Small Diffs - by Greg Foster

I began my career as a new-grad software engineer at Airbnb, where I got a crash course in all things tech: building new services from scratch, refactoring old systems nobody wanted to touch, getting paged at 2 a.m. to fix production outages, collaborating with PMs and designers, and yes, inevitably breaking the site more times than I’d care to admit. I loved it. As an IC, you learn to focus on shipping code. Whether you’re writing design docs or squashing bugs, there’s always the tangible thrill of solving a problem by turning it into a neat little pull request.

Eventually, though, I realized my passion wasn’t just about making good software—it was about building the team that makes software. I found my way toward co-founding a company, Graphite, where our mission is to create developer tooling that helps other teams ship better code. That means we’re essentially an engineering team that builds software to help other engineering teams build their software. My parents may never understand what that means, but I find it incredibly rewarding.

As Graphite grew, I noticed that the scope of my responsibilities had shifted. I was no longer just heads-down coding. Instead, I found myself reading up on management best practices, talking to seasoned engineering managers, and even hiring a leadership coach, all to help me become an effective leader for our growing team. Over the past few years, I’ve hired, let people go, coded in the trenches, run weekly standups, delivered tough-love feedback, dealt with product and roadmap debates, and everything else you can imagine. Now, I’m lucky enough to be mentoring two of our own engineers in their journey to become managers themselves, which has forced me to articulate the often fuzzy question: “What is the job of an engineering manager, really?”

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