Vidal: [00:00] Good afternoon. I have with me today Jeremy Henrickson, VP of Product and Engineering at Rippling. Welcome to ManagersClub, Jeremy. Jeremy: [00:07] Thank you so much. It’s good to be here. What’s your background and how did you get into management? Vidal: [00:10] It’s great to have you. Could you share with us a little bit about your background and how you got into management? Jeremy: [00:15] If we go back far enough, I grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and was a shy, introverted kid and therefore fell in love with computers pretty young partly because I think of my native inclination to that, partly because my dad got all these books on how computers work. And I was fooling around with my Apple II plus back in the day and really liked adventure games and taught myself how to code. And that was the genesis of my interest in computer science which, over the years, as I got into college and then had my first job out of school, made me realize that what I really enjoyed about that was people. And how people act around computers and with computers. And that kind of led to this sort of dual exploration of human-computer interaction as a part of that. And then, of course, as management itself. And so, when I was at a company called Reactivity, we were incubating companies and doing consultancy for people that were trying to figure out what this internet 1.0 thing was back then. The company started growing, and it made sense for me to start managing folks. And so I started figuring it out. Vidal: [01:22] All right. Great. Yeah. And I noticed you had also were a manager. Guidewire, Coinbase, and now Rippling. So, you have a lot of years of experience in leadership, right? Jeremy: [01:30] Yeah, I guess I do. I’ve been. I guess if I think back on it, I’ve been managing more or less for 25 years now. Yeah. What are the biggest challenges you face as an engineering leader? Vidal: [01:36] Oh, wow. That’s awesome. Could you share with us what are some of the biggest challenges you face as an engineering leader or have faced? Jeremy: [01:45] Yeah, there are many I think strangely I think perhaps the most consistent challenging thing is recruiting. I’ve been lucky enough to be at a set of companies that we’re all growing incredibly rapidly and whose future depended on us hiring really amazing talent. And that really amazing talent, of course, is in really high demand. And getting really good at that has been one of the biggest challenges, and it’s different at every company. A lot of lessons are the same, but, in specific, it’s really something you have to work out, or at least I’ve had to work at it every company I’ve been at to really get good at it at that specific company. The other challenge I would note is like finding the right people for the right job at the right time. And making sure that you can see around those corners of when an org is scaling beyond its capabilities or when people are accelerating quickly in their own careers and identifying them and making sure you give them the opportunities to accelerate and grow with the company. And so I think those two parts, the recruiting side and the kind of the growth management, have been two things that have. But I’ve always been always been challenging, fun, but challenging. What is your approach to hiring? Vidal: [02:50] All right. Let’s set, let’s talk a little more to hire then because this is a key thing for all engineering leaders.