Back after two weeks, thanks for sticking around. These days I’m mostly busy with my first 1:1 training clients, who want to be (better) engineering managers; and thinking about how to organize and display the content I produce that’s scattered around the web under different| Péter Szász
This is a shorter edition than usual: life throws curveballs and makes me reshuffle my plans. Crises have a silver lining: they make prioritization easier. When there’s one obvious thing to focus on, the cloud of uncertainty and self-doubt disappears. In light of this, I’ll also have to| Péter Szász
Sharing lessons learned from my Engineering Leadership experiences.| Péter Szász
Wartime can be extremely demanding for Engineering Managers. But by ruthlessly focusing on delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining their own strength, an EM can lead their people to not just survive but thrive under pressure.| Péter Szász
This is probably the last update for a few weeks, as we’re preparing for our vacations. Taking big breaks is important to recharge, but I found that smaller pauses, making adjustments in the daily routine, to allow space for relaxing a bit, are important too. I mean things| Péter Szász
This week on Leadtime.tech I addressed another reader submission — how to decide the necessary resources to operate a third-party platform. I usually write about the people management aspect of an EM’s life, so it was a fun detour to think about something closer to technical strategy.| Péter Szász
Summer is coming in full speed to Hungary. I’ll launch this short edition, then head out to meet a friend to share some beers on a terrace. This week on LeadTime.tech I wrote about a difficult challenge: how to approach having to lay off a well-performing developer. In| Péter Szász
Coincidentally, this week, the power of in-person discussions came up in multiple talks. Written communication, while having the benefits like speed and asynchronicity, misses a bunch of nuances that can be critical during conflicts. A voice call is better; you get a lot of hidden meaning from the tone, speed,| Péter Szász
This week in my Engineering Manager Challenges newsletter, I wrote my approach to building a platform team. It’s the twentieth week I’ve been publishing on Substack, and so far, I’m okay with the results: 127 subscribers with a roughly 50% open rate. I’m starting to run| Péter Szász
I’m sitting in the Hungarian Railway Museum’s amazing park, under the shadow of buckeye trees, in the middle of a chirping concert from at least a dozen different birds. Halftime of the 2-day Craft Conference, I arrived a bit early to be able to finish this| Péter Szász
(Feel free to scroll through the first part if you get annoyed by Bitcoin - I find it a fascinating invention, a celebration of mathematics, so I’m a bit biased.) Bitcoin broke its all-time high this week, climbing briefly above $111K, meaning its hypothetical market capitalization went just above| Péter Szász
The biggest Hungarian tech conference is coming up in two weeks, and I’ve been asked to moderate two panel discussions on AI Security and Engineering Efficiency. I’m super excited about this opportunity: I frequently visited and wrote about the conference, and had the chance to give| Péter Szász
It was 1995, springtime like now, and I was sitting on one of my first university exams. The subject was UNIX shell scripting, and our task was to write some code using grep/awk/sed to manipulate text files. We had an hour or so to complete the script, and| Péter Szász
Another unusual newsletter, because I only want to write about one thing this week. The topic of “silent walking” came up in a Hungarian leadership community, and it gave me a good opportunity to share some related thoughts. Some housekeeping before I jump into that: the new EM challenge I| Péter Szász
Short edition after a short week. It’s spring break in the school of my daughters, so I spent more time with family and less time with everything else. It was worth it — for example, Chloé started teaching me how to paint with aquarelle! You can see| Péter Szász
Happy Easter weekend if you’re celebrating this, or just live in a part of the world where Friday and Monday are a day off. I’m planning to spend some time with family. We found an old LEGO BOOST set that my daughters played with a bit years ago,| Péter Szász
This week on my Engineering Manager challenges series I wrote about handling an ambitious developer who announces they want to be an Engineering Manager too. I wrote about goals, risks, details to discover, and ways to support this engineer regardless of current organizational opportunities. Read it here if you missed| Péter Szász
The potential of positive feedback and the framework to construct and deliver it, reinforcing the right behaviors to help individuals reach their full potential.| Péter Szász
Another focused week on building my mentorship and coaching business under Leadtime.tech. This also means that the “small sister” of this newsletter, my weekly substack about Engineering Management problems has a new issue. This week, I explained how I would’ve handled the harsh Pull Request comment from a| Péter Szász
We’re covering the entire process of getting hired as an EM together with Péter Batiz, an experienced consultant who’s been helping startups and scale-ups find tech talent for more than a decade. If you prefer reading offline, you can also download all the articles about finding a job| Péter Szász
We’re covering the entire process of getting hired as an EM together with Péter Batiz, an experienced consultant who’s been helping startups and scale-ups find tech talent for more than a decade. If you prefer reading offline, you can also download all the articles about finding a job| Péter Szász
I’m covering the entire process of getting hired as an Engineering Manager in this mini-series. With the tech industry changing gears, more and more EMs find themselves out on the job market or considering a switch soon. (See the stats in my last newsletter about close to half of| Péter Szász
Between May and June 2024, I ran a mini-series covering the hiring process for Engineering Managers looking for a new job. Here I introduce all the episodes, link an interview with my co-author, and provide PDF and EPUB versions to download for your e-readers.| Péter Szász
Thoughts on the aspects a manager should take into account when the negative behavior of someone on their team is impacting others - or themselves.| Péter Szász
We’re covering the entire process of getting hired as an EM together with Péter Batiz, an experienced consultant who’s been helping startups and scale-ups find tech talent for more than a decade. If you prefer reading offline, you can also download all the articles about finding a job| Péter Szász
