Fixing the Broken Ladder Rung at "Staff Engineer" by Jocelyn Goldfein
Engineering Managers need different tools to coach new grads to independence, to coach accomplished software engineers into seniority, and to support senior engineers in breaking through to the staff level. Most engineers get stuck at the mid-career level, and most managers think that's inevitable. Spoiler alert: they're wrong. Jocelyn will discuss a framework for engineering career growth that gives tech leads tools to advocate for themselves, managers tools to accelerate their team members, and leaders tools to systemically improve the career growth engine across their organization.
Jocelyn Goldfein
Jocelyn Goldfein is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she invests seed capital in AI-native startups with B2B business models. Jocelyn is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware. During her tenure at Facebook, she helped convert News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a ‘mobile first' product organization. As an early engineer at VMware, she built core virtualization technology and ultimately created and led VMware’s Desktop Business Unit. Jocelyn also held engineering and leadership roles at startups Datify, MessageOne and Trilogy/pcOrder. Jocelyn has a passion for STEM Education. She currently lectures at Stanford University where she received her BS in Computer Science.
