the interviewee an opportunity to showcase how seasoned they are as managers.

Premise of the question

A perfectly good team may end up in a state of dysfunction if not invested properly. Given that we are hiring for a manager for this team, it means we have underinvested/invested slower than needed in the past or there is a regime shift(past manager leaving), which means there will probably be things that are broken/need to be built and need love.

Framework

There are various answers mostly structured around projects, people, product, customers, technology, culture, prioritization, scale, reliability, operational efficiency, strategy. All these factors could be changing too fast/too slow than normal which is typical in hypergrowth tech companies that would stretch the team beyond the comfort zone. If overdone on any of the axis, it could tip the team into a state of disfunction. Also answers will vary based on the managers past experience on product, infra, platform, ML, etc

Signals from the interview

• A sign of a good manager is someone who can take a chaotic state and turn it to a stable state. This also gives the interviewee an opportunity to show me how good are they in their ability to identify patterns of dysfunction in a team and how much change they have dealt with in the past. 

• A key quality of successful managers is anticipation. Assuming that they have already engaged in the hiring process with recruiter, hiring manager, product manager, etc, it also tells me how engaged they have been in the process and how much they have realistically thought about the position. 

Followup question

Given the landscape what will be your strategy to fix some of these.

Always be closing

Finally, this also gives me an opportunity to close. In a way, they will also surface their biggest concerns
about the role from all the information they have collected about the team.
Some of this may be perception and some of it may be reality. It gives me an opportunity
to close the gap and get one step closer to closing the awesome candidate.

Maker vs Manager - Work Life Balance Edition

Why this post ?

I often get this question from ICs who have interest in management, how is the work life balance(wlb) of a manager. Often times they dont have visibility into what their manager is doing or what the day to day might look like. The common notion may be that the manager's life is pretty chill and some ICs may be motivated to take the job because of that, which may be the wrong way to approach it.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y-combinator wrote the famous blog post on the Makers schedule vs the Manager's schedule. I would recommend that to anyone who wants to try out management or even a high Tech Lead role with a lot of surface area. The goal of this post is to demystify a bit about the manager's wlb and how that is different from ICs.

What can lead to poor wlb for ICs ?

ICs have delivery pressure. They have goals and timelines to hit. So they have to be on top of the timelines, deal with complexity/breadth in a timeboxed manner, manage expectations around feasibility/risks and escalate in a timely manner. Complexity/breadth are the variables which lead to feasibility/risks to the project which may lead to poor wlb.

What can lead to poor wlb for managers ?

As a manager you dont own your calendar. It belongs to the team as you have to make yourself available for team members, cross functional peers(PMs, Data Science, User Research, Business, Analytics), partner teams, etc. So as your surface area grows and as the team grows the number of variables outside your control increases. You have to available often after hours for leadership escalations, issues your team members may be facing, shared goals changing, partner teams priorities changing, issues with cross functional relations, etc. Bottom line is you have to put out fires in your area and fires dont have a schedule. Also given managers have so many meetings during the day, often times they have to work after hours for design reviews, doc writing, upward presentations, talent reviews, roadmapping when they can focus on real work.

What does a stable state look like for ICs and Managers ?

ICs can have good wlb when they have a strong manager with good projects. When the manager can set reasonable goals, prevent thrash, smoothen out priority changes and transitions for the team.

Manager's can have a good wlb when they have a strong team of rockstars who can solve complex/broad problems and be able to deal with variable complexity/variable breadth(cross stack,versatile) as needed. I keep complexity and breadth both as variables because that is dependent on the team and business/product/technical challenges on that team.

What are the pitfalls to be aware of as you make career choices ?

Having read the above, you can probably infer which role is worst. Hint : combination of both tends to not work out as it stretches you on both the axes at the same time. Often times it happens when you are new to the manager axes and those muscles are not yet built out.

References

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html - Makers schedule vs Managers schedule

Pointers to prepare for that system design interview

1. Change data capture systems
• Brooklyn built by Linkedin
• Wormwhole by Facebook
2. Zookeeper
• Zookeeper overview
• Zookeeper recipes
3. Apache Kafka
4. Apache Samza
5. Apache Spark
6. YARN
7. Kubernetes

Links

• Grokking the System Design Interview
• https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
• https://github.com/checkcheckzz/system-design-interview
• https://github.com/shashank88/system_design
• https://gist.github.com/vasanthk/485d1c25737e8e72759f
• http://www.puncsky.com/blog/2016/02/14/crack-the-system-design-interview/
• https://www.palantir.com/2011/10/how-to-rock-a-systems-design-interview/
• http://blog.gainlo.co/index.php/2017/04/13/system-design-interviews-part-ii-complete-guide-google-interview-preparation/
• https://github.com/yangshun/tech-interview-handbook/tree/master/experimental/design

What are the good attributes of a new Senior Manager ?

Are you a new Senior Manager/Manager of Managers ? Did you only manage Individual Contributors(ICs) and senior ICs before and are you going to manage Managers for the first time ? Or is your team growing very fast and you are about to manage more managers.

There are a lot of articles to help out folks converting from IC to management. However, I have found few articles on being a good Senior Manager managing other managers. The goal of this article is help you bootstrap and avoid some common pitfalls. Hopefully you will also appreciate the difference between managing ICs and Managers. This is one of the most common pitfalls of new Senior Managers and the part that they find hardest during the transition.

A common question that engineers ask is what does my skip do ? This article should be a good read for engineers to understand your skip better.

There are two broader dimensions (2Ps) : Project and People that we will talk about.

Project 

1. As a Senior Manager, you need to manage a manager by setting expectations based on business metrics and outcomes. You have to give flexibility and freedom to the manager about how to achieve these goals. If you start thinking too much about the "how" then you will end up micromanaging the manager. You have to detach from the project perspective and only think from outcome perspective. The manager should have the independence to create an appropriate roadmap, work with PM, determine team composition and structure, setup collaborations to hit the goals. 
2. On the other side, while managing ICs as a Senior Manager, you may be more attached and involved from the project perspective. This is how the nature of the job may look different while managing other Managers vs other ICs. You will probably have a few senior ICs reporting to you directly and hopefully through them you are personally attached to only the most important projects in your team. This will help you scale as the team grows.
3. On the first point, I mentioned that you need to detach from the "how". That is both true and not true. It is more nuanced. You can regulate the "how" and this is your way of setting technical direction/culture of the team. Here are some examples of regulations to set : 

the operational efficiency of the team should improve quarter over quarter(reliability SLAs, oncall load, system outages, weekly post mortems) 

the engineering quality should meet minimum bar(test coverage above x%, design docs and processes, deployment schedules, ab testing guidelines) 

data quality standards 

These regulations will also determine the engineering culture in your organization and hopefully this is also what you promote and reward in performance reviews. This is what you need to be in sync with your new Manager report because this will be a key part of the performance conversations. The regulations don't always need to be top down. These can be and should be bottoms up from the Manager and the ICs. This brings us to the next dimension : People

People

As a Senior Manager, you set/establish the culture of your team. People are a big part of the culture and who you hire is key to maintain and grow that culture. While you draw major components from your company and organization(director's) culture, you should also work together with your manager reports and senior ICs and customize it as you see fit. From here on, you have to give the Manager the freedom to hire/retain/manage the people they think are fit for the team and for achieving the team goals while thriving and growing the team culture. You should be available to help them navigate edge cases whenever needed, for eg: a sell call to help close that rockstar candidate.

There are a few ways you can regulate the people side and make sure things are on check without micromanaging the manager :

• do regular skip level 1:1s to keep a tab on the pulse of the team. conducting good skip level 1:1s is an art and takes years of experience. that itself could warrant a complete post
• every company has some kind of manager survey that they conduct. make sure that the top concerns expressed in those surveys are regularly being addressed by the Manager. This will be your way of growing the Manager reporting to you and this will ensure that the team trusts you and feels that their feedback is actionable

This post is geared towards new Senior Managers. I have deliberately left out other aspects when a Senior Managers/Director has several Managers reporting to him. These managers may be collaborating internally and externally to hit some of their goals. Those are more advanced topics and create a different set of dynamics. I will save that for another post.

If you are a Senior Manager/Manager of Managers and have read this far, I would like to thank you for your time. I would love to hear your thoughts about this article, things you wish someone had told you when you started out and anything else that could benefit the community.

For engineers reading this article, hope this sheds some light into the life of your skip. Do you know now what your skip does ? Would love to learn more. Please leave your stories in comments.

Areas of investment by Big Tech

Mobile Hardware : Apple, Google
Mobile OS and App store : Apple, Google
Voice : Apple, Google, Amazon
Home(Camera, speaker, other devices) : Apple, Google, Amazon
Social : Facebook
Communications : Apple, Facebook, Google
Video : Google, Amazon, Facebook
Search : Google, Microsoft
Ads : Google, Facebook, Amazon
Cloud : Apple, Google, Microsoft
Computer Hardware : Microsoft, Apple
Computer OS : Apple, Microsoft
Productivity Suite : Microsoft, Google
e-Commerce : Amazon, Facebook

How big tech makes money - 2019 edition ?

How Big Tech Makes Money

This is the followup to the earlier version of the post which describes 2018 revenues and profits https://siliconvalleystories.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-big-tech-makes-money.html

Apple (Revenue in 2019: $267.7 billion, $55 billion)

• Q4, 2019 revenue - $91.8 billion, net income - $22.2 billion
• Q4 revenue breakdown by category
• iPhone - $55.9 billion
• Mac - $7.56 billion
• iPad - $5.9 billion
• Wearables - $10 billion
• Services(Apple TV, AppleCare, ApplePay) - $12.7 billion (up from $7.3 billion in Q4 2018)
• Active installed user base 1.5 billion
• Commentary : You can see that apple revenue is pretty much constant from 2018, however the stock is up because apple has consistently reduced the outstanding shares by buybacks which increases earnings pre shares. Also Services and Wearables revenue is blowout and increasing as Apple pivots itself into a services play from a phone maker. 

Amazon (Revenue in 2019: $280.5 billion)

• Q4 2019 GMV - $87.4 billion, operating income - $3.8 billion, net income - $3.2 billion
• Investing in Amazon provides significant international exposure. NA sales : $53.6 billion, international sales : $23.8 billion
• AWS 2019 revenue : 35 billion
• AWS Q4 2019 revenue : $9.9 billion Q4 2019 profits : $2.6 billion
• Commentary : AWS makes up most of the profits for amazon and accounts for 11% of the revenue. The retail business is a thin margin business and AWS remains the cash cow. Amazon and Apple have similar 2019 revenues, but Apple is way more profitable as a business. Amazon's AWS made in Q4 as much as Google's cloud made in whole of 2019 demonstrating its lead in the cloud. Amazon also declared 150 million prime subscribers which gives them a $16.5 billion recurring revenue bundle. 

Microsoft (Revenue in 2019: $126 billion, $39 billion)

• Q4 2019 revenue : $36.9 billion growing at 14%, net income : $11.6 billion growing at 38%
• Productivity and Business Processes was $11.8 billion and increased 17%(includes Linkedin, Office 365 commercial, Office 365 consumer, Dynamic 365)
• Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (Server products and Azure)
• Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62%
• Personal Computing was $13.2 billion and increased 2%(Windows, XBox, Search, Surface)
• Commentary : Azure continues to be be bright spot for Microsoft and that continues to drive the revenue growth. Microsoft has Office 365 which is its recurring revenue bundle like Prime and it is using its sales team to drive Azure growth. 

Google (Revenue in 2019 : $160 billion, Net income : $34 billion)

• Q4 2019 revenue : $46 billion, Net income : $8.9 billion
• Google search - 27 billion
• Youtube - 4.7 billion
• Google network member properties - 6 billion
• Google Cloud - 2.6 billion
• Google Other (Includes Youtube subscription) - 5.2 billion
• Commentary : Cloud reached around a 10 billion annual run rate. Youtube generated 15 billion ads revenue. Google is making more revenue than microsoft but is a thinner margin business. However, Google's revenue is growing at 20% pace for the last few years, whereas Microsoft is around 15% growth rate. Youtube ads grew at 36% YoY. Google cloud is growing revenue at 50% YoY, however, the base in much smaller than AWS. To put things into perspective, AWS made in Q4 what Google Cloud made in 2019. 

Facebook(2019 Revenue : $70.6 billion, Net Income : $18.4 billion)

• Facebook makes most of its money from ads (98.5%)
• Q4 revenue - 21 billion, Net income - 7.3 billion
• Facebook DAU - 1.66 billion
• Facebook family of products MAU - 2.89 billion
• Commentary : Facebook family MAU is 2.89 billion compared to Apple's 1.5 billion devices. 

Overall Commentary

• Apple and Amazon have the highest revenue. Apple's total revenue is not changing much YoY, Amazon is still growing revenue at >20% clip YoY
• Apple makes the largest amount of net income every year. Apple returns largest cash back to the shareholders
• Google total revenue is now greater than Microsoft with Search alone generating close to 100 billion in 2019. Microsoft is a higher margin business than Google
• Facebook continues to boast highest percentage growth in revenue numbers at 27%

thoughts about self-worth, entitlement, resilience, endurance

Performance reviews, 360 degree feedback, fast feedback is common theme in today's corporate america. Employers today care less about well being of employees. Workplaces are stressful and challenging. Businesses are way more dynamic than ever before. This trickles down to less planning and more adaptivity, be it in your roadmap, your career growth, your next promotion. There is always uncertainty.

In this age it is ever important to understand the difference between self-worth, entitlement, resilience and endurance. The difference between the four can be trick and the balance is key to good emotional health.

Self worth : Firstly, your year end performance is not a measure of your self worth. The true measurement of self worth is not how a person feels about their positive experiences but rather how they feel about their negative experiences. You have probably heard about the self esteem movement : feelings of self-esteem were the key to success in life. However, overdose of this can lead to entitlement. Read more about entitlement below. Healthy doses of self esteem needs to be balanced by healthy doses of self awareness and reality checks.

Entitlement : People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we are uniquely special. Somehow unlike others, the rules must be different for us.

If you have a problem, chances are more people have had it in the past or will have it in the future. It just means that you may not be as special as you thought. Your problems may not be priviledged in severity or pain.

How do you balance between self-worth and entitlement and not feel like suffering/entitled ?
The answer is mindset. Do you have a mindset of resilience or endurance ?

Endurance and resilience sound very similar, but are very different. Endurance is short term and resilience is long term.

If resilience is lively, challenging, bouncy and full of flexibility; endurance is characterised by stiffness, survival, cutting off from oneself to get through it. When we endure, we keep going heads down through difficult situations and heavy workloads, sacrificing sleep, activities that we enjoy, relationships with others and self care promising that when this current storm is over, we will rest, connect, get fit, eat healthily. But what happens?

As you have read in the previous posts, life is about moving from one milestone to another. It is about solving a new set of problems. Once you solve a set, there is another set at home or at work which demands you endure again. So the cycle starts again.

Chapter Summary : The subtle art of not giving a F* : Happiness is a problem

Happiness is a problem

1. The first noble truth of buddhism is that life itself is a form of suffering. I think the author here combined buddhism with recursion. The author here says acceptance is the end, the pursuit of the end is another form of suffering. 
2. The rich suffer because of their riches, the poor suffer because they are poor.
3. Happiness is not an algorithm, it is not an end goal. It is a process and a journey. Hopefully the view along the road is what you enjoy. Dont go to the mountains if you like the ocean. 

Reward vs Process

1. You have to figure out whether you are fascinated by the reward. If so you cannot have the reward without the struggle. You cannot choose the result without the process. 
2. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. 
3. This is not directly about willpower or "no pain, no gain". There might be tradeoffs, you may like the reward so much that you are willing to bear the process which you may not enjoy as much. This is not just corporate america : college students when doing branch selection, often make such tradeoffs. Eg : I am great at chemistry, but I am ok studying computer science because chemistry may not pay the bills. Applogies for chemistry majors reading this, this is not to cherrypick on you, but to explain the concept of tradeoffs. Willpower and grit comes in that whether you are ready to pull through on the process. That is where the sacrifice comes into play. 
4. Its a never ending upward spiral. If you feel that at any point you are allowed to stop climbing, then you are missing the point. The joy is the upward climb itself. You reach milestones on the way : get into top school, graduate top of class, get the top job , get the first promotion, become a manager, become a director. At each step, the problems you are solving are different. What got you here to milestone n, wont get you to the next milestone n+1. So your problems will change, but that doesnt mean they will get easier. The nature of the problems you are solving will change. It is all about whether you enjoy solving those problems or not. It will also depend on which milestone you get to. For example : if you think you are a great engineer and hate management, you will not like the problems that managers have to solve day to day and that kind of job wont scale. That is where matching your milestones with the problems you like to solve matter. 
5. 
   

Chapter summary : The subtle art of not giving a F* : The feedback loop of hell

The feedback loop of hell

1. The feedback loop of hell
• You are anxious about being anxious of something all the time
• You are angry about being angry too quickly all the time
• You are worried about being worried about something all the time
2. Social media today has bred a whole generation who believe that these negative feelings on anxiety, anger and worry are totally not ok. The feedback loop of hell has become a borderline epidemic
3. We feel bad about feeling bag
4. The desire for positive experiences is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience in itelf is a positive experience.
5. Countercultural philosopher Alan Watts calls this the law of reverse effort or the backwards law: trying to make everything right often causes things to go wrong. Watts writes, “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.” Security is an illusion. It is only when we acknowledge that insecurity is an inevitable aspect of life that we cease to fear it.
6. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering
7. The avoidance of struggle is a form of struggle