Tony Tam

Empowering Engineers – Deeply helping people achieve their greatest positive impact by leveraging technology.

What drives me at work and life

Community, Creativity, Autonomy

Core Values

Empowerment – I love to enable others to do their best work regardless of whether they report directly to me.
Open Communication – Breaking down the silo, be aware of Conway’s Law when an org chart cannot fix systemic issues.
Doing vs Taking – Roll up my hands, do a hack, POC and try to fix systemic problems and bring others along.

Personal

Tony Tam is a first-generation Chinese American who immigrated to San Francisco at 10. He grew up in the San Francisco public school system benefited from the ESL program, graduated from Lowell High School, and graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science.

My college-age daughter Cate @ceik0 (artist and writer), My spouse Katherine Toy, My million data points

Work

resume | linkedin.com/in/tonytamsf

Amplify the needs of the engineering community on areas of productivity and pain points.

Identify and fill the gaps as our engineering organization grows. Catch the falling balls.

Support my own team in their personal growth.

My team’s responsibilities

Bootcamp – twice a week, 3 days of product, organization and tools orientation for all new hires into products.

POC’s and tooling – that will help all engineers do their work better – this is very broad and often we have to work across orgs or often transfer ownership once the POC is done.

Internal tools product management – Bring product management discipline and rigor into internal tooling

Engineering community – technical talks, Slack, engineering handbook

Hackathons – my team runs the product wide hackathons and iterations to make hackathons more meaningful

Technical documentation and engineering training

Expectations of my teams:

Ownership – Own your work, ask for help and don’t be blocked, you have to remove roadblocks and I’m here to help.
Collaborate – Software engineering is a team sport, you can not solve difficult issues alone. Ask questions, collaborate to solve problems together.
Learning – It’s okay not to know everything, no one does. Have a growth mindset, especially in the Engineering Productivity team where we have to help onboard every new engineer.
Share Knowledge – After you learn something, or you already have a skill, teach someone else via tech talks, short demos, a new go/workshop

What gives me a lot of energy

Collaborating with a large number of engineers and building support bottoms up

Outside of Work

Founded impactfulengineer.org to help engineers learn from impactful engineers in the industry
I organize 110 people to play advance badminton at sfbadminton.org
I organize 100 people to play tennis at http://sf-tennis.org
On weekends, I write Java code and contribute to the podcast ecosystem via AntennaPod – Google Play | MRs

Blog Posts By Topic

See the latest blog posts at https://tonytam.org

The postings on this site are my own and do not represent the position or opinions of my employer.