Career on jeffcarp

Reflections on Becoming a Manager

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last year after rejoining Google, I became a manager for the first time. As a long-time IC, I had some preconceived beliefs about what the job would be like, many of which were wrong.

During this transition a mentor pointed out one chapter from Nine Lies about Work about how humans are terrible at objectively rating other’s behavior. The result is that your entire work life is filtered through the lens of your manager’s point of view. I think this is something anyone with a boss has experienced: a great one can make your life amazing, and a bad or nonexistent one can make it a living nightmare. The saying “you don’t leave a job, you leave a manager” has rung especially true in my journey.

I Joined Google (again)

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Joining Google in 2016 vs. 2024.

This Spring I joined Google for the second time. I’m working on core ML infrastructure, specifically ML frameworks for Keras, JAX, and Gemini.

Not everyone is aware that Waymo is a completely separate sister company to Google. Going between the companies is an external hire in both directions.

Since joining Waymo four years ago, I worked with a ton of excellent people on a lot of different aspects of ML infra, including quantization-aware training, ML training frameworks, and global-scale automation of TPU training and simulation pipelines. It was always super rewarding walking around the streets of SF encountering a Waymo doing a specific behavior and thinking to myself “I worked on that model!!” (at least in very small part 🙂)

Questions I Ask Companies in Interviews

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Julia Evans’s post Questions I’m asking in interviews and Chip Huyen’s Questions to ask your interviewers section from her ML Interviews book, here are the questions I ask in interviews, targeting staff roles in ML infrastructure.

Overview

My general approach is:

Have 3-5 “primary” questions that cover the most important things.
Have a backlog of 20 questions that I can fire off as necessary. I never want to run out of questions or repeat a question in an interview.
Only ask “hard questions” after getting a job offer.

Primary Questions

What kind of scope and responsibility can I expect to have?
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now?
How does this team fit into the broader organization?
How big is the team and how fast is it growing?

Backup Questions

Recruiter-focused questions
- What rubrics will I be evaluated on?
- What kinds of questions should I be prepared for?
Team Alignment
- How fast are you growing and how is headcount allocated between teams?
- Who is competing for scope with your team (internal and external)?
- How many headcount do you have open right now?
Career
- When does the career ladder split between IC and management? What does that transition look like? How often do opportunities at that level come about?
- How easy is it to change teams at the company if things don’t work out?
Enjoyment
- What are the working hours like? When do most people work?
- What does your day look like?
- What do you like about working on this team? At this company?
Technology
- What’s your tech stack like?
- Do you have an oncall rotation and what is it like?
- Do you standardize tech across teams?
- What is your process for big projects? Do you write design docs? Do you have design reviews?
- How much tech debt do you have?
- How are tech teams organized? By technology or by product?
- What is the release cadence?
Leadership
- What is your decision making process?
- What are you looking for in employees and leaders?
- Who is the ultimate decision maker?

I'm Joining Waymo

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 15:38:38 -0800

Quick life update: I’ve left the Chrome team and joined Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project). I’ll be working on ML infrastructure.

It was a fantastic whirlwind 3 years working on infrastructure for Chromium and helping to–in a very small way–push the open web forward. On the team I launched wpt.fyi, a resource to help align the APIs of all browsers. I worked on syncing source code across repos. I launched a couple TensorFlow ML models. And I helped make the bug tracker quicker and more useful for everyone in the project.

3 Tips for New Technical Interviewers

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 15:00:31 -0700

One year ago I conducted my first software engineering interview at Google. In that first interview I gave, I guarantee you I was more nervous than the candidate I was interviewing. Those first few interviews were particularly nerve-wracking. A lot was on the line—I didn’t want to screw up this person’s career by being a bad interviewer!

Since then I’ve conducted a great deal more interviews and learned a lot about how to interview candidates successfully. I want to share three small tips that would have helped me improve as I was getting started.

You are an engineering manager whether you realize it or not

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 21:33:26 -0700

Over the past few months I’ve mentioned to friends that I want to learn engineering leadership skills. Each time the reaction is: “you want to get into management??” That’s not how I see it.

As engineers we hold the lone wolf in high regard, the hoodie-wearing coder hacking away in the corner at a genius project. But large projects that deliver a ton of value are made by teams of engineers, not lone wolves.

Interviewing 2 Years in: What Worked

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m almost pee-my-pants excited to announce that next week I’ll be joining the team at Braintree and Venmo to work on their JavaScript SDK.

Now that my job search is over, I want to share the lessons I learned from interviewing as a software engineer 2 years into my career. Most of these are not new (or specific to being 2 years into your career), but these points are what specifically helped me the most.