His first computer was a Franklin 1200. He now supports two teams of engineers that help Facebook scale at a rapid pace and tackle some of the most challenging problems in warehouse data processing. Find out more about Vaughn's work and impact at Facebook.

I'm an engineering manager in the Facebook data infrastructure team. Data infrastructure is responsible for the data centers, hardware, and software systems that help power Facebook. Specifically, I support two different teams of engineers within data infrastructure.

I joined Facebook with 15+ years of prior experience in the software industry working in enterprise software. After just arriving, I asked several people what it takes to succeed as an engineering manager at Facebook or alternatively what mistakes do many new managers with outside experience make. I learned that a common failure mode is a new manager who arrives thinking that it is their job to tell engineers what to do. This might sound like an oversimplification or common sense in that managers at most software companies understand that you can't completely rely on being directive, but as I dug deeper, I found that Facebook truly was different from my experience. More so than any place I had worked before, Facebook is “bottoms up” both for designing individual features and for technical roadmap planning (and just about everything else). An engineering manager's role is to partner with engineers on the team to help ensure that we're making choices that are aligned to the company and organizational goals. More generally, the role is to support engineers to help them be as successful as possible.

As a kid, my family was fortunate enough to have a computer in our home. It was a Franklin 1200 and I used it to play text-based games and do very basic programming. Later, I was lucky enough to get access to a modem which exposed me to bulletin board systems, turn-based games, and ultimately fed my interest in computers and technology. I still remember how excited I was when we upgraded to a 9600 baud modem. In school, I was exposed to more advanced programming like COBOL and Pascal. In college, I originally thought I might major in math or physics, but somewhere along the way, I realized that I couldn't resist the opportunity to get paid doing something I enjoyed so much.

Each team is unique but there are common themes that apply. Engineers are extremely focused on impact and they find the shortest path to turn ideas into reality. Even though Facebook has grown a lot, it feels more like a resourceful start-up when it comes to solving engineering problems. That's not to say that we sacrifice quality or don't build things to last, but the first question that's typically asked is not how to do something but what's the value of doing it at all.

After working in distributed data processing at Facebook for a few months, one of the surprising realities I discovered was that both the users I'm supporting and the engineers running the systems underneath me all want the same thing as me - that Facebook is succeeding at its mission. For years before that, my experience was trying to make my “widget” (aka product or service) successfully fit into the constrained environment of current and potential customers. At Facebook, we often sit with our users and discuss changes that could benefit the end-to-end use case all the way from changing how an event is generated in a mobile application, to the format it is stored on disk, to the shape of the query used to analyze it. It's incredibly powerful to have everyone up and down the stack aligned and motivated by the same top level mission.

As an engineering manager, I spend a sizeable amount of time in meetings. An engineer I worked with several years back asked me if it was frustrating spending so much time in meetings and not being able to get much valuable work done. I responded honestly that I valued the time spent in meetings and considered it impactful. Many of the meetings are one-on-one discussions with engineers to check if they are feeling challenged and enjoying day-to-day work. Other meetings are more technical with several of us sitting down to talk through an approach to solving a complex issue. I also spend a significant amount of time reading and writing. A cool thing about Facebook is that we use Facebook as a communication platform for much of our work. It's an extremely useful tool for understanding what's happening across your organization and the entire company, as well as sharing the work you do and collecting feedback.

Facebook's mission is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. There are the softer (or loosely correlated) ways to know the impact my work is making like attending our weekly company Q&As to hear about the progress we're making and hear the perspectives of other employees in the discussion. More specifically, within infrastructure, we do work that powers many of the ambitious company goals. If we take on a technical project that improves CPU efficiency by 20%, then at our scale that translates to a very real savings for the company. This opportunity for direct correlation along with a huge opportunity for technical advancements is very exciting to me.

Borrowing wisdom from a great manager I previously worked with, Ted Kummert, here are three helpful questions in understanding my own or others level of job satisfaction:

• Most mornings when you wake up, do you look forward to come into the office?
• Are you learning and growing in ways that you appreciate?
• Do you feel like you're being rewarded appropriately for the work you do?

If the answer to only 2 out of 3 questions is yes, there's likely a long term job satisfaction/retention problem. If the answer to only 1 out of the 3 questions is yes, there's likely a short term satisfaction/retention problem. And if the answer to none of the 3 is yes, what's that person still doing in the job? For me with Facebook, the answer to all 3 is yes.

A few pieces of advice I would give to an engineering manager who was interviewing with Facebook:

• Prepare for a technical interview. I believe most large tech companies still have a fairly standard technical interviewing process and while many experienced candidates would say (and I would agree) that these processes can often skew towards being more effective at evaluating less experienced candidates, it's important to brush up on and practice the basics. I believe Facebook does a great job at applying a fair and rigorous bar, but it's the responsibility of the person interviewing to make sure they bring their best self to the interview which typical means spending some extra time preparing.
• Be yourself. Facebook values authenticity, self-awareness, and a willingness to learn. In the interview, don't be afraid to admit times you've screwed up but rather embrace those situations and focus on what you learned from them. In the same vein, don't be afraid to admit where you're not strong but instead talk about how you've learned to be effective by leveraging your strengths and developing techniques for mitigating your weaknesses.