Name: Chris Quirk
Title/Employer: Director of Engineering/Liquid Machines, Inc.
Age: 38
Education: BA in government, Dartmouth College
Tenure In IT industry: 14 years
First Tech Job: Quality Assurance for 1-2-3 at Lotus Development Corp.
Current Role: I am responsible for all outsourced product development (including vendor selection); project management across all engineering projects at Liquid Machines; managing escalations from technical support into engineering; and responsible for development process and methodology.
What's been your best job and why?
Director of solutions at Instinctive Technology. The job entailed running an engineering group that straddled the line between engineering and professional services. It was the best of both worlds, as we approached problems from an engineering discipline and tired to design and architect our solutions for reuse, robustness and scalability. Yet, at the same time, we had the freedom to operate without a ridge roadmap. We were small and nimble and went where the money was. We would swoop in and help close enterprise deals by adding missing functionality or overcoming sales objections. My constituents were: the VP of Engineering, the VP of Services, the COO, the VP of Sales and the Director of Product Management. It was during the boom in the early 2000s. It was a lot of fun.
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What do you think is the number one non-IT skill IT professionals need today?
The ability to listen. By that, I mean active listening. Understanding what a customer or end-user is really saying. Being able to bridge the gap from a stated problem to a solution and not getting lost in "capabilities," or worse yet, the technology.
What do you credit your career success to?
This might be strange, but I'd have to say my experience in sports. Most of the lessons I've learned that I apply on a daily basis, stem from the lessons I learned through team sports. Communication, working together, motivation, understanding the common goal, working really hard to achieve a goal. It pays to be a good sport. Sometimes you don't have the quality of players to compete directly with better competition, so you have to change the rules of the game. I learned all that from playing sports.
What are the top three skills a high-level IT manager needs today?
Understanding your company's goals well enough to make good decisions at the micro-level.
Communication and knowing what to communicate to whom. Making sure your staff has enough of the big picture to make decisions without having to be micromanaged.
Prioritizing your time as most high-level IT managers I know are swamped. I get over 300 emails a day. You have to prioritize your time, otherwise you never get to the important, non-urgent things and you never get out of fire fighting.
What's your favorite IT resource site and why?
I'll give you three:
www.wikipedia.org—I can start there and usually link to what I really need to find.
JoelOnSoftware.com—because I like Joel's perspective and wit.
Our own internal knowledge base—we use a product called eRoom, but what ever product you use internally should work. The best information for your current job is usually already within your company. It's just a matter of finding it and harvesting it. Investing in indexing that data or keeping it organized usually pays off.
What is the best career advice you've ever received?
Do what you love.
What's the top advice you'd give to a new IT staffer?
Do what you love, work with people you like and don't be afraid to take risks.
What would you advise someone looking to find the type of role you currently have?
Change your mind (just kidding). Find a position that best matches your skills and do the job well. Then look for opportunities to do work outside of the box that people see you in. If you are a quality engineer, do a comprehensive pass on the documentation or write a marketing strategy for a beta program. Get people to see you first as proficient in your current role. Then get people to look at you beyond your current role. That first part, finding something that matches your skills, is important. I've seen a lot of people fail because they spend a lot of time on things they just aren't very good at. If you are a manager, hire people that complement your weaknesses.
What is the one career decision you would change if you could?
Early in my career, I had to choose between taking a lead position on a testing team or an individual contributor position testing an API. The API testing position would have meant deeper coding skills. I choose the management position. I wish that I had gone deeper technically at that point in my career.
If you had the choice to jump into any other job, tech or non-tech, what would it be?
Real estate developer / contractor. I like the idea of building houses. There are a lot of similarities with software products. Managing inter-dependencies, solid architecture and design, coming in on budget. I think that's what I'd be doing.
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