Category: General topics
How to Protect Job During Layoffs – Tips for Engineers and Developers
Layoffs slowed down in 2024, but it is still a painful topic in the tech job market. Things are tough, it is essential to maximize your chances of protecting your job and avoiding being laid off. This article discusses how engineers and managers can protect their jobs during layoffs and how to proactively prepare yourself…
Pay Transparency – Benefits and Dangers
Pay transparency (or salary transparency) is a policy that makes information about salaries and benefits available to any employee or even to general public. It is a quite controversial approach, so in this article I sumarise existing practices and share personal experience regarding pay benefits and dangers it brings. Pay transparency in context of this…
Boy Scout Rule – Continuous Improvement and Engineering
One of the most important qualities that I look for into in people is if they care about our common interests. Care is about continuous improvement that resists degradation, or, how tech folks and boy scouts call it, boy scout rule. It can be a contractor that goes the extra mile when renovating my house.…
Tough Times in Tech – How to Deal and Survive
This article is not a historical analysis. This article discusses how to deal and survive during tough times in tech industry, how to motivate yourself and your team. Both managers and individual contributors can find it useful. Folks from the tech industry remember epidemic times a bit differently than others. There was shock, unrest, and…
Efficiency and Effectiveness Difference
There is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. This is a very common question that pops up from time to time during planning, executing, retrospective analysis, and everyday life. In short, efficiency is about doing things right to achieve the goal (emphasis on execution), and the effectiveness is about doing the right things to achieve…
How to Be a Good Manager
Managing is extremely difficult. Looking back, being an individual contributor has certain benefits. As a contributor, you are responsible only for your own actions, you are almost not involved in politics, and the work scope is focused and specific. Sometimes I do miss those days, but the complexity of management makes it enough fun and…
How to Track Employees
Micromanagement is less effective than aligning company and employee interests via proper goal setting. The fact that you, as a manager, are not able to set goals and understand your coworkers does not mean that they have to suffer. Nobody stops you from tracking your workers, but be ready that they will slack and leave…
Cold Morning Showers – My Chilling Journey in Cold Conditioning
Invest 2-4 weeks into adjusting to the coldest shower you could possibly have on a daily basis and get more healthy, energetic, and focused! Cold conditioning is free and takes only willpower and dedication. The origins of cold conditioning The concept of conditioning human body with cold to make it stronger is as old as…
Blog expectations
I want to share my expectations for this blog and tell what actually drives me in sharing and helping. This will give more information to you, my dear readers and clients, what you can expect from this blog in return. Intelligence types I want to confess – I am not smart at all. There are…