Hello! I'm Dave, and I'm very excited to be joining GitHub as an Engineering Manager! I’m very much looking forward to meeting you all and I’ll schedule introductory 1:1s as soon as possible. In the meantime, I wanted to share a bit about myself, my philosophy, and my working style to help us get started out on the right foot.
I live with my family in the suburbs of Portland, OR. I have three boys, ages 8,11, and 17. They love playing outside, playing golf, making stop motion videos, playing video games, and riding around on anything that has wheels. During the summer, we like to camp throughout Oregon and Washington. My partner and I have been married for about 13 years, and she works as a technical program manager at a local company. We also have a dog Sammy, a 6-year-old German Shepherd/Pitbull mix, who you might see occasionally on Zoom calls.
My main hobby is playing guitar. I enjoy all kinds of music, though I’m especially fond of jazz. I've also kept bees on an off for most of my life, though at the time of this writing I don't have any. Hopefully I'll find a swarm this spring!
I've spent the last 10 years in various engineering management and leadership roles. Prior to my move into management, I worked as an engineer building software in a variety of spaces, such as healthcare, education, and finance. My move into management was gradual at first. I was a team lead with a lot of engineering responsibilities, but over time I started taking on more management responsibilities and I found that I really enjoyed it. I felt a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction from helping my teammates level-up, advocating for my team, working with customers, listening to other people’s challenges and concerns, removing pain points and blockers, and generally finding ways to make my team successful.
Above all, I believe that the role of an EM is to help their team succeed in delighting their customers. There’s a lot that goes into making that happen, but in my mind, everything I do as an EM flows from this fundamental goal.
- Great Observability: I'm passionate about observability and have witnessed its transformative impact firsthand at multiple companies. I believe great observability should empower everyone – technical or not – to answer any questions they might have about their software in a matter of seconds, ideally without incurring a giant bill.
- Customer-Centricity: The most successful teams I’ve been a part of worked closely with their customers to understand their needs, and found creative ways to solve their problems in an incremental fashion. To me, this strong feedback loop between a team and their customers is the essence of agility.
- Diversity and Inclusion: I'm committed to diversity and inclusion, and I want to create an environment where everyone feels like they belong and their perspectives are valued and respected.
- Individual Growth: I believe in aligning each team member's strengths and ambitions with our team's goals and vision. Finding opportunities for everyone to apply their strengths, learn new skills, and grow their careers is one of my top priorities.
- Collaboration: I value open communication, honest feedback, and teamwork. I believe teams do work better when they collaborate. I am a proponent of pair/mob programming, structured brainstorming activities, well-facilitated meetings, and regular team retrospectives.
- Quality and Reliability: Quality and reliability are very important to me, and I believe investing in quality enables us to maintain sustainable working practices and leads to happy customers. I am an advocate for code quality and testing, and ensuring that we provide a reliable product for our customers.
- Predictable Execution: Reliably delivering what we say we will deliver helps to build trust with our customers and stakeholders and gives us more space to innovate. In my mind, the key ingredients to predictable execution are identifying success metrics, and creating plans that break work down into bite-sized milestones that can be delivered incrementally.
- Work-life balance: Folks do their best work when they aren’t feeling stressed out or tired and I’m mindful of making sure that no one is suffering from overwork or burnout.
I’m comfortable with both synchronous and asynchronous communication. I usually work between the hours of 8am and 5pm, Pacific, but I'm happy to flex when necessary.
- Useful 1:1s: We'll have weekly 1:1s at a time that works best for you. These meetings are your time – we can discuss career goals, technical challenges, pain points, success stories, or simply get to know each other better as humans.
- Transparency: I want everyone on the team to know where they stand and how their team is perceived by stakeholders, customers, and leadership. I intend to share feedback quickly, and I also want to hear any feedback that anyone might have.
- Availability and engagement: I'm always available via Slack or for impromptu Zoom conversations. I’m always down to chat. When in doubt, reach out!
- Curiosity: I'll ask lots of questions about what's going well, what's challenging, and how I can better support the team.
- Advocacy: I actively work with internal customers to understand where we can make the biggest impact, and I'm not shy about championing our team's accomplishments and vision.
- Adaptability: I’ve seen a variety of approaches over the years, but I believe every team and situation is unique so I’m not here to push a particular way of working on my team. I’ll share my experience, but we’ll work together to choose how we organize. I’m a big fan of framing changes as experiments - we can always try something and change it later if it’s not working.
I'm looking forward to working with each of you and building something amazing together. Don't hesitate to reach out with questions, concerns, or just to say hi!