Craig A Holliday

Manager, Development - Dolby Laboratories

Functions

As a Development Manager, I was tasked with the management and success of 4 full-time team members:

  • 1 Staff Engineer
  • 1 Senior Engineer
  • 2 Associate Engineers that were promoted to Engineers.

These team members worked across multiple teams in our department and reported to me for general development help and help with their career advancement.

During this period, I was also in charge of hiring to fill a full-time position and a few contractor roles.

Project Outcomes

  • 2 Junior Engineers promoted to Associate
  • 1 Staff Engineer hired
  • 2 Contract Engineers hired
  • 1 Internship
  • 8 quarters of 1:1s, general development advice, career advice, conflict resolution, and more.

Personal Takeaways

General

Measuring and reporting two years of management duties for a small team is difficult.

Managing this team was mainly about understanding, collaborating, and communicating the needs and desires of the team.

All team members had clear instructions from their project leaders and clear goals for their career advancement. I was a valuable asset in listening and providing feedback.

Hiring

Hiring contractors and a staff-level engineer have a few challenges.

All of our hiring at Dolby utilized a panel of existing team members to interview the prospective team member. This was important because maintaining a cohesive team is more important than any technical talent that could be brought into the team.

When hiring contractors, we sought generalists for one project and an engineer specializing in developing TV devices.

Hiring for the generalist position took a lot of work to find someone with general knowledge about the platform we were developing and not only specific knowledge about building applications.

Hiring a TV specialist was more accessible since the team could utilize an existing network of developers in the media streaming space. This was one of the lucky occurrences where a team member from a prior relationship was available for our use case at the appropriate time.