The company I co-founded is also in a rough patch, as a startup that got founded in the bull market of 2021, going over to 2022 and 2023 bear market has been a hard ride.

Hardship creates anxiety. It is hard to keep people motivated and focused. They need to be on top of their game to win. It is hard to imagine explosive growth amid a worldwide recession while democracy is crumbling around you.

For this I turn to inspirational stories, they inspire me and keep me on target.

What to say to death?

One of my favorite characters is Arya Stark. She is the toughest most inspiring badass around.

I believe that this short 2-minute clip is just right for this moment in time, and I'll explain why below:

Arya doesn’t want to practice, she is worried about her father. The brilliant dancing instructor drops some wisdom on her:

1. “Trouble is the perfect time for training”

   ”If you are with your troubles when fighting happens, more trouble for you”

   My interpretation:

   If you come to do a difficult job and you are already anxious, it will bring more anxiety to you.

2. “How can you be quick as a snake or as quiet as a shadow when you are somewhere else?”

   My interpretation:

   It is hard to perform when you are not present.
   Being successful in a demanding role is hard enough when things are going well outside work. It is harder when anxiety is high.

   Next, the master explains how to handle trouble.

3. “You are fearing for your father”

   My interpretation:

   First, acknowledge the emotion, it is present.

   People are stressed and it isn’t always easy to notice it.

   Acknowledging and naming emotions is valuable, it normalizes them and permits them to exist.

4. Syrio Florel: “Do you pray to the gods?”

   Arya Stark: “The old and the new.”
   My interpretation:

   When things are out of your control, prayer can help. It can be like sharing troubles with a higher power.

   Prayer is helpful to achieve peace of mind and release things you can not change.
   Prayer doesn’t have to be religious, doing something to share your pain can help. Going out to protest for democracy is as good as praying in that sense.

   It is obvious that praying to the gods, old and new, didn’t help Arya. She is not present.

   The master has one more important teaching.

5. “There is only one god and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to Death: "Not today".”
   My interpretation:

   There is one thing to fear - it is death, the end of all things.

   There is no stopping death, it will claim us all.

   There is only one thing we can do. Focus on the moment and say “Not Today”.

   Democracy is ending - "Not Today"

   The business may not take off - “Not Today”
   The company may close - “Not Today”

   All hope is gone - “Not Today”

   Focusing on the here and now, the immediate future is a powerful little trick suggested by the master.

   Pushing away uncertainty and things out of our control. We are saying “Not Today”, regaining control and keep moving forward.

I find this inspiring and helpful, tell me what you think about it.

Ever since book clubs have been part of my life. Book clubs have played a role in my personal and professional growth as well as helped me build a thinking and empowered team.

I think more people should try them and this post will try to explain why.

The value of reading together

In hindsight I can now see the strength of this simple tool, I’ll try to list some of the values:

• Teamwork
  Reading together is creating bonds and strengthens collaboration.
  It enables people from different parts of the company who have little day-to-day contact to connect over something.
  Discussing sensitive topics that are not strictly work-related with coworkers in a safe space builds empathy and connection between team members.

• Openness
  Many of the meetings are setting the right example for an open environment.
  All discussions we had are civil and people do listen. It is practicing the right type of discussion in a safe setting.
  In the book clubs I’ve run, team members shared personal things about themselves and got supported by the listeners.

• Creating a shared language
  After reading a book together, some ideas are shared. I can use ideas from “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” or other books in discussions to clarify my thought.

• Connect to the mission [if the CEO/Founder/Executive attends]
  Reading the book with a senior leader brings extra value.
  The leaders, when joining can talk about the things behind the company strategy and mission, they have a chance to elaborate on what made them build the company the way it is.
  They also have the rare opportunity to get deep and thoughtful challenges to the way they are leading.
  When I was in riseup, whenever the CEO joined the group we felt that we gain deeper understanding of how the company became what it is. It was also a good place to raise questions or concerns about things that happen in the company.
  Whenever I participate as a founder of a small company I feel some of the discussion is an opportunity to connect attendees to our mission.

How to do it?

The technical details are quite simple

• Pick a book you like and that you think resonates with your company stage and culture [I’ll share some books I recommend below]

• Share that you are opening a book club and see who wants to participate, I usually connect to it a poll [paper, audio, kindle] to make it more tangible and get responses.

• Buy the books and set a first meeting date. Our meetings are recurring two weeks apart

• Before every meeting - go over the chapter and summarize the main ideas. This should be a 5 minute summary of the chapter to set the context.

• Encourage participants to take notes before the meeting.

• Open the meeting with the summary.

• Let people discuss.

Some more notes to know

• Note for the moderator - try to hear everybody in the meeting. You can ask people who didn’t talk for their input.

• We tried to have some people join remotely and it doesn’t work as well, I think having people discuss face-to-face works better.

• Some / all of the books we read had some less interesting chapters, the moderator can skip those if they know the book.
  For example: in “Learned Optimism”, there are some parts about kids, education and sports that are less relevant to me so we just didn’t read and discuss them.

Another way to do it - the “Hevruta” model

Hevruta - the idea of learning together in small groups, usually pairs. It comes from the Jewish tradition I absolutely didn’t know until David, a co-worker in riseup, told me about it.

The concept is very similar to the group book club but done with only two people. It enables a deeper intimate discussion.

The concept of a club leader is no longer needed as both people read and discuss together.

David and I have been running this Hevruta for the last 3 years, we are now on our 4th book and not planning to stop anytime soon.
We pick books that are relevant to us. The discussion always brings us back to our day-to-day and how to apply what the books suggest.

I find myself speaking about ideas from those Hevrutas in many of my daily meetings, they sometimes help clarify my communication.

When I first hired people to the current company, I suggested reading a book together as a way to support their personal growth. Reading together allowed us to shape the environment at the same time we build the mastery.

For example:
I read “Deep Work” with a co-worker that felt the daily hustle and overbearing noise isn’t allowing for them to grow their mastery.
During the read, we would talk about the tension between what is expected from them and what is required for them to grow their mastery and deliver great work.

The cost of reading together

The commitment for whoever joins the book club is one hour every other week + the time to read the book. Usually reading the chapter takes 1-2 hours depending on the length of the chapter. I rarely saw people reading in the office, but I’m totally fine with that. I usually do read in the office and summarize which takes a little longer.

Some people won’t join and that is totally fine, I think book clubs must be optional but inclusive, everybody should be invited. I did find that the people who did join were usually the top performers in the org, not sure if it is anecdotal or the correlation exists there.

Recommended books

• “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” - a fundamental book that explains what goes into building strategy and strategic thinking.
  The concepts from it help create clarity in an otherwise ambiguous term.
  Reading it when deciding on the next product strategy, or next go-to-market strategy helps frame the discussion in a helpful way.

• “No rules rules“ - the essential culture book, its greatness is the extreme view and the simplicity of the explanations.
  The book is easy to disagree with, It is a good conversation starter. If you are familiar with “the keeper’s test” or “unlimited time off” you know what I mean.
  We read this book as a small company and it helped us talk about tricky issues in an open and collaborative way.

• “Learned optimism“ - my personal favorite, a psychology book that helped me be a better listener over the years.
  The simplicity with which different explanation styles are described and the impact of these styles on people’s actions was truly revolutionary for me.

• “Deep work“ - A great book about how hard it is to build meaningful things. This is another extreme book - like “No rules rules” that will cause people to disagree with it.

Summary

I love the ability to engage in correlation and establish a language as the base of the culture. I think book club is a great way to do it.

If you have recommended books - let me hear about them.

I’m available at odedblayer@gmail.com and always open to chat via https://calendly.com/od3d/talk-to-oded-30-minutes

Asking for feedback

Humans are social animals. We care what other people think of us. Be it good or bad, we are curious and always trying to figure it out.

When I start managing people, I usually create an expectation document. It helps to align on the kinds of behaviors and actions I would like to see from new team members.
I share a document with the new joiner in preparation for an expectation setting meeting. I ask them to read carefully, and add comments or questions to the document.
As a pretext of a conversation - I also ask them to write up the expectations they have from me and from the company.

Setting your expectations as a new employee can be challenging. It's not something you hear very often. Yet, one thing I hear from new joiners is:

Give me feedback - tell me what you think about me.

In some cases this is the only expectation from me as a manager and leader. It makes sense, we are all obsessed with our image in the eyes of other people.
Feedback is an important part of getting better, and we all strive to improve.

Good before bad

Managing people requires us to build a trustful relationship. Most people who ask for feedback want to hear how they can improve. Tech employees tend to be ambitious and competitive.

What they don't think about, and what I need to consider, is the praise-to-criticism ratio.
According to a well known study 1, in high-performing teams, the ratio of praise to criticism is about 5.6. For every criticism an employee receives, they should receive 5.6 praises.
This makes a lot of sense - we are all sensitive and fragile. We need to feel safe and appreciated before embracing criticism or constructive feedback.

The trick

I meet all my team members weekly in 1:1 meetings. Our focus is on the person and the team's progress. This includes collaboration and communication in the team.
For a better understanding of the team's state, I often ask how people are doing. Some of the things I hear are pretty pleasant and encouraging. It turns out that most people enjoy working with their teammates, but they don’t tell them enough about it.
People usually won’t praise their peers or other people they work with.

So I started a habit of being a praises router:

I share with my team members the praises I heard from their peers.

This may sound small, but it is one of the most powerful habits I have developed as a manager.

• I give a positive example of sharing praise. it strengthens a culture of praise.

• It strengthens the connection between team members.

• It increases the praise-to-criticism ratio. People will be more open to criticism.

• It requires only minimal preparation on my part. I take notes and remember to share.

• It is less embarrassing for everyone involved.

“Won’t it be more effective if people share their praises themselves?” I hear you ask.
To which the answer is "YES”, I usually suggest they do it. Getting praise or compliment  from a proxy is powerful but receiving it from the source is much better.

I don’t mind double praising and neither should you. Except when someone asks me not to praise because they want to do it themselves.

Why isn't this in management books?

I don’t know. 🤷‍♂️

It's something I do all the time, but I rarely receive it in return.

Maybe people think it is wrong to speak on behalf of others.

People want to praise, but they don't always get to do so.

Every praise un-shared is a loss of opportunity to motivate and improve collaboration.

It gave me some structure and helped talking about my responsibility, I hope it will be useful for more people

Why I started thinking about it?

On July 1st 2021, I started to work on building a startup with my partner Noam Bernstein. We both were 100% committed and made the expectation settings ahead of time, but didn’t decide what we will build.

The first month was ideation. The second and third months were getting funded and opening a bank account. Months 4-9 were hiring and team building. Throughout this time we continued to meet customers and understand their businesses.

As the team evolved, and the effort to build our product kicked off, I’ve been starting to wander around. Asking myself and others - what is my role?

My preconception about the role

I worked with some good CTOs over the time: Barak Naveh in Snaptu and Iftach Bar in riseup both Managed me. I also have some good CTO friends like Alon Shalita of Second Nature.

There is a connecting thread between them all: They are deeply technological.

Each of them is the mentor you want when you grow up as a developer. This was fortunate for my growth, two of them were my mentors at work and the third helped me as a supporter and friend.

So my preconception based on my limited experience would be that a CTO is

1. Deep and passionate about technology

2. Leading the technology vision for their companies

Now, my concern was that this CTO persona doesn’t fit my strength and passion. I am not a “gotta-have-my-coding-time” kinda CTO. I don’t care enough about the nuance between react and angular 😲. After all these are tools, means for an end - solving customers problems - and not the end itself.

When I needed to make the decision of which technology stack to use. I used some shallow reasoning to pick node.js and react:

a. It is in fashion. The tools became the industry standards because of their stability and versatility.

b. I used node.js in riseup and led a team that did some react while I was in Facebook.

c. “code-is-code” - we can build what we need with that. After all, code/tech stack is a tool.

Getting comfortable with my role

I started talking about my preconception with a few people in my support crew and my challenges with it. It became a good opportunity for me to go deep and learn something, so I did.

To my rescue came a tweet from several months ago: @_maintenance a twitter star I admire, built a mentorship list. This is a list of mostly-tech people willing to mentor randos from the internet.

Since I already know from Gabby’s dollhouse that asking for help is a super power. I opened the list and started looking for mentors. I looked for CTOs and people that look like they could tell me about that role.

I scheduled 6 zoom meetings with people on the list as well as a couple people outside the list that I got connected to.

My Insights

After my meetings, it became clear to me that there are many nuances about the role. It depend on the size and type of compny.

I clustered the responsibilities to 7 different roles that CTOs take on:

Role #1 - CTO is an executive

This was the first thing I heard from my first mentor @nukemberg

Funny enough - the CTO role is not to “Execute” but rather to “Define”/”Describe”/”Direct” the company towards achieving its vision.

This means leadership meetings, strategy setting, budget planning, etc.

When the companies are small, some of the execution can be done by a capable CTO, but it is not an essential part of the executive role.

This theme returned through the discussion with the other mentors. My learning was that any CxO or C level title [according to @nukemberg] is an executive, so even a non-founder CTO is an executive role.

Role #2 - CTO is a representative

In a way, the CTO is the technology face of the company, it is a symbolic role.

A good track record and reputation of the CTO will make hard things easier.

It will be easier to get funded. It will be easier to hire top talent. And it will be easier to convince customers and partners to work with the company.

A CTO is the most senior technology title in the company and it matters a lot. This was a rare consensus amongst the mentors. A good CTO is building a good company by using his reputation and track record. The brand of the companies the CTO worked in is sometimes more important than his actions as a CTO.

Role #3 - CTO is [sometimes] a people manager

This was a first major split between my mentors, some mentors are not managers. Others, like manage the engineering org.

The CTOs that don’t manage usually hire a VP R&D early on to take on people management of the engineering org. Usually, the engineering org is the biggest org when the company starts. In some cases the CTO manages the VP R&D and in others, the CEO manages the VP R&D.

The VP R&D is the operational figure who works with the executive functions - CXO from Role #1.

When a CTO is managing the engineering org, they are accountable for the operational role. It is a time consuming effort but also one of the most common things that CTOs do.

Role #4 - CTO is [sometimes] hands on developer

In my definition - a developer writes or reads code. sometimes they leading design and architecture sessions and make technical decisions.

It is common and that caused my preconception of CTO before this exploration. I thought that a CTO must get deep into the technology details.

If a CTO is also a strong developer, they are likely to spend much of their time working with the development team.

There are two different cases where I saw this:

1. If the company is very small, the CTO is likely to build the prototype and first few versions.

2. If the product is deep and technical, a novel way to achieve something the market hasn’t seen before. For example - a complex AI ranking system where the CTO is an AI expert.

Role #5 - CTO owns Security and IT

This was a big one for me, while engineering orgs get most of the glory, there are areas that usually get less attention but are still important.

In some cases Security and Compliance are essential for the company. They are prerequisites to putting a product in the hands of customers. This is true in regulated fields, like Insurance, Finance and Health.

Even in unregulated domains, someone has to make sure people get the right equipment to do their jobs. Someone needs to build the right security measures to protect customer/partner information.

When the company is small, the CTO can do most work themselves with help of freelancers. As the companies gets larger, a CISO usually owns security and in some cases compliance and IT as well. The CISO may report to the CTO or not [related to role #3]

Role #6 - CTO is a salesperson

I worked in B2C companies and this role is more true for B2B where the second B is enterprise. It is more true when the product is more technical or when the product targeting tech people. In those cases the CTO needs to make sure the company is able to deliver on their promises. In many ways the CTO is the chief sales engineer in company.

Being part of the sales process is time consuming. In the cases of my mentors, this can take the majority of their time. In some cases it can become hard to be a salesperson as well as a hands-on developer and/or people manager. It makes sense to delegate one of them.

There is an advantage of having the CTO engaged with sales and customer integrations. The process feeds insights to the CTO who then uses their executive role [#1] or hands on prototyping [#4]. They influence the product and engineering direction. While at the same time creating measurable impact on the company (increase ARR)

In my chat with Nissim Tapiro who is a CTO in a large scale SMB self-serve model. He suggested that building a data organization as a parallel to the salesperson role. Data can provide insights and is a way to chart the direction of product and engineering.

Role #7 - CTO does whatever it takes

In all my discussions, the CTO is a catch-all doing whatever it takes, based on their skills. Things that some CTOs do:

• Product exploration and leadership

• Own DevOps and developer efficiency work

• Hiring all tech roles [design, PM and others]

• Own parts of the company culture

• Employer branding

What am I taking from this?

Takeaway A

It is clear for me that role #1 [executive] and role #2 [representative] are inescapable, like it or not. It is a good challenge to define how I do them well and be proactive to invest in those two roles.

Takeaway B

Most mentors were doing both role #3 [people manager] and role #4 [hands on developer], some took only #4.

As my passion lies in #3 more than #4 I am not the right person to be hands on. I choose be a manager and not hands on. My background is making this an easy decision and I know how to do this part well.

In the future, I can see a world where I renounce my people manager role too. By hiring a strong VP that can manage people better than I can. Speaking to the mentors helped me come up with the following hypothesis

It is possible to be a CTO and be neither an IC nor a people manager

While I didn’t met anyone who was neither #3 nor #4 - they must exist and it might be a good future for me.

Takeaway C

Role #5 [CTO Owns Security and IT] is a big important role I need to own and do well. This is often overlooked when the company is small, and causes pain when the company gets larger.

I will own IT and Security and invest my time and effort in progressing both.

In my case it means allocating time for security work every week. I will spend time on our IT processes and SaaS tools used by various parts of the company that are not engineering. For example - Marketing, Compliance and Customer Success.

Takeaway D

Role #6 [salesperson] is not a priority now for our business so I can decide not to take it on. This is an ongoing discussion between Noam and myself.

As a note, having Data as a parallel to selling, Data is something I will take on very soon.

Takeaway E

Other things I do and fall under Role #7 [Doing whatever it takes]

• I love hiring, so I will reach out and hire people when I can.

• I love building a good culture, so I will take lead on the culture and people stuff

Last words

I want to thank the mentors for making the time to talk to me: @nukemberg, @shemmag8, @LimorLah, @esapir, Nissim Tapiro, Alon Shalita, @barnashon and @barnhartguy. I’m grateful for your openness and kindness.

Big thanks to @_maintenance who compiled a list of talented kind people.

I am part of the mentor list, and quite eager to help whoever wants to talk about anything in this post or out of this post.

Please feel free to ping me at oded@gotrapeze.com or set time on my calendar my phone number is in the second link.

I’ll appreciate your feedback and comments here or in private.

The concept of relying on someone for support as a booster for self growth was not new to me, yet I failed to do it in the past.

In this post I’d like to describe the process that works for me, and how I regularly get support from a crew of good people. I now consider this to be my superpower 🦸

Why rely on anyone?

Growth is hard, the better I got at anything, the harder it was for me to grow further. Yet, evolving my mastery and scope of influence is likely the most rewarding thing I could do with my time.

Over time, I found people around me to be essential to my growth. Such were people who told me I’m not thinking things through, people who said they think I’m doing the right thing, and people who just said that I have plenty to offer even when it didn’t feel like it.

Who should you rely on?

During much of my career I had the good fortune to have very good managers, managers who I trusted and in turn helped me grow significantly as a developer and later as a manager.

Only recently did I understand a problem with relying ONLY on my manager for growth. While it was true that my managers always showed care for me and my growth. They were on my side, but they were also on the company’s side. The overlap between my growth agenda and the company agenda is never 100% full - not even now when I am a founder in a company.

For me it makes perfect sense to rely on people outside the system to support your growth. Not only do they give me a better perspective, they also are more on my side than my manager could be.

How to be the person who relies on people?

The thought of asking someone for help is scary. I am vulnerable, I may ask stupid questions or make a bad impression. The people I rely on are strong and capable. Will they think I’m not worthy of their support and their time?

Even if they will be generous with their time. I would be putting myself in the spotlight asking someone else to focus on me. Who would like that kind of attention? Not the introverted developer that I am.

If you are anything like me, second thoughts of used to happen every time before reaching out. This caused me not to reach out many times in the past.

If it wasn’t that important I would just stay home and watch Gabby’s Dollhouse on Netflix - but it was important! So I found a way that work for me.

My way to overcome the fear was to create a system. This system is designed to have me reaching out to people every week.

To do that I took thinking out of my process. I use Asana for work and added the following tasks to my Asana.

I have 18 tasks that recur - they reopen 30 days after I close them. When they pop-up into my daily task list I send a message to the right person asking for a slot of time to have coffee / beer or just sit on a park bench. During COVID some of those happen over Zoom, which is also fine.

This makes the second thoughts less relevant, there is a task and I’m all into achieving the dopamine rush of completing a task.

Who is on my list?

My list is composed of friends and past co-workers. The people on it know they are on it and are usually happy to have a coffee every 4-6 weeks.

This somewhat resembles the concept of a personal board of directors. the idea of choosing the board people that offer a diverse set of skills and experiences. However, for me it wasn’t as intentional as the board of directors would be. I consider them a less formal support crew.

My list is diverse and long, I love talking to each of the people on it, and that is a reason it isn’t hard for me to reach out when the task appears.

It hasn’t always been long, I started with a much shorter list and grew it over time.

What should we talk about?

For me, this is the easy part, I care deeply about the people in the list and curious about what they are going through. The discussions are usually open and unstructured.

Sometimes there is a ritual - play a game of chess, grab a beer or have coffee and a sandwich in a coffee place.

Asking for help doesn’t have to be explicit, many times it isn’t. The opportunity to talk to someone does bring up the things I need help with naturally.

Showing Gratitude

One more thing I find helpful is to thank the people that were generous with their time.

The last two years I created a personal token of appreciation, a real life achievement for my support crew members.

This is embarrassing to fabricate and hand out, but it is a process I force myself to do. Going through the list and writing a personal message addressed to each of the support crew members makes me appreciate what they did for me and let them know they were an important part of my journey.

I know this is something people don’t do usually - it is hard to hand out and embarrassing to receive. Nevertheless I find it healthy and meaningful.

Here is my 2021 real life achievement token which I am handing out to my crew these days.

Summary

Reach out, hop over the embarrassment in any way you can think of - it is well worth it.

If you would like to reach out to me for support, I’m always happy to chat about anything. Seemy previous post. Feel free to set time on my calendar atcalendly.com/od3d I promise to listen and to be generous and on your side 100%.

Last month I posted the following post in an Israeli developer group - English translation follows

Translation:

I want to give some of my time to the community I love 🧡

I opened some slots on my calendar for anyone to grab and talk to me.

What will we talk about?

1. Salary - Want to ask for a raise? Not sure you are compensated fairly? Options? Anything more you want to discuss I’m happy to share from my experience.

2. Performance reviews - It is the season, Anyone who wants to talk about filling, getting or discussing performance with their manager. [I did plenty as a manager and a developer]

3. Career management - Anything from thoughts about being a manager, changing a job to existential dilemmas

4. Manager’s dilemmas - To the managers among you who want to talk about issues with managers or reports.

5. Interviews - Preparing for interviews, job searching, etc.

6. Anything else hat you want to talk about

7. I like chess - if you want to play a match on lichess.com with a mediocre player, bring it on ♟️

<Technical stuff about setting the time>

Thanks to Tamar for giving me this charming idea and let me duplicate her text and try it myself

Why I did this?

Tamar, who I mentioned above, told me about an experiment she did before we started working together. She was amazed by the different stories and situations people shared with her.

This inspired me and piqued my interest, 1:1s were always my favorite part of being a manager, and doing so with people I don’t know was even more intriguing.

I didn’t know what to expect, but that was also the exciting part.

So I borrowed most of Tamar’s text and posted it in a Facebook group I love and follow for years - מפתחים חסרי תרבות is a community founded by a great Hebrew podcast with the same name - which translates roughly to culture-less [uncivilised] developers. I once participated in the podcast co-hosted by my previous manager Iftach.

The meetings

I ended up having 44 thirty minute meetings with people I don’t know [except 1].

The subjects we chatted about were diverse as were the people I met. Here are some charts to show the data.

What I’ve learned?

Some of the things I’ve learned

1. Being a developer in tech can be quite a lonely occupation. Some people have some questions and discussions they don’t feel comfortable sharing with their co-workers and managers. I must admit I felt this way myself for most of my career.

2. There are so many different things going around I had no clue about, our industry truly is huge. I spoke to people from 44 different companies, most of them I didn’t know.

3. Top performing senior developers are even more lonely and sometimes can be clueless about how to grow in their profession.
   In most companies - big and small - being a staff / senior+ developer means you are not likely to have a role model [in or out of the company] to learn from. As a result, personal growth becomes harder to imagine and achieve.
   Many time there is a notion that growth can only be achieved by becoming a manager.

4. Managers were less likely to talk to me.

5. An intriguing category of “Joined the wrong company” was surprisingly common. In most cases this puts the new hire in a very peculiar position - they just started and already feel this isn’t right.
   It can be about the project they were assigned to or about a bad culture that was invisible from the outside.
   It puts them in an extremely lonely position, I felt it helped to tell them that it happens and it isn’t necessarily their fault.
   I think this is quite common, I saw this in my previous companies and in some CVs. However, I never saw this in any posts.

6. Half of the people that spoke to me were looking for their new position - I tried to help them figure out the right criteria for picking the next place and connected some of them to few of my friends.

Tips I found myself giving over and over

• Before asking for a raise - be curious about the system

  • Every company has its own compensation system, typically tied to employee performance. Your manager or HR person can tell you about how it works.

  • Understanding the system will make the discussion easier and less stressful.

• When looking for your next job - define what are you optimizing for.

  • “Growing my skills as a developer” - “Finding my next step as a technical person”

    • Make sure you get the right support [manager / peers].

    • Make sure you are excited about the domain / technology.

  • “Learning some new skill” [ML/AI/Full-stack]

    • Make sure the commitment is real, it is often easier for the new company to just use your current skillset than teach you something new.

    • Be ready to compromise on compensation to gain the experience you want.

  • “Improve my compensation”

    • What are you willing to give up for that?

    • How much are you willing to prepare for the interviews?

• Before signing on an offer - Set expectations.
  Make a list of the things that are important for you and make sure to cover all of the list with your future manager before signing.

• “Find a role model” - I believe this helps figuring out where our growth should be. I found My role model by joining a manager’s community and it gave me a lot of clarity.

• System design interviews are all about the trade-offs. You can start every sentence with “It’s a trade-off” and it is likely what the interviewer is looking for 😉

• Don’t join the first place that reach out to you - if you are looking for a job, make sure to proactively search for your next place.
  It is a repeating theme in the people that joined the wrong place - they didn’t proactively search for a place, they joined a place after a recruiter reached out to them.

What am I going to do with it?

A few things I will definitely do:

1. Continue holding those meetings while there is still demand. 22 hours a month is a lot, I’ll reduce it to be less. Grab your slot here: https://calendly.com/od3d/ - message me if you can’t find a good slot and I’ll add one for you.

2. Top performing senior+ developers - there is a real opportunity to build a community of some sort - I will follow up on that. Talk to me if you want to be part of it.

3. Helping people who are looking for their next challenge is rewarding and hopefully was valuable for them.

Many thanks to the people who reached out to me and spoke openly. I know that reaching out to a stranger and asking help is not easy and requires courage. I hope I was able help even if just a small bit.