A Day in the Life: Vera Mehta (Senior Engineering Manager, Twitter)
Vera shares her journey from studying Architecture and Computer Science to an engineering leadership role at Twitter and the challenges of working at a globally distributed organisation with a complex tech ecosystem.
What has your journey in tech been so far?
I started programming long before formally studying it, and I particularly enjoyed making things for the web. I went on to study Architecture (of buildings, not software!) and Computer Science. My career began in a few start-ups, then moved into larger UK-based organisations and government departments. This was mainly as a software engineer before I moved into leadership roles.
I’d say my biggest impact was being one of the founding members of Digital in the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and helping MOJ to deliver its first digital strategy. As well as delivering some of the earliest services to citizens, I built a highly successful team of 60+ engineers within the challenging environment of a central government department. I helped to establish the Ministry of Justice as one of the centres of excellence for digital delivery in the public sector, before heading to Marks & Spencers and finally Twitter.
At Twitter, I work on a product called TweetDeck. It is a free social monitoring tool that helps professionals to harness their competitive edge on Twitter, by making it easier to track the real-time conversations you care about. Find out more about TweetDeck and its features here.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced moving into your current role?
Twitter is a globally distributed organisation, with a complex ecosystem of technology at its heart. A big challenge for me has been adjusting to this and finding the right balance between the freedom and autonomy of my team vs. the need to seamlessly integrate with the culture, processes and technical systems in the wider organisation.
For example, I’ve always been interested in how user-centred design can be used to make services better for users. After moving to Twitter, I’ve faced new challenges because the needs of our customers are so diverse. This often leads to many competing product development paths, and more barriers to understanding and empathising with customers.
Briefly describe your tech stack
The codebase is really exciting. The product has been around for nearly ten years. Tweets in columns sound simple, right? But there is a whole world of complexity to providing tweets and interactions in near-real-time. As a team, we constantly stumble into new areas and have opportunities to discover other parts of the Twitter codebase: there is a lot of tech debt we are tackling, but there is always something new to master.
We are using Javascript and React on the front-end. We have a microservices architecture, with a modern and clean backend codebase since our move from Python to Scala.
What does your typical day look like?
I receive a tonne of emails like most people. I spend the first part of my morning reading and replying to things, figuring out what decisions need to be made, creating/adding thoughts to documents people have shared. I scatter 1:1s with the team and tactical meetings with other teams / EMs throughout the week. We have a strong agile process that cycles every two weeks.
I join in with planning meetings, retros, team meetings, cross-team meetings with remote offices; setting up strategic tech sessions, road mapping and coaching the team — it really depends on what’s happening. It’s never a dull day!
I’d say that the real essence of my job is solving interesting problems numerous times per week. This centers around thinking about people, strategy, budgets, skills; I have to come up with answers and make decisions.
There’s a lot of regular travel too which helps establish stronger partnerships with teams from other distributed offices like New York, Boston and San Francisco.
What’s the best and worst part of your job?
The thing I enjoy the most is giving opportunities for my team to develop, and seeing the impact this has on what we’re trying to achieve with the product. I love finding out people’s unique strengths and interests and using these to help them build skills, knowledge and confidence. A key part of this for me is being a strong supporter of women in technology, and I’ve been helping to run @womeng+ (Women in Technology) at Twitter for nearly 2 years.
Managing lots of people can be incredibly satisfying but can also be exhausting — you need to look after your own mental health. When you invest and believe in people, you invest a lot of yourself at the same time — so you share with your team both the highs and the lows. But! Good outcomes always outweigh the sometimes difficult journey!
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
“Don’t do things simply for recognition. It will never be enough and your expectations will rarely be met. Do things because they are the right thing to do, because you care.”
What is your most useful resource?
I’m dyslexic and I find it challenging to read large blocks of text. Twitter to me is easier to read, a bit like comics — bitesize chunks and visuals. Blinkist is also my go-to, Harvard Business Review which I take the time to read, and audiobooks wherever possible.
I enjoy meandering around a topic from multiple sources — I’m a sceptic when it comes to journalism and commentary, so I often explore until I feel I’ve understood something from a few different perspectives.
The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
What one thing would you like to learn, develop or work on for 2019?
I’m keen to get more insight into what aspects of a job really make me happy and shaping this into what I currently do. Understanding what you can do next sets a direction, allows you to plan, and set out on a journey of fun and exploration!
