I'm a curious Engineering Manager with 18+ years of experience in developing software and leading engineering teams. Having lived in 5 countries, I've developed a strong ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional and geo-distributed teams. Having worked across industries such as Retail, Telco, Manufacturing and Energy, enables me to drive engineering excellence, business value, and customer success.

• teach themselves multiple ways of solving the same problem and understand that code is just one of the many ways to achieve the solution. As a consequence, they treat code as a liability, not an asset.
• consider the term best practices as relative. Since best practices constantly evolve over time, great engineers brace themselves to unlearn and re-learn. They never settle in learning in-depth how something works.
• put people over processes.
• judge people on their contributions, not on how confident they seem.
• don't let their own desire to get things done quickly, turn into undue pressure on peers.
• are happy with others' success and acknowledge that success is not a zero-sum game.
• recognize that out of all the agile practices commonly used, estimating work items and trying to measure project velocity is the least productive.
• acknowledge that new systems are best designed by a small number of minds, not committees.
• instead of only doing their parts, help out in dependent workstreams too if needed.
• are aware that their team is only as good as the weakest code reviewer.
• are cautious when dealing with hyped/fashionable tech (e.g. Kubernetes) and understand that CS fundamentals don’t change much over time.
• understand that knowledge of specific frameworks, libraries or tools is not that important in the long run.
• keep the documentation as close to the actual source code as possible.
• ensure that all code must have good tests regardless if the tests were written first, last, or in the middle.
• have the same high standards for all the code they write, from tests, little scripts to the inner loop of critical system.
• deploy from main branch to prod from the very beginning of a project.
• automate all the things that are worth automating.
• know the importance of being able to tell what the system is doing, so they make sure it’s observable.
• As managers/leads, if things go well, they give their team the credit. If things go sideways, they take the blame themselves.