Some time ago, I was asked in an interview for an engineering manager position a very simple question:

How would you measure your team member's individual performance?

I know how the industry does it, and I know how my performance was measured, but I didn't like it, so I said something along the following lines:

We should focus on the outcome rather than any other aspect of performance because it simply can't be measured accurately.

However, the value is very simple to measure, and a good manager has an understanding of each of his team members without relying on any arbitrary number.

Of course, I was not taken seriously and was not even given a chance for the job.

The truth is, if you want to measure performance, no matter what, expect the following:

1. Burnouts in your team

2. Wrong expectations that growth is always linear

3. Teammates sabotaging each other

4. An unfair and absolutely biased way of promoting people

Measuring performance has completely the opposite effect of what its initial idea was.

Solution? Managers should play by ear! They should see themselves as the leaders they are supposed to be. Drop measuring individual performance. Instead, measure team outcomes and their contribution to the overall business goal.

Spark is dying off. I'm being rundown by bad experiences in startup scene since past 6 years.

I'm seriously questioning my decision to switch from mechanical engineering to "software engineering"

Of course, one can never know. "What if" is terrible place to be.

However, as a father I would seriously reconsider pushing my son in a direction of a software development.

For the following reasons:

You can exercise all you want, there's no escaping from a life long back pain if you sit 8-10h a day.

Depending on the industry, people are one of the most disingenuous ones you can find.

Mental health issues goes way beyond the usual suspects of an imposter syndrome, it's no joke. Cold sweats and countless sleepless nights thinking if you will be fired or left for the next round. If your coworker will "set you up" for a failure etc...

Interview processes are a joke. For real, as an industry we should be ashamed of how we treat each other.And no, it's not companies who does this, it's us, software engineers to each other.

General mentally of "not giving a zero f***" about the actual product you are building, caching in you monthly paycheck and calling it a day.

Zero focus on simple concepts such as MAKING MONEY. Instead, focus on promises of making money.

About 8 years ago, I was a YouTuber ( not the most successful one ), I needed a website, Internet thought me how to make one. I got hooked. All things UI got me excited, from a simple animation on a button to a large scale apps with various of moving parts.

But it's getting harder to keep up lately. And I can only assume I'm not the only one.

To land on a more positive note, things usually become a lot worse before they starts to get better. It seems to me the bottom is

close.

Only way is up.

Why do I care?

It's not even my business. It's not going to make me any more happier and richer if I do things right.

So why do I care about your products? About your company? About your money? About your users?

I don't have a great answer to that, but how about this one?

It's literally in my job description as a software developer to make great products for the users. It's in my job description that I do that with the best interest of the company that hires me.

It's also because I just so happened to spend 5 years studying the very same engineering principles which I'm trying to employ in order to make great products.

And maybe just maybe because I have been doing this for a while now. And experience does mean I have seen how leaders fails, and how great products crumbles and how companies burns.

It's because of you lazy and uninterested leaders who take your position for granted and make it irrelevant.

You lead, I will follow.

It's simple as that. Otherwise, let us lead and you follow.

Just step away.

I always had to do above average effort for barely average results.

I hated this.

My wife turn it around. She said: "The more you struggle the more your success feels good."

We both passed driving test, she did it with zero problems just casually learning over the app. Me? Well I was studying like never in my life.

Difference is that when I passed it felt like I win a lottery.

It's good to be average. I believe it runs the world.

I learned more from a good junior than a great senior. Because seniors tends to be highly opinionated and not willing to open their minds. Juniors especially good ones, will not challenge you BUT due to their eagerness to learn will ask questions which will make you think twice about how correct your approach is.

This is why great teams should have a healthy balance of seniors vs juniors.

I am increasingly frustrated with React developers (I am one of them) always trying to be smart, super smart, or even too smart. Being too smart often means being delusional, thinking that every decision during development needs to be super clever, abstracted, and, without exception, innovative.

Which tech stack does not suffer from over engineering and is a LOT more opinionated while at the same time has decent DX?

Letter to God.

I see suffering of so many people. I see them doing each other evil. I'm scared. There's seems to be no voice of reason. There seems to be no love.

When my son was born I cried together with him. It was the most beautiful moment of my life. Never have I been as close to you God as that day.

Can you do for others what you did for me that day?

Can you show them how love can be absolutely unconditional? Or is it on me to share this message?

If so, I will do it.

People, I know God loves us, we need to recognize God in us and see God in each other. And love the God in and out of ourselves.

God. Help us see you. And forgive us, forgive me, as the absence of love in my surrounding is getting better of me.

Peace has a price. Massive one. Peace is payed in Love, for each other and for God.

I believe in Love.

So... Being married and having kids are two things one can expect to gain so much from.

Ofc, love and meaning and purpose but also it can make you work harder and more smarted.

It also, will make you sleep less.

I love you my little boy ❤️

Speaking from the heart ( hope it won't backfire )... ❤️

• I happen to be able to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
• Serve many clients and companies during what is now my 8th year working as web developer.

• I am far from your best ever (Google, Meta, Deep Mind etc) friendly developer.

  But I do believe that I left no company, team, or client dissatisfied with my work and results.
  I acknowledge the fact that I must and can be better tho.

  Here comes the meaty part, you ready? 🥩

  I am suspected to have dyscalculia, something that has been a challenge for me since forever.

  Things I find difficult on a day to day basis:

• Analog clock, I have to multiply 9 * 5, recognise that clock hand MUST be before the number and only then I can tell the time, takes around 30s.
• I know only half of multiplication table, rest I calculate from the known one by doing subtraction.
• I have insane amount of anxiety (shame) when I have to do math in public setting.
• Oh many other issues as well with both my native language and second one where I mix similar words. (Then vs Than just one example)
• I don't know the date of birth of my family members (my mom yes, as she was born on 8th of March) 🌹
• I missed important doctor appointments many times as I confused the dates.

• etc

  You might assume (rightfully so) that I will not be a decent developer, however, I might not be the most talented out there, but I am focused and I work work work....

  I use calendar for everything, task manager for absolutely everything (I would literally put task "think about how you can solve <insert problem>"). I never missed a single meeting as again thank God we have calendars.

  I recognise that I have to do more to be the average at best, but I do very often perform above expectations. There is no feedback from my line managers that was ever concern about my professionalism, my skills and my results in a negative way. As a matter of fact, most of the time I am being told to take a step back, not to push that hard, not to over achieve as I tend to experience burnouts.

  Why am I talking about this now?

  Because I am angry, sad, frustrated and hurt by in which direction our industry is going, it has been in a downfall for some time already, which is weird because with all the super cool stuff we are building with the AI you would assume the opposite.

  I am seeing a massive trend of companies who are as a first interview doing IQ tests. To make it even worse, test is not your typical IQ test, it is based in quick math, testing your so called "numerical thinking" that one people like me have a huge problem with.

  So yes I failed one, more then one...

  I won't fail any moving forward, as, well, I won't be taking any. 🙅‍♂️

  Questions I have for our industry?

• What happen with inclusivity efforts?

• What happen with diversity (neurodiversity in this case) efforts?

  Were they ever genuine?

Reasons why I experienced burnout many times is for example being denied growth opportunities even though I fullfil all the expectations set by my manager.

Being assigned on tasks which are extremely simple and not challenging.

Having to deal with things which has nothing to do with product / software development, example long discussions about how to change git branch name.

Incompetent leadership, and incompetent employees who are blindly following, creating terrible software development practices harming the business but somehow making stakeholders happy, until, well layoffs...

By far the biggest reason I burned out is because , I care about my work, I care about the customers, I care about the people and I absolutely put business success at the top of my priorities but somehow non of those qualities are being valued, appreciated and never reworded.

I had terrible micro management, a tone of responsibilities at certain companies and a lot of work. Never have I ever experienced burnout due to "too much work".

Sleepless nights, cold sweats, back pain and more serious symptoms which I'm not comfortable sharing ALL stopped when I reduced how much I care.

I feel like they won.

Just like any other micro services MFE are not a tool to solve engineering problems but rather they are engineering solutions to organizational problems of scaling.

This is crucial to understand for anyone attempting to implement their web using micro services ( again, of any kind)

I have been a part of organizations which required MFE but would fail to see the benefits, worse than such I was also part of organizations which employs MFE for the sake of scaling its product offerings, which again is totally not what MFE are aiming to solve.

MFE brings a lot of challenges, I mean a LOT. They absolutely must be justified by organizational challenges of scaling in order for organization and users to actually benefit from it.

We should never forget MFE aim to streamline product development faster (in case where they are needed) if you as an engineer or product owner feel like you are being slowed down by the challenges MFE brings, it's a sign your organization made a mistake and you really didn't needed MFE to begin with.

Be brave and abandon the ship.

Right tool for the right job. I hope you don't mind me, I feel responsibility to share view after so many sometimes irreversible problems wrongly adopted MFE can bring.

I have been disappointed in tech industry for a while now. I have decent amount of experience by now, and I'm tired of people who don't care about their work.

There's a time and place for rest, less aggressiveness, less potent work if I can say so, as everything goes up and down.

Sometimes, admittedly best course of action is to do something none optimal.

But always that "sometimes" must be checked in, heavily documented (paper, or tribal knowledge). That "sometimes" becoming "often" is hurting us all. Especially employees.

We want companies to succeed. And duck typing your solution, low efforts to no efforts at all is proven to bring no results!

I'm all for being pragmatic when it comes to changing one perspective of way of working. However, there must be a line drawn which must not be crossed.

1. Never compromised users safety
2. Never compromised user security
3. Never treat users as just a number
4. Never harm your employees
5. Always, absolutely always aim for value rather than some trivial measured outcome, which is there to aid you and should never be a goal on its own

Having those values in mind, how many duck typing you should really allow yourself?

Very little actually.

1. Service is down, for whatever reason you can't rollback, but dirty fix is enough to bring the service up. Do it!
2. You are building POC, Do it!
3. You have bosses who are terrible at their job and demands results yesterday. Do it! (And leave the job first thing)
4. You simply do not know of any other way, as system is build so badly that extending is hard without wracking the system. Do it! ( And identify this code as tech dept)

Now, I understand some companies are just pretending to be engineering based when in reality they use us as a signaling for investors.

However, even for such companies, time will come and they should realize sooner than later that engineering is about solving problems and companies are just about the same.

You are only fool once!

Once I asked in front of a many software developers what is "AWS"? ... because, well, I did not know!

Everybody was silent and in a state of shock. But one person. That person was laughing at me for not knowing. And said: How can you not know that? and continue with a almost hysteric laugh.

It was at the begging of my career. God knows how stupid that made me feel. But hey, now I know what "AWS" is.

"#amazinglywildscripting right right?"

There are days you just want to quit. Whatever is that you are trying to achieve doesn't seem to be working out for you.

It sucks.

I'm having those days at the moment. And they keep coming in more frequently as I further push through the challenges.

I have to remind myself that quiting is like a painkillers. It provides immediate relief. But it doesn't bring lasting peace.

To address the underlying problem you must WIN!

Or at least play a different game. One where rules are know and the play is fair.

Never give up!

You do not want your coo-worker to lose a fight with you! You do not want people you menage to lose a fight with you! You do not want your team to win the other one!

Please trust me, you do not want to WIN over anyone. Share the values build that product and respect diversity in all of its aspect (especially personality as it is the highest form in which all other are reflected).

We should be wining our customers, user and market!

Fights are not among ourself!

Understand this dear leaders and senior manager and everyone else

Nobody works at their best (or even good enough) when they are beaten down!

Seems like this section of my website turns into somehow of a public diary. I know what I am about to write has zero relevance for my future clients and employers but I must say:

I love my wife so much, she make going through difficult times fun, her faith is unbreakable and her breakfasts are the best ❤️

I am blessed to have you in my life. 🥰

I want to grow organically rather than opportunistically!

So many of us are bad at leadership and mentorship because we are taking chances rather than letting the chance take us.

Not to say that you can't be good or even great if you force your growth and take some people out in the process, however it's not healthy for your company's culture and will eventually lead to toxic environment.