Four years after AOL hired me as an engineer, I moved into management. Some of the people reporting to me were the same people who had interviewed me.
Since then I've spent years on the leadership side of engineering at scale. I've mentored dozens of ICs through the transition into management — several of whom ended up reporting to me, others who moved up through other parts of the org. I coached my own direct reports through their first hiring rounds, and built the cross-team hiring framework multiple groups eventually used to standardize how candidates were evaluated across the org chart.
I've absorbed entire teams, drawn and redrawn org charts, and made layoff decisions. I've stood up horizontal platforms, absorbed adjacent ones, EOL'd the ones that had run their course, and consolidated platforms inherited through acquisitions and reorgs that had drifted into competing with each other. I'm known inside the orgs I've worked in for letting product teams move quickly on top of shared infrastructure, then "industrializing" the experiments that worked.