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.

Tech Lead is one of the most desirable roles in tech.

The reason?

A good mix of technical and people-related skills, which includes:
- common sense and pragmatism,
- good communication and leadership,
- being a multiplier for others and making everyone around them better.

These skills do well in the AI era and are just going to be more and more important.

To learn how to become a Tech Lead -> join engineers and leads from Meta, Google, IBM, Revolut in my cohort-based course here: https://lnkd.in/exsYfM54 (we start on January 20).

Gregor Ojstersek

CTO | Founder of Engineering Leadership newsletter (179k+ 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!

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

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.

This year, I had 42 collaboration articles on my Engineering Leadership newsletter.

Collaborations with experienced professionals in the engineering industry, experts each in their respective field, who are a part of various kinds of companies, from Startups all the way to Big Tech.

All shared a LOT of great insights, and it was a real pleasure working with all of them!

Here is the full list of professionals that I had the pleasure to collaborate with:
- Arpit Bhayani
- Taha Hussain
- Aleš Čadež
- Junaid Effendi
- Patricia Juárez Muñoz
- Prasad Rao
- Owain Lewis
- Gábor Till
- Chaitali Narla
- John Crickett
- Jordan Cutler
- Sidwyn Koh
- Yue Zhao
- Gilad Naor
- Jeffery Morhous
- Anna J McDougall
- Laura Tacho
- Aleš Žehelj
- Alexander Kliotzkin
- Miqdad Jaffer
- Hamel Husain
- Djordje Mladenovic
- Matt Watson
- David Weiss
- Omar Halabieh
- Pramoda Vyasarao
- Kjartan Manvelyan
- Dr. Ashish Bamania
- Henry Poydar
- Steven Levey
- Andy Skipper
- Ali Merchant

You can find the full list of articles and also a lot of interesting insights from 2025 in my latest article.

Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eScGeqHc

CTO | Founder of Engineering Leadership newsletter (178k+ subscribers) - Helping you become a great engineering leader!

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!).

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

Switching off from work is a skill like any other. Make sure to practice it over the holidays.

Especially if you are an engineering leader, it's really important to switch off regularly. Always keep in mind that as an engineering leader, you are setting an example.

If you work:
- Long hours, weekends, over the holidays
- You always respond to Slack messages fast, even at unusual times
- You send emails overnight, etc.

You are setting an example and expectations for your whole team.

The whole team feels like they need to do the same, or else they might feel that they are not doing the work up to the expectations.

Which ultimately can lead people to burn out, while they are doing great work → all because of misaligned expectations.

Switching off won’t make you less committed. It makes you more sustainable, and it will make your team stronger, because it gives room to others to step up when you’re not there.

It will also allow you to enjoy the career you’re working so hard to build.

Learn more in the latest article: https://lnkd.in/eegZKbrs

Wish you a happy and successful New Year 2026!

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

Here are some of my personal favorite articles in the Engineering Leadership  newsletter in 2025.

I really like the articles where I ask engineers and engineering leaders to share their insights from their real-world experience.

Of course, this takes a lot of time for me to get all the insights and structure them consistently, but it’s totally worth it in my opinion!

These articles are:

How to Use AI to Increase Software Development Productivity - https://lnkd.in/ezNtRCFU

How to Use AI to Be a Great Engineering Leader - https://lnkd.in/e-DyPQF5

What’s Really Like to Be an AI/ML Engineer - https://lnkd.in/eizUgaRu

And I also really enjoyed going through the industry reports and sharing my thoughts on the data. It gives me good insights into what’s happening in the industry and what kind of trends we might expect in the future.

These articles are:

The State of Engineering Leadership in 2025 - https://lnkd.in/eAfJ3Zav

The State of Software Development in 2025 - https://lnkd.in/eHbxsi85

Decrease in Entry-Level Tech Jobs - https://lnkd.in/eiW9c8if

The Impact of AI on Engineering Teams - https://lnkd.in/eNYKEDFX

How Engineering Teams Set Goals and Measure Performance - https://lnkd.in/eAyzZshg

The Impact of AI on the Performance of Software and Systems - https://lnkd.in/ev8AXCZN

OpenAI’s Report: The State of Enterprise AI - https://lnkd.in/eJ7BBsa5

Read the full insights on the Engineering Leadership newsletter in 2025 here: https://lnkd.in/eScGeqHc

Here are some interesting statistics of the Engineering Leadership newsletter in 2025:

- 177k+ subscribers (up from 100k~ at the end of 2024)

- 1633 paid subscribers (up from 951 at the end of 2024)

- 5M+ views in 2025 (up from 3.5M~ views in 2024) → main sources: email, Substack app, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google)

- 795k views in the last 30 days (up from 521k in the last 30 days of 2024)

- 427 other newsletters on Substack recommending Engineering Leadership (up from 242 in 2024)

- 200 different countries (subscriber countries) are reading the newsletter (up from 193 in 2024)

- 104 articles in 2025 (2x per week → Wednesday’s article for paid subscribers and Sunday’s article for everyone)

Wish you a great New Year's Eve celebration today and a great start to the new year!

When people feel like they are growing, that’s when they feel the most motivated.

This is really important to understand as an engineering leader, because you are playing a big part in defining the overall culture inside your team and also in your organization.

And it all starts with the clarity of defining goals for your people.

- Do they want to become a Staff Engineer, an Architect, or a Manager? 
- Are they happy where they are at the moment and wish to grow by learning a new skill? 
- What does growth actually mean for them?

Those are all very important questions that, as leaders, we should definitely help our engineers find answers to!

How to do that, you may ask? 

To help us with this, in tomorrow's Engineering Leadership newsletter, Simone D'Amico will be sharing a LOT of tips on how to do that.

To not miss this article, make sure to join 178k+ engineering leaders here: https://lnkd.in/eNSKBMUf

taplio

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