DEV Community: Sha Alibhai

Doing it the hard way - My career journey failing forward into success

Sha Alibhai — Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

No coding tutorial or bootcamp can prepare you for the feeling of having to tell your family that you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from because you didn't pass the job interview.

I've always loved computers so when I was 10 I gifted a book that changed my life. It was a book teaching Visual Basic 6. I didn't understand anything it said at the time so I was was introduced to a different, simpler language called Basic. I coded my first "Hello World" in Basic at the age of 11. I was instantly hooked! What followed was me spending my birthday money every year on programming books. Since then, I've been a developer working with JavaScript, PHP, C# and Ruby. I got my first paid contract at 16 and worked multiple jobs both in and out of tech since then, but for this story I'm going to focus on my experience since finishing university, because that's when I stopped working to live and started having to work to survive.

No coding tutorial or bootcamp can prepare you for the feeling of having to tell your family that you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from because you didn't pass the job interview. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of defeat as you realize you're going to have to shut down your business. But I've had to face this reality so many times in my life.

I could feel sorry for myself about a lot things that have been unfair in my life. From being born to a working class family and not being able to afford the same experiences as others to having to close multiple businesses. I could have felt like a failure over and over again. But instead I forced myself to compartmentalize the negativity and instead focus on what I needed to do to be better.

Starting my first business

I packed everything I owned into a single suitcase, collected all the money I had which turned out to be less than $1000 and made a leap of faith.

My professional journey started in England where I spent the first 23 years of my life. I've always aspired to have my own business and when I finished university that was the plan. The problem was that my family had moved to the US, and those that have lived in England know how hard life can be if you're struggling financially.

I decided to make the move to be closer to my family and start my business in the US because I felt I'd be able to take bigger risks if I had a safety net to fall back to. I packed everything I owned into a single suitcase, collected all the money I had which turned out to be less than $1000 and made a leap of faith.

Within 2 weeks of making the move, I was introduced to the owner of 7 pharmacies in the Central Florida area that was looking to take his business online. The only problem was that just a couple of months before he had already had the same conversation with someone else and had a prototype in the works. I told him not to worry and asked if he would be willing to meet me anyway just to chat and see if he could give me any advice. Within an hour he was yelling at me for not coming sooner because he felt like I understood his vision better and ended up cutting his losses and asking me to redo everything that he'd had done up to that point. Things were looking good!

Over the next few months I had steady work coming in and met some great people to partner with along the way. One ended up offering me a substantial amount of money to partner with him 50/50 with the promise that he'll teach me everything he knows and together we'll grow the business much bigger than I would be able to do by myself. I'd be crazy to turn an offer like that down right?!

Well, as I found out 18 months later, things don't always work out how you imagine. We didn't have a conversation up front about what we expected of each other and both ended up at a loss. My expectation was that I would be able to rely on my partner to manage the business side and grow it while I focused on the technical side, while he expected me to carry on doing everything and just ask for help when I needed it. The lack of growth created a debt that the business was unable to repay and I ended up having to make the painful decision to shut down and part ways.

Shutting up shop and starting over

Unless I spent another 6 months developing there was no way I was going to be able to sell this thing.

In the meantime I'd been thinking a lot about the e-commerce space and how at the time there weren't many options for small businesses. I'd already met a lot of small business owners when I was freelancing, so I knew I'd be able to make something useful for them. I went and talked to a bunch of them and found out what type of features they'd look for and then set out to try and create a product that would work for all of them. 6 months of 18 hour development days later I had a product that I was certain every small business owner would be throwing their money at. How unbelievably wrong I was! By trying to create something that tried to work for everyone, I'd created something that didn't work for anyone. Everyone i talked to said the same thing - "It's almost there, but you'd have to make some tweaks for it to work for us." That lack of product-market fit really hurt. Unless I spent another 6 months developing there was no way I was going to be able to sell this thing. But I had another problem.

Me and my then fiancee were trying to get married. But I had no money left. There was no way I was going to be able to support someone else if I couldn't even support myself. So I made the hard decision to once again close my business and started working on my resume.

Moving into employment

I wanted to use my talents to make the world a better place and I just didn't feel I was doing that.

My luck turned. I found a promising position and applied on a Wednesday. On Thursday the company called asking to set up an interview for the next day. On Friday I had my interview. During the interview I took my laptop and showed them the code for my e-commerce solution. They seemed impressed! We parted ways with them asking if it's ok for them to call me over the weekend if they decide to go forward with an offer. Saturday afternoon I got the call and was asked to start on Monday. Things we're looking up! Except... not really.

I hadn't realized it at the time but I didn't really know too many specifics about the product the company was creating. They kept on describing it as email marketing software but didn't go into too much detail about what it actually did. I found out over the coming weeks why that was. The company was using the software to sell "magic products" to vulnerable and unsuspecting people. Everything was technically legal, but morally in a gray area. They would use clever tricks to make it seem like they are talking to a psychic who knows everything about them. In doing that they had created actually a really smart email marketing system with dynamic campaigns and intelligent segmentation.

For a few months I convinced myself that it's fine because I was working on the product itself and not the business that actually uses the product so I'm not directly involved, but my conscience got the better of me and I ended up deciding to leave because ethically I couldn't do it anymore. I wanted to use my talents to make the world a better place and I just didn't feel I was doing that.

Getting into the grind

They were blown away with my practical demonstration and proactivity. I knew I had the job! Things were finally back on track. I bought my dream car! I bought my first house! Life was great...

What followed was a few years of taking short term contract jobs. I didn't have stability but the money was great. Eventually I got an interview that I was really excited about. It was a remote position for a really interesting agency that was hiring an AngularJS developer. I wasn't too comfortable with AngularJS yet but I knew I wanted to learn and I knew I'd have to do something special to stand out during the interview. I went on the companies website and saw a really cool grid on their company page that had all the employee pictures. I decided to recreate it in Angular and showed it during my interview. They were blown away with my practical demonstration and proactivity. I knew I had the job! Things were finally back on track. I bought my dream car! I bought my first house! Life was great... until it wasn't.

Making big life changes

I got promoted all the way to Director of Engineering and now run a team of 15 engineers, am responsible for all the major technical decisions across the companies product suite and own a budget of just under $1m a year.

In summer of 2016 my wife asked for a divorce. What's worse is at the time I didn't really understand why. As a developer I'm used to feeling imposter syndrome with my work, but I'd never felt imposter syndrome in my life. I didn't know what I'd done wrong and so decided that everything I did was wrong. This mentality effected everything. My personal life, my relationships and even my work. I didn't know who I was anymore. I spent a year in depression, constantly forcing myself to do things that took me out of my comfort zone because I was so desperate to be someone else. In hindsight I did a lot of the right things but for the wrong reasons. I started going to the gym, I wrote a book, I went to public speaking classes and I started a YouTube channel.

March 2018 was a month that totally changed the course of my life. First I reconnected with an old friend who I hadn't seen in years. She noticed I wasn't same person I used to be and told me she wants to help me get better. Another was an old colleague who had started a business with a couple of people in the healthcare technology space. At the time I was interviewing at Facebook and Universal Studios and both were looking promising but my friend gave me some great advice. She told me to take a risk with the startup, the other two will always be around if it doesn't work out.

That turned out to be some of the best career advice I've ever had. I started as employee number 6, and their first developer. In the time since then, the company has grown like crazy and so have I. I got promoted all the way to Director of Engineering and now run a team of 15 engineers, am responsible for all the major technical decisions across the companies product suite and own a budget of just under $1m a year.

Where I am now

No coding tutorial or bootcamp can prepare you for the feeling of telling your family that you got the job. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of victory as you realize you've achieved your goal and are living your dream.

That brings me to today. I'm sitting here next the friend who found me at my lowest and helped me find the self confidence I needed back to being my best again, and I'm so happy that I can now call her my wife. I have a great family and I work for a company that lets me use my talents to make the world a better place. On top of that, I work a job that gives me the influence to help others reach their goals and dreams. I'm even writing a book about my experiences and everything I've learned on my journey. Best of all, I'm less 2 weeks away from meeting my newborn son. At the time every failure felt like a setback, but now I can see they made me the person I am today.

No coding tutorial or bootcamp can prepare you for the feeling of telling your family that you got the job. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of victory as you realize you've achieved your goal and are living your dream. I'm thankful that i've been able to face this reality.

What does a Director of Engineering do?

Sha Alibhai — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 18:44:16 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

I've been fortunate in my career to be part of organizations that have always constantly pushed me. When I started with the company I'm currently at, Roundtrip, I was a software engineer. At the time, Roundtrip, a company in the healthcare transportation space was an early state startup with six employees, including me. As the team grew the CTO, my direct manager, had to elevate himself to out of the day to day and so I was put into a leadership position out of necessity. My accountabilities and responsibilities changed but at the time my position in the organization chart didn't.

I had no idea what the expectations were of me, but I knew I had to grow the team by finding engineers, handle technical and personal reviews and create processes to keep us moving forward. Aside from all that, I also had to figure out what responsibilities fell under my domain.

Three years on, I'm finally at a place where I feel confident talking about my accountabilities and the worth I feel this position brings to an organization. Recently, I challenged myself to mind map my role and break each part down into granular expectations.

People Leadership

Conducting 1-1s

My personal mission is to create a world class engineering team that create world class products. This starts from the individuals. Understanding and managing peoples motivations, emotions, skills and expectations, helping them set goals, removing personal and professional blockers and keeping them happy with their salary and their current roles are imperative to maintaining their focus and ensuring high quality output. I meet with my team individually on a weekly basis to keep a pulse on their needs and give them a platform to be heard.

Recruiting

To build the best team you have to find the best people. Each person you bring in should be better than at least half of of your existing team. This keeps the bar high and makes sure that everyone constantly feels challenged.

Recruiting goes beyond just position. I have to find personalities that match my teams needs. I do this by identifying the teams weaknesses and needs and finding people that complement them. If I have strong executors but am lacking in people leaders, I bring in someone who has that focus. Overall, I hire for an individuals strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. This ensures that I have a great, balanced team.

Defining the Engineering Growth Map

Progression is key to motivation. People need to know whats expected of them to keep challenging themselves. Theres a cliche, "dress for the position you want". I encourage this behavior on my team too, in that by setting expectations and success profiles for every position and measuring them to this during 1-1s, theres a clearly defined career progression path and transparency around what they need to accomplish. If someone shows competency, promotion becomes obvious.

I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a bit differently. If an individual on my team is working hard, I'm going to keep them where they are because they're getting the job done. Rather, I'm looking to elevate my 10x engineer - not the one that's the doing their job well but the one thats mentoring those around them to do their job well too.

Enforcing Core Values

Core values are the main pulse for me to make sure individuals are the right people in their seats. For me it helps to be at an organization who's values I believe. For example, Roundtrip has 5 values:

Ownership
Proactivity
Resilience
Listening First
Keeping it Simple

Holding myself and my peers accountable to these 5 values constantly helps keep the level of the team high.

Driving us towards our Mission

The best way to keep us all rowing in the same direction is to use the mission as our source of truth and guiding light. Every person, process and initiative should be measured against the mission to ensure it gets us one steps closer to achieving it.

As Roundtrip has grown, we use the mission to remind us of empathy. It's easy to become a "growth organization" focused only on the needs of paying client, but as a mission driven organization trying to help the underserved by removing transportation as a barrier to healthcare, we need to remember that clients that don't significantly contribute to revenue numbers are just as important. It's the responsibility of every leader to push this message constantly.

Process Management

Software Development Lifecycle

A great Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) helps us predictably and consistently deliver high quality software. Although I've been out of an execution role for a while, and every Director of Engineering likely has very little time for coding, I'm still accountable for how we get things done.

The right balance here is for me to focus on outputs, value and costs while letting my team focus on the outcomes. I'm responsible for reporting on how many hours it takes to create a feature, how many points we can achieve per sprint and how much it costs to keep my team running. I'm only able to manage what I can measure.

Scaling the Team

My accountabilities when scaling a team go in both direction. Downwards, there's a responsibility to my team to find them the right people and ensure i'm putting them all in the right seats. Upwards, it's about costs and optimizations. I have to fall within budget so that I contribute to the companies profitability. It's easy to throw money at a problem, it's much harder to solve it in a financially responsible way that helps the company grow leaner.

When a new team member joins us, I'm responsible for creating onboarding processes that give them the necessary context to set them up for success. I do this by breaking onboarding down into 3 stages. The first stage is to make sure they "get it". This means introducing them to the organization, problem scope and our existing processes. The next step is to make sure they "want it". During this period of onboarding, I ensure the individual has the right motivations and drive. This is where I start measuring them against our core values and setting some goals for them. Finally, I make sure they "can do it". Are they able to challenge the rest of the team? Are they bar raisers? Success for me is maintaining a process that constantly evolves to meet the needs of the team and my measure is having a healthy engineering culture.

Define Technical Strategy

The Roundtrip Technology team is split into 2 parts - Engineering and Product. Engineering focuses on the "how" and Product on the "what". Although I'm not responsible for defining the product roadmap, it's my responsibility to ensure that the challenges my team is facing are also addressed. We meet weekly to strategize on what things we need to put on the roadmap, these can be anything from fixing tech debt to developing infrastructure enhancements.

The other part of this is architecting the product to meet the everchanging needs of our clients. I used to be more heavily involved in the technical side of creating solutions, but recently I've had to elevate myself out of this to focus on other accountabilities and trust my team to do this.

EOS

Running a company is hard. Roundtrip has tried a few different systems to keep us rowing in the same direction, but the one that's worked best for us is EOS. As a leader in the organization my responsibilities including running my team's L10 meetings which give me a weekly heartbeat of how we're doing and helps us work on the business not in the business so that we can identify and solve problems quickly.

Product Direction

Resourcing for the Roadmap

Ben Horowitz put it best when he defined the two stages of a company - peacetime and wartime. During peacetime, we experience extended periods of growth where we focus on building our product to create better processes for our customers. At this time, the Product team defines a roadmap and I have to make sure the Engineering team is resourced appropriately to ensure things get done. During wartime, for example when we're in a recession, it's time to optimize our roadmap and processes. During this time there's likely restrictions on resourcing which means the Product team has to define a roadmap based on the resources we have available. At this time it's more about focusing on initiatives that drive revenue, client retention and acquisition so my accountabilities shift from finding the right people for the work to staying as budget neutral as possible by finding the right work for the people we already have.

Managing Deployments

As a Director of Engineering, I have to make sure we're delivering consistently. If there's a barrier to this I have to coach my team through this. Deployments are usually the last, and hardest part to delivering software so a lot of my focus goes in to making sure we have a solid process in place.

I also have to take into account the impact a deployment has on both the clients and my team. Ensuring that clients feel as little impact as possible while maintaining my teams health because of odd timed deployments is definitely a tough balance.

Overseeing Integrations

Exposure helps us grow, but from a technology perspective these are the initiatives that introduce the most amount of risk because there's a lot of third party influences we can't control. From initial technical discussions through to implementation and onboarding I keep an eye on the processes being run to keep things running smoothly. At the end of the day, we only get one chance at a first impression so it's important for me to make sure that we give off a good one.

Access Control

Part of this is making sure I limit risk by only giving people access to the things they need. But there's a different dimension to this too. I want to ensure my team feels empowered and owns the products they're creating. I try to hire smart people to do the smart things and delegate tasks out to them to give them access and make them feel in control.

Building vs Buying Features

With the number of services available these days, it is so easy to create a product by just stitching other products together. But by doing this you lose a lot of control and specificity in functionality. As developers, it's just as easy to decide to create everything ourselves. But by doing this you lose time and increase complexity.

In my position it's about constantly having the "build vs buy" argument in my head to optimize on costs and keep things simple. Overall it comes down to which decision is going to give me the best return on investment.

Conclusion

Being an engineering leader is challenging. There's multiple accountabilities, both towards the people and the technology. This inherently means that the biggest problems fall on your lap, and often when it rains it pours. There's no schedule or predictability, and it's definitely more of a work until the blockers are removed rather than a standard 9-5. But if you embrace the challenge you see the direct result of your work in both the people and the product which makes it incredible rewarding.

Discuss on Hacker News

Hi, I'm Sha Alibhai

Sha Alibhai — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 18:43:27 +0000

I have been coding for 15 years.

You can find me on GitHub as shalotelli

I live in Orlando, Florida.

I work for Unboxed Technology

I mostly program in these languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, SASS, HTML.

I am currently learning more about Angular 2.

Nice to meet you.