Why didn’t anyone tell me before?

The first time I understood I was underperforming was when I was let go.

I will start with the bottom line to save some of you some reading. Classic TL;DR.

Don’t focus on the structure — focus on the process

Imagine that you ask me to review a new piece of code and my feedback is something like: “it’s not good enough, because in a year from now we might have more use cases that it doesn’t cover”. I assume you would have, at least, looked at me…

Stop nagging about the JIRA board

Engineering managers often find themselves chasing their team members and nagging them about the JIRA board: reminding them to move the ticket and update its status, to never work on a task without one, to log time, to write descriptions and so on. As managers, we use…

Bring me juniors

I think that it’s easy to understand why organisations hire juniors, as there are quite a few obvious reasons to do to that. Naming a few: juniors are cheaper (or more affordable), companies want to get a hold of the best ones before they become experienced and more desirable, often they’re hired…

From a group of developers to an engineering organisation

There’s a time in a the life of a startup to grow the tech and to onboard more developers. It is true that most startups do not reach those exciting times. Nevertheless many startups do get there, and it’s happening every day and…

Senior Engineer — more than a role description

Senior Engineer is a role, job description and a title. From a developer’s point of view it’s a career milestone and a status. From an employer one, senior engineer is a set of expectations and requirements from the developer.

Don’t fear product

A strong product organization is a must for good R&D

I got to see, quite a few times already in my career, tech companies, in which the R&D is afraid of product. They prefer to have a weak, toothless, temper product organization, which will keep things simple and easy…