01
2019
Building a distributed R&D center from zero
Stood up Clicktale's Kyiv engineering center with Ciklum, recruiting 14 developers and 3 team leads, and built the cross-site processes that let Israel and Ukraine ship as one team.
Tag
leadership
11 posts · 2 projects
Work
02
2012
From team lead to building a site abroad
Grew from leading a team of four on the core trading platform to founding TradeNetworks' Sofia engineering site in 2012, hiring and training it to our bar to deliver CRM and billing end to end.
Posts
7 min readLet the bot be the bad cop
The worst part of managing engineers is the nagging. So I built night-watch, a Go service that chases missing ticket IDs and tickets with no epic, by private Slack DM only. Nobody resents a robot for being consistent. Spend your authority budget on something better.
6 min readI stopped writing code in 2015. I just shipped a platform.
The ladder deal says you trade the keyboard for the org chart and never get the keys back. Agents rewrote that clause. Typing got cheap. Judgment didn't, and a decade of management sharpens exactly the half that got expensive. The receipts are one link away.
6 min readFix the org before you scale it
Every team I inherit asks for headcount first. It's almost never the fix. Ownership gaps, the wrong people, or too much noise: diagnose, fix, then hire. Plus the two years I spent killing matrix management.
7 min readI fixed the funnel everywhere. A 40% pay gap beat me at home.
Time-to-hire fell from 45 days to 30 everywhere the blocker was process. Israel, my home site, moved zero, because the blocker was a salary band. You can't interview your way through a 40% comp gap. The pipe-or-wall test I should have run in week one.
5 min readHow I Broke My Best Engineer
I gave my best engineer the promotion's workload without the promotion, then cheered from the sideline while the organization ate him. The project shipped. The engineer didn't. The lesson has a name: cover, not cheerleading.
6 min readYour 100-Day Plan Dies on Day 12
Write the 100-day plan anyway. The three classic new-EM faceplants, why month one is for mapping the local balagan instead of fixing it, and the quiet Flink timezone bug that erased events during a pre-Black-Friday code freeze.
2 min readDay One as the New EM (And the Three Ways You'll Embarrass Yourself)
Day one in a new company is a reset button. The logistics, the watching, and the classic rookie faceplants.
5 min readYou can teach Kubernetes. You can't teach someone to stop being a jerk.
Tech leads are made, mostly. The asterisk is the short list you cannot install in an adult: honesty, empathy, the credit reflex, decency under pressure. The two-pile sort, the promotion I refused at a real cost, and the legibility trap that hands brilliant jerks the title.
7 min readTrust Your Gut. Check the Expiry Date First.
"Trust your gut" is the best advice you can give a senior and the worst you can give a junior. A gut is compressed experience with a domain and an expiry date, and the confidence never tells you which one you're holding.
5 min readMy youngest tech lead asked why nobody warned him the role sucks
He was right to ask. The promotion confiscates the scoreboard an engineer can read and hands them one they can't. The Scoreboard Swap, and the unglamorous weeks of prep that keep a new tech lead from breaking.
6 min readYou will not out-discipline a noisy calendar
The day you become a lead, your calendar stops being yours. One dumb 2x2 grid, sorted as a team and out loud, got mine back. Includes the meeting that nearly cost me an engineer.