YZ: 0:00

Welcome back. Thanks. You have been managing a lot of people at tech companies. How many people have you managed cumulatively?

VJ: 0:09

Ah, cumulatively. I don't know. I think I started off managing about six people in the beginning and then When I ended(at) a large company, I think there were 1, 200 people. 1, 200

YZ: 0:22

people. Yeah. PMs, engineers, designers? PMs and engineers. Okay. Yeah. I also heard that at Facebook, you often stay late and spend the dinner with uh, any engineers. Yeah. Like if they come to you, you'll share your wisdom with the engineers. It was

VJ: 0:38

not just engineers. It's anyone that is hanging around. I generally like to just be with people, learn about what they're thinking. And just discuss in general. Like, you know, I'm pretty open and transparent. So if anyone had questions about the business, about the product or the vision or the strategy, I'm like there to talk about it. If they have, like, you know, more deeper questions about why we chose to do what we did, what we're doing, why we choose to invest in certain teams and so on. I'm very transparent and happy to share those thoughts that I have. And so a dinner is a very good place to have that unstructured conversation

YZ: 1:17

I'm going to have many questions in the future. For example, what's it like(to manager 1200 ppl)? What's your day to day or what are the distinguishing factors for principal engineers or what's the difference between junior versus senior engineer, but today let's do one topic. Okay. One topic is what are the good questions? People ask you a question, right? I got asked a lot of questions and sometimes there are questions you're just dying to answer. Sometimes there are bad ones, you know.

VJ: 1:42

Yeah very, very good questions usually come from engineers that are like doing day to day their job and they're curious about how what they're doing on a daily basis actually affects the business. How, how strategy maps into what they're doing. Those are usually like very thought provoking, because, you know, sometimes you do a very small project, depending on your scope, you're kind of like focusing on something very, very deep. But it's oftentimes beneficial to just like step back and look at like, okay, the feature that I'm building, how is it benefiting the product? How is it benefiting the overall you know, investment that the company is making? How does it benefit the users or the customers that eventually will end up using this product? And so having that understanding helps you, helps you greatly. One, it helps you get motivated that, you know, the things that you're doing is just not going to waste. Two, it actually helps that someone Like, you know, it's really thinking about the strategy and then thinking about like how you break that down into smaller pieces and how that breaks into like you know, makes the day to day job that you're doing. So those are, you know, motivating in a way when you hear about that and you kind of like, then you have some sort of a meaning to what you're doing on a day to day basis.

YZ: 2:57

So from a leader's perspective, hearing that people actually care about the product, care about the strategy is motivating.

VJ: 3:05

It's extremely motivating. It would be demotivating otherwise, right?

YZ: 3:09

That's actually my question to you. I became suspicious. Like, I feel like a lot of big tech companies, a lot of strategies actually do not make sense. A lot of products actually... Are gonna go to waste. What's the problem, right? Yeah.

VJ: 3:27

It could be many things. I mean, it's hard to like, you know, exactly pinpoint what happened in your case. There may be many layers before a strategy breaks down into like your day to day. Some of those investments are directly related to the core product or are directly related to, like, improving existing products. Some of those could be new investment that the company or the leader decided to make. And not all new investments pan out. Like, you know, from my experience, if, if something works, if you see early signs, you double down on it. But there's also, like, lots of cases where investments did not pan out. And you have to be, like, you know just look at data and make a decision to not... Continue investing in it. And so a lot of times if you're a junior engineer and you don't fully understand like why you're doing what you're doing on a daily basis, it may feel like thrashing.

YZ: 4:16

Yeah, so what is your advice for such engineers? I'm sure. Yeah, like people came to you or feel like they are thrashy and frustrated with the strategy. Then what's your advice to like common engineers in front of the camera.

VJ: 4:31

Start by asking questions whether you are asking the questions to your manager or your tech lead, or when you have an opportunity at an all hands to ask the leader, you know. How do you translate that, you know, what you're thinking about, what your vision is down to like, you know, everyday work that people are doing. I'm pretty sure if you ask the right questions, you will be able to get an answer because I don't think any company, any logical company would want to like waste resources, waste good time from engineers. It's hard enough to find and hire good people. There's no reason why companies should be wasting, so there will be a good explanation. But it all starts from, like, asking the right questions.

YZ: 5:13

Actually, this goes back to, like, from the leader perspective. Asking the right questions is motivating. And yeah, I actually hear a lot of complaints. Among like people working at big tech that, you know, my managers are just dumb and they don't know what they're doing. The strategy doesn't make sense. Then there is this adversarial relationship between employees and their managers, their leaders, and they don't trust each other. But I guess I don't know if it's a lot of attraction. You first need to believe that there is good intention. It's actually within their own best interest.

VJ: 5:49

Yeah, I'm not going to say that 100 percent of the relationship is going to be like, you know, with good intentions. I think there are lots of cases where you may be layered. There may be incompetent people that are there that have, like, grown and it's kind of like, you know, one of those Peter's Law. Yeah, it's like large companies. You're going to end up with pockets like that. So I think that's one of those things. Over time, you have to build the intuition of, like, you know, When to go to your manager versus when to go to a skip level or even like, you know, go talk to senior technical leaders They may not be in your management chain. They may be in other teams and just like finding the right folks that you know, I always talk about like, you know, a good mentorship relationship has to resonate. Yeah, if there's no resonance, then it's not gonna work. And so find the people that you resonate with have that conversation. Talk about like why the day to day that you're, you know, your work matters. And if you can't find that, then change. Yeah.

YZ: 6:46

Okay. You already mentioned several options, like talk to a manager, ask question in all hands in this public domains, ship manager, senior leaders in your own chain, and mentor and leave. Yeah. I think we can talk about all those options in the future.

VJ: 7:04

Sounds good. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks for having me. Thank you.

YZ: 7:07

Cool.