Career Journey 1: Interviewing & Getting Promoted | Thiago Ghisi

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
I highly recommend going from individual contributor to manager in the same company that you're in, because one, you get all of that benefit of knowing the technical details behind the scenes, because you've already, and also, it's very, very low chance that I'm gonna hire a manager who's never been a manager before, not from my own company. So promoting from within is the way to go.
And then after that, you can look at other companies to be like your second manager job or director or something like that.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
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**Dan Lines** (1:37)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO. And today we're joined by Thiago Ghisi, Director of Engineering at Nubank.
Thiago, welcome to the show.

**Thiago Ghisi** (1:58)
Thank you Dan, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite.

**Dan Lines** (2:01)
Yeah, of course. It's awesome to have you with us today. And I'm gonna give a little bit of a background about you. You've worked for startups in Brazil and the US.
I think you've been, as we were talking before the show, you're 10 years in New York City now.

**Thiago Ghisi** (2:20)
Almost there.

**Dan Lines** (2:22)
Almost there, almost at 10 years now. A lot of major companies that we've all heard of, places like Apple, American Express, ThoughtWorks, so some big time companies.
And through your time at those companies, both big and small, you've kind of done it all. So you've been a software engineer, you've been in QA, a project manager. I have a note here about SRE even. And now today, engineering manager, and I think you're a director now, so even more management, and you've really made it your mission to help engineers, managers, help teams grow, which is why you are the perfect guest to kick off Dev Interrupted series on the career journey of an engineering manager. So this is gonna be a multi-part series. It's more of a collection of stories. It's about learning, it's about experiences, lessons, failures, triumphs from leaders just like you. So in this first episode now, we'll be discussing how to get your start as an engineering manager, how to stand out in the interview process, what it means to be a manager, and how to take your first steps once you become one. So we have a packed show today.
Thiago, let's kick it off. I think the best place to start is when an engineer comes to you. So an engineer is coming to you and they say, hey, I think I'm ready to try out being a manager. What's your first thought?

**Thiago Ghisi** (3:58)
That's great.
So I mean, I have had that happen to me like a bunch of times and I think like grew depend a lot on the profile of that engineer and my previous history working with him or her, right? But in general, I would expect that that person was ready doing some kind of leadership job, even as I see, right? So if it is someone that's like just like coding all day long, hate meetings, does not have any soft skills, it's not like communicating, usually I have concerns on that. But if it is someone that I see that is ready taking some additional responsibility, that's already communicating across, not only engineering, but also talking to designers, talking to the product manager, talking to other dependents that we have on the project, right? Someone is already doing a little bit of work across. I would say that's more like a time of like, okay, how can we make that happen? Because I'm usually really comfortable with people transitioning to management and trying it out, right? The other thing is, I have, I would say, a stronger opinion about how, let's say, if that person is more like a generalist or more like a specialist, because I tend to feel that managers are more successful when they have a more diverse and a little bit more full-stack-ish generalist background. Because a lot of management is about navigating on different domains, connecting the dots, connecting people, right? And not only the one that knows the most about a particular platform or the one that has spent years on a particular domain, a particular language, or someone that is really, has only seen and has only done a small part of this stack. So that concerns me a lot, a little bit. So I would say those two things, like, okay, what was the background?