The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 1. Getting the Job

At Digg, I ended up running Engineering, but I certainly wasn’t hired to do so. It wasn’t until a decade later, when I joined Calm, that a company deliberately hired me into my first executive role. If you start researching executive career paths, you’ll find folks who nominally became Engineering executives at 21 when they founded a company, and others who were more than 30 years into their career before taking an Engineering executive role.

As these anecdotes suggest, there is no “one way” to get an Engineering executive job. However, the more stories you hear about folks assuming executive roles, the more they start to sound pretty similar. I’ve condensed the many stories I’ve heard, along with my own experiences, into a repeatable process that prospective candidates typically follow.

This chapter will cover:

• Deciding whether to pursue an executive role

• Why each executive job search is unique, and how that will shape your process

• Finding executive roles externally and internally

• Navigating the often chaotic executive interview process after you’ve gotten comfortable interviewing in well-designed middle management interview processes

• Negotiating an executive contract, particularly the terms that rarely come up in the non-executive contracts you may have negotiated prior

• Deciding whether to accept an executive offer once you have it

If you’re kicking off the search for your first executive role, reading through this chapter will provide a clear roadmap ...