I moved to San Jose last month. After nearly six years in Philadelphia, I am now Vice President of Engineering at Knight Ridder Digital, based at the corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose. I am 26 years old, and I am told I am the youngest VP at KR Digital.
The scale of this role is different from anything I have done before. In Philadelphia I led a team that built and ran the web technology for two newspapers, the Inquirer and the Daily News. Now I manage about 35 engineers and managers across two cities, San Jose and Philadelphia, with a budget in the millions, serving the web operations of 31 Knight Ridder newspapers.
That is a sentence I can write, but the reality of it is still sinking in.
The move itself was straightforward. I packed what I needed, shipped the rest, and drove across the country. California is different from the East Coast in ways I am still noticing. The weather is obvious. The tech culture is less obvious but more significant. In Philadelphia, I was one of the few people in my social circle who worked on internet technology. In San Jose, everyone does.
What concerns me more than geography is the organizational challenge. Managing a team spread across two time zones, three hours apart, is not the same as walking down the hall to talk to someone. In Philadelphia I knew every person on my team. I knew their strengths, their working styles, what motivated them. In San Jose I am learning a new group while maintaining relationships with the Philadelphia team that I built over years. Both groups need to feel that they have a leader who understands their work and has their back.
I spend a lot of time on the phone now. Conference calls with Philadelphia in the morning, when it is still before noon there. Meetings with the San Jose team in the afternoon. The engineering work still matters to me, but the job has shifted. I am less the person writing code and more the person making sure the right people are working on the right problems with the right resources.
The technology itself is at an interesting point. We are running Cofax across 20 newspapers with more coming online. We are building new tools for advertising, for audience measurement, for content syndication. The web is growing fast, and newspapers need to keep up. My job is to make sure our engineering team can deliver what 31 newsrooms need, on time and at quality.
I think about whether I am ready for this. The honest answer is that I do not know yet. I have always learned by doing. I learned to build web systems by building them. I learned to manage a team by managing one. Now I will learn to run a department by running one. The stakes are higher, the mistakes are more expensive, and the problems are more complex. But the approach is the same: understand the problem, build the team, ship the work.
I owe this opportunity to people who believed in me. Fred Mann hired me as a college kid in 1995 and gave me room to grow for five years. He championed my work to leadership and recommended me for this role. I would not be here without him. Dan Finnigan, CEO of Knight Ridder Digital, believed in me enough to offer a VP position to a 26 year old. That takes confidence in someone, and I do not take it lightly.
Philadelphia will always matter to me. I arrived there as a college freshman, and I left as a director who had built systems used by millions of readers. The Cofax team, Karl Martino, Sam Cohen, Toan Dang, Derek Dinh, Don Henry, Charles Harvey, Hung Dao, and the entire Philly.com team became more than colleagues. They became dear friends. I carry what they taught me to San Jose, and I am grateful that many of them continue to work with me across the distance.