Scaling Culture Without Dilution
As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see...
#Performance Management
Writing on expectations, underperformance, growth, and fair people decisions.
The Weekly Win
If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly checkins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could ha...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
New Manager Survival Guide
Alright, this is gonna be a long one. And not just a onetime thing. I'll keep updating it as I write more about leadership. I’ll try to link everything I’ve written before. This...
Take Self Reviews Seriously
This isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last time I find myself in a conversation about the importance of self checkins, performance reviews, and all that socalled “ref...
Chasing Real Respect
You can fake a lot of things in business. Authority. Expertise. Competence. But you can’t fake certain , like respect. Think about the managers you’ve had in the past. The good...
PIP Manager Insights
I remember one of my directs stepping into a new manager role, only to inherit a team with one or two employees who just weren’t cutting it. From day one, it was a challenge. He...
Engineering Manager Interview Preparation
Layoffs seem to be everywhere these days. You scroll through feeds, and it’s another round of cuts, another company restructuring. If you're a seasoned manager, losing your role...
Work-Life Balance as a Manager
As an IC, you close your laptop at 6 PM, log off, and forget about the work unless you are oncall. As a manager, you check Slack at 10 PM because someone might need you. Your ca...
Ideal Number of Direct Reports
Amazon’s likely comes from a closer look at ratios. Were there too many managers with only 23 direct reports? That’s entirely possible. From my time at AWS, I didn’t see this mu...
From Misperception to Promotion
If you are in the realm of management, sooner or later, you will encounter someone who wants a promotion but isn’t quite ready for it. In fact, I have seen many cases where the...
From Engineer to Manager
I often get asked whether someone should transition into management. In the past, this might have been the only viable growth path. However, in most large organizations today, t...
The Power of Consistency
One of my friends from primary school didn’t go to high school. At first, it was a bit surprising, but his family was making kebap, and he wanted to run the family business. Bec...
Yazılım Mühendisliği Kariyer Merdiveni
Yazılım şirketleri, mühendislik mesleği seviyelerini dikkatlice oluşturmalı ve çalışanlardan ne beklendiğini, roller arasındaki farkı ve kariyer gelişimi için alanları açıklayan...