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Please describe your role and your work relationship to the promotion nominee (e.g., teammate, collaborated on project X, stakeholder, customer)
I was CEO and CPO of npm, Inc. where Michael Garvin (Gar) was hired first as a registry/ops engineer. After the acquisition of npm, Inc. by GitHub, Gar joined the CLI team, where I was working as a GitHub Principal Engineer.
We worked closely together through most of my time at GitHub, from 2020 through 2021.
Has the candidate demonstrated readiness for promotion? Please reference the below criterias to comment on impact, results and behaviors?
Yes, Gar has repeatedly demonstrated Staff Engineer behaviors, results, and impact.
I have seen him act consistently as a thoughtful and extremely competent technical leader and mentor on the CLI project, leading to significant technical improvements.
He is an extremely competent leader on the projects where he contributes. He takes care to manage all of the technical and nontechnical impacts of technical and project management decisions, with vision and courage to make reasonable tradeoffs when appropriate.
As Gar once said, he specializes in "making working code good". He came into the npm CLI project inheriting over a decade of legacy, and had clear technical vision to take it to a place that was more maintainable and reliable, in a way that minimized any adverse user impact.
He is exceedingly confident in his technical views, but also consistently displays patience to explore alternatives, listen, and explain his point of view, so that the team can align on a single course of action, even if it was not his initial viewpoint. It is a balancing act to have a forceful point of view, but also be flexible enough to hear alternative viewpoints and not generally be a jerk about it when others don't agree. Very few developers can accomplish this, and Gar does so consistently.
This is a rare and valuable skill, and the obvious wise self-serving move for GitHub would be to recognize this skill and provide appropriate compensation.
When considering the rubric of "cross-team influence", if that is an objection, consider how many teams use npm, and how much benefit is provided across the entire company (and indeed, the entire world) by the improvements to this tool that Gar has helped bring to reality.
What is one thing the candidate should focus on going forward to make themselves, the team, the org, or GitHub more successful?
This is difficult to answer, as I have not been working directly with Gar since I left GitHub at the end of 2021.
Please share any additional feedback we should take into consideration for the promotion.
I of course realize that you are new to managing this team, but as the team's manager, you inherit its history, so please take this in the spirit of trying to help you in making the best decisions moving forward, and not as a personal criticism.
I remain unclear as to why Gar was not promoted to Staff Engineer already, or even brought in at that level during the npm, Inc. acquisition, as was recommended by the npm executive team in 2020. This is a mistake that should be corrected as soon and as generously as possible. He has been doing Staff Engineer level work since starting at GitHub, and the fact that he has been so patient about receiving this promotion is quite frankly a courtesy that GitHub has not earned and ought to remedy.
Do you support this nominee's promotion? Yes or no.
Yes, this is long overdue.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to schedule a time to chat.