Director of Cloud at Namecheap | 🤓 Author of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter about Engineering Management, Leadership, Career Growth and Productivity

I've spent 25+ years diving deep into technology, building businesses, and leading high-performing teams of Engineers. I try to condense all this experience in my newsletter and share it with my 30,000+ subscribers.

My main goal is to help other Engineers and Leaders grow and avoid mistakes I made in my career, through sharing:

🔧 Practical advice on how to grow from Engineer to Engineering Manager or Leader
📚 Personal stories about how I grew from Individual Contributor to Director
🎨 Easily understandable articles enriched with visuals to simplify complex concepts

If all of this makes sense to you, join 20k+ subscribers at: https://hybridhacker.email

Nicola Ballotta

CTO | Author of Engineering Leadership newsletter (65k+ subscribers) - Helping you become a great engineering leader!

I am an engineering leader with a passion for solving complicated problems with innovative concepts. I love learning about new technologies, sharing my knowledge and teaching others. 

I have a proven record of successfully managing Agile teams, setting the correct direction and culture as well as creating right processes and continuously improving them. I have overseen hiring and building up the teams as well as have strong emphasis on coaching and mentoring to direct reports.

You can reach me at info@gregorojstersek.com.

Gregor Ojstersek

In today’s AI era, being a great engineer is no longer defined by your individual contribution alone.

Being a great engineer is defined by the ability to make others around you better, to deliver projects successfully, and to create impact that moves the whole organization forward.

There are many ways to multiply your efforts:
- making your whole team better,
- to work well across different teams,
- be a multiplier through systems,
- multiply and scale through people.

These are all archetypes of multipliers, where each provides immense impact in its own specific way.

Learn more in this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/eDyTMzes

CTO | Founder of Engineering Leadership newsletter (180k+ subscribers) - Helping you become a great engineering leader!

This is what happens when you do 10k lines of code per day with AI :)

Happy Friday and have a good weekend!

The speed of writing code has never been an issue.

You can write 10,000 or 20,000 lines of code, but if you are building the wrong thing for the user, it means nothing.

Once you know you’re building the right things, then you can bring in AI tools to speed up the delivery.

This is far more important than just typing faster or producing more code.

While most teams are bragging about how fast they ship code, your focus should be somewhere else:

Focus on building the right things, first.

Then, use technology to accelerate the rate at which you produce new value.

That's how you win in tech in 2026.

What makes a great engineer in the AI-era?

As tools for development got better, the desired skills for engineers have moved from just pure knowing programming languages and frameworks (expected) to problem-solving abilities and people skills.

It's less about the tasks, but how big an impact you can create.

And engineers who can create the biggest impact have the multiplier mindset.

It's the mindset where you focus less on just your pure individual tasks, but you focus on how you can make things better for your whole team, organization, and, of course, the customers (users).

Learn more in this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/ezWydu8T

Pragmatism is one of the most important concepts in Software Engineering.

There are endless variables and trade-offs we need to consider when building Software. And a lot of them are people-focused.

And pragmatism is just going to be more and more important as time goes on. 

The reason?

AI can just predict the next best token, but what is missing is the touch of real-world experience and the feel for what may be the best decision in a certain moment, based on many different signals.

To learn how to become pragmatic as an engineer, read this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/eGh5s5Tm

“My work speaks for itself”

Assuming that everyone knows that you are doing good work is in most cases, going to be a wrong assumption.

There are 2 things I like to say.

1. You can do the best work in the world, but if the expectations are not managed correctly, it will not be perceived that way.

2. Doing great work is only half of the work, making sure that everyone knows about it is the other half. You need to do both.

Learn how to build a successful engineer <> manager relationship in the latest Engineering Leadership article that we did together with Shehab Abdel-Salam here: https://lnkd.in/dhJ4qAyD

So simple, yet overlooked.

What you can do is limited. But a team’s impact scales.

Real impact comes from being a multiplier.

Learn more in this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/ezWydu8T

As an engineer, I didn't properly use 1:1 meetings with my manager.

I didn't use my 1:1 meetings for my career growth, instead, I used them to give a status update.

I was missing out on so many different learning opportunities, which I could use the 1:1 meeting for:
- I could talk about career goals,
- work through plans for the promotion or
- ask for specific coaching and feedback situations.

Lesson learned: 
It’s a lot better to use 1:1 meetings to help you be successful in your role and with your overall career growth.

P.S. To learn more -> join engineers and leads from Meta, Google, IBM, Revolut in my cohort-based course here: https://lnkd.in/exsYfM54 (24 hours left to sign up!).

Meetings don’t create alignment. Decisions do.

If no one leaves the room knowing:
- what was decided
- who owns it
- what happens next

It wasn’t a meeting, it was a calendar placeholder.

Make sure to respect people’s time.

End meetings with decisions, or don’t have them at all.

Learn how to create meetings that engineers will love in this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/ekZcdgGu

Pramoda Vyasarao went from being laid off at Meta to doing an MBA in Solopreneurship.

Meta laid off 11,000 people in January 2023, and his position as Head of Data Engineering was one of them.

He took a 2-month break to reflect on next steps, and that's when he got an idea and asked himself: What if I take a two-year break and do something on my own?

This is what he did:

1. His first product: one-on-one coaching
This was the easiest place to begin for him. He had done this at Oracle and Meta as an organizational leader. He didn’t need preparation or certification.

2. Cohort courses
Within two months, he realized one-on-one coaching doesn’t scale. That’s when he thought of online cohort courses. He started with one course and then added 3 more.

3. Digital courses
To scale further, he converted all four courses into digital products. To save time, he hired contractors to record his live sessions and professionally edit them.

4. Published a book
He published a book called Beyond Your Limits with the endorsement of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.

5. Started to write a newsletter
He started posting on LinkedIn in March 2023. Later, in a consulting session with Justin Welsh, he convinced him to start a weekly newsletter.

After 2 years, he returned to tech, but not the same person.

Returning to corporate life felt different for him. He no longer defines himself by a title. He carries the mindset of an entrepreneur, comfortable with ambiguity, focused on impact, and willing to take calculated risks.

To learn about his full story, read the latest Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/ds6TWcvD

Coinbase scaled their hiring to 150 engineers per month over the pandemic.

How did they do it?

1. They standardized the searches

Previously, for every new hire, it would be required to draft a “job spec”. With standardization, you could only hire a frontend engineer, a backend engineer, a crypto engineer, an infra engineer, or an ML engineer (and a few others).

2. They moved from hiring in SF only to nationwide

And later to 10+ countries. This resulted in a massive increase in talent pool size.

3. Interviewing became centralized

Candidates weren't screened by their future hiring manager or peers anymore, but rather by any Coinbase engineer. This massively opened up the interviewer capacity.

4. From hiring manager round-ups to centralized hiring panels

Each day with a rotation, one Coinbase leader would host a hiring panel (with 5-6 senior managers), where all the interview packets feedbacks were reviewed and decided which ones would move to offer and which ones would be rejected.

This gave them the ability to process 40-50 candidates at the pre-offer stage a day.

5. The offers became standardized and non-negotiable

No back and forth with the candidate. Both base salary and equity were directly related to the level you would be hired in, no exceptions allowed.

To learn more, make sure to not miss tomorrow's Engineering Leadership newsletter.

Luca Bonmassar, Former VP of Engineering at Coinbase, is sharing a lot of interesting insights on how they scaled hiring.

To not miss tomorrow's article, make sure to join 180k+ engineering leaders here: https://lnkd.in/eNSKBMUf

Trust is earned and not given. 

You build trust by consistently doing the right things.

And that’s especially important to focus on when you get hired by a new company or you come to a new team. 

DON’T believe that a title can give you trust by default.

The first thing you need to do is to earn trust from others. And it takes time to do that.

But the funny thing? 

It takes a long time to build trust and it takes a couple of seconds to lose it. 

To learn how to build trust, read this Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/exFUZ4Uz

Structure stories with CARL instead of STAR for a behavioral interview.

This is what Austen McDonald recommends, and here is his reasoning.

CARL stands for:
Context: The background of what was happening and why it mattered
Actions: The specific steps you took (plural, not singular)
Results: What changed and the impact you made
Learnings: What you learned or would do differently

The key difference is that CARL combines Situation and Task into Context, eliminating the mental energy wasted trying to separate them.

And it adds Learnings, which gives you a platform to demonstrate the depth of wisdom that separates senior engineers from less experienced ones.

Learn all about how to nail behavioral interviews in the latest Engineering Leadership article: https://lnkd.in/eN5qJy7g

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