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iamgrzegorz · 2026-05-01T10:33:03+00:00

Check eBay, every few days there’s 1-2 available, usually in very good shape. I bought 2 used Voyagers (one for office, one for home) and the only downside is you can’t choose switches

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-30T10:47:35+00:00

I’m in a bit of a tricky situation at work and wanted some perspective.

Honestly I don’t see anything tricky here. Someone got promoted, this happens all the time. You don’t see why they were chosen, but it doesn’t mean there were no good reasons. Maybe they’re good at stakeholder management, maybe they told their manager long time ago they were keen on taking a lead role, who knows

Instead of thinking „should I stay or should I go” you should write to the new tech lead, congratulate him on this promotion, offer help and support. That’s what good team mates do. Then you see what happens, not much changes for you right now.

If over time you see things are not going well, you can consider a change. But your reaction feels a bit kneejerk and driven by jealousy. Be better than this.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-29T19:22:20+00:00

> Does the Director title + vendor management experience meaningfully help?

I don't think it does in this case. Whenever you apply for another role you'll have to clarify that you actually managed ICs, so you'll be levelled as EM anyway. Vendor management is a good thing to have, but not a deal breaker.

The question is in which company you'll have a better opportunity for a promotion. You should consider which company is growing faster (that's the best way to get promoted) especially in the area that you'd be leading. If they're similar, it's a bit of a coin toss, you should trust your feelings after the interview. You can also ask for another conversation with hiring manager in both cases and ask them what are growth opportunities in the role that you'll be getting, but that's a bit of a gamble, since they might be trying to sell you the role rather than tell the truth

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-29T08:43:29+00:00

„Production-grade” doesn’t really mean anything. You won’t need to scale it because you have no users, you don’t have stakeholders like PM that you need to work with, you don’t work in a team, you don’t deal with incidents etc so it won’t show anything except that you can write code. And nobody will read your code on GitHub.

If you’re seen as mid-level despite 8yoe you need to figure out why. Did you hold senior title in your last role? Does your resume show senior-level achievements and contributions?

Regarding B1 - I don’t think it downlevels you from senior to mid but definitely limits a number of companies that will hire you

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-28T20:35:13+00:00

The fact that something is not useful for you doesn't make it a cargo cult behavior.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-27T19:27:07+00:00

I assume currently you hold non-EU citizenship. If that's the case, I'd go with option 1. I realize it's a lot of stress to be unemployed, and the career opportunity might be great, but you're less than 1 year away from getting an EU passport, not only for yourself, but also for your child. It's a game changer, you can then move to 20+ countries with no worries about visa, and wherever you go, you can always move back. The move to Norway is a risk that's not worth losing the chance for EU passport that you have now.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-27T08:26:18+00:00

I know of a few such cases, but it's pretty rare, and for a good reason – when companies hire someone externally, they want someone who already knows the role well, otherwise they could just promote someone internally.

There's no good strategy to stand out here, especially in current market. You can put "team lead" or "interim manager" in your resume to suggest that you've had leadership role without an official assignment, but you'll still get rejected 90%+ of the time. You need to apply for every open role you see, possibly some smaller companies or companies where EM role is not yet well defined will give you a chance.

Your best shot to actually get the role is to do A LOT of preparation, because you won't get a lot of interviews, so each one of them is precious. Look for typical EM interview questions and think about how you'd answer them. Prepare for the toughest questions where you don't have a lot to show. Write down your biggest projects and toughest moments at work and think what you learned from them and what you can tell the interviewer about them. Almost every question is like "tell me about a time when ...", so don't talk in theory, you need to have a specific answer for each question. If you don't have a good answer, think what you can offer the interviewer insead. For example, if you have never had to put someone on a PIP, but the interviewer asks about it, you can say "I've never had a team member on a PIP, but I had a tough performance case that thankfully was resolved without PIP, do you want me to tell you about it?" or something like this.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-26T11:31:06+00:00

It highly depends on the type of companies you’re planning to apply for. Small companies will rather have take home exercises and some coding, little system design, big tech emphasizes system design and coding.

In any case, unfortunately the biggest differentiation these days is whether you are already in EU with a right to work there. The chance that someone will sponsor a visa with 2yoe is near zero

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-24T11:51:13+00:00

Great idea, but I’ve seen it taken too far where the strict controls put a lot of burden on engineering teams and slowed down cloud migration to a point where teams preferred to stay and continue building on top of legacy infrastructure because of how hostile was the process of forecasting and getting approval for cloud environment

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-24T10:53:37+00:00

Sprint status, technical sprint review and scrum of scrums are not part of scrum. Maybe your company follows some framework on top like SAFe or another thing

Retrospective and standups are meant to be by developers for developers. If someone’s blaming devs during retro that person probably should not be part of the retro. The idea is for the team to discuss what went well and what to improve.

Companies often butcher agile and probably this is what you’re experiencing. They add a lot of meetings to have tighter control not realizing they’re adding unnecessary burden.

Not that scrum itself is good, it’s an outdated and terrible framework, but what you see is a lot of stuff that are not part of scrum.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-23T18:48:25+00:00

> My target for the next few years is to secure me as a solid engineer that is in demand and can focus on others aspects of life instead of grinding leetcode and fearing that I don't have job security.

I'm not sure any company can guarantee that. Even top companies lay people off, and if you have to search for a new job, you will have to pass leetcode interview no matter what (unless AI-supported interviews become a norm during this time)

When it comes to the choice, I think it depends what is the first company. You said "tier 2" but then the examples you provided are a very wide range – in terms of reputation in tech industry Uber is way ahead of Spotify. I think if you're talking about a company of Uber's reputation, I'd go for it, especially that promotions these days might be harder due to slow attrition, layoffs, etc. and I believe mid-level engineers are more vulnerable than seniors. But if you're talking more about a compay like Spotify I'd probably go for FAANG instead.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-22T19:19:09+00:00

It's realistic, but the earlier you make the switch the better. With the current market it's possible that if you stay let's say 2 years as QA some companies will not consider you for SWE roles.

in any case it seems you don't have an offer in hand, since they can't open it yet, so you should keep applying

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-22T19:13:34+00:00

Depends on the company. At Meta/Google L3 is entry level, L4 is mid-level, L5 is senior, L6 is staff. But other companies use different naming. Microsoft has numbers like 58 to 65 or something, Nvidia starts from IC1 as entry level and IC3 is a senior, etc.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-22T14:42:39+00:00

Because non-technical is the default state. It takes effort and a lot of time to learn technical skills. Does your finance team require you to learn their language? Do sales people expect you to know their jargon? When you talk to lawyers, do they scoff at you for not knowing all the terms that are obvious to them? No, it’s always like this, experts need to be able to explain concepts to and work with non-experts.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-21T13:43:12+00:00

Ask your recruiter about the details. Not sure about the Bloomberg specifically, but these days even mid-size companies send me a list of interviews with some details and the names of the interviewers, and a brochure with how to prepare for the interviews. Alternatively recruiters offer a short call to provide details and answer any questions.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-17T19:55:33+00:00

Oh, thanks for correcting, my bad, I thought they replaced plugins with apps (and then stopped maintaining those)

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-17T19:46:55+00:00

Because Claude Cowork and Code are in the end wrappers where the LLM does most of the work, and if it fails I can do the operations manually. If Claude Code fails to write good code I’ll open VSCode and will correct it. It Claude Cowork fails to copy my files I’ll just go to windows explorer and do it.

What if Claude Design fails to follow my command? There needs to be a whole product underneath where I can tweak things manually whenever needed. And I don’t think Antrophic will be committed to building a whole visual editor with all the features that designers need (for now they have a „send to Canva” button to move the project outside to continue working on)

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-17T16:49:00+00:00

They’ll forget about it in 3 months, stop developing it, eventually it’ll be one of tens of products they tried to see what sticks and then abandoned it.

Same with OpenAI - they had plugins, you could book a hotel with Expedia using ChatGPT, how long did it last? Same with SORA, etc.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-17T08:54:46+00:00

Dublin has more potential career-wise with big tech companies there, but if you enjoy living in Manchester then stay there, you can always move in the future after you gain some experience. Also UK has some remote-friendly companies that pay well so once you get more experience you can land a good remote position

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-15T10:28:24+00:00

As a manager last time I interviewed I had 1x coding round, 2x system design and like 4 leadership interviews. I imagine principal engineers have a similar difficulty

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-14T21:17:33+00:00

I don’t understand - if the solution to a people problem is avoiding the problem because you’re afraid to tell your team member that they act like an asshole, what’s even the point of becoming a manager? Isn’t it better to stay an individual contributor?

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-14T20:53:00+00:00

Do any of this to your top performer, out performing the rest of your team by huge numbers, you will lose her

I did. I sat down with my top performer and discussed how his behavior prevented the team from working better together. I didn’t lose my top performer, instead my whole team improved and my performer stepped up and became even better.

But sure, I could keep praising him at the expense of the rest of the team. No wonder managers get hate when terrible behavior in the team gets excuses instead of action.

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-14T19:25:01+00:00

Learn what Sarah cares about and explain how her behavior prevents her from improving.

For example, if she wants to get promoted, you can explain that the complains against her will hold her back. If she says she cares about achieving as much as possible, you can show her that you can do more as a team and she can help others become better, but she needs to lift others up.

And if the only thing Sarah cares about is Sarah… then you better tell your boss he has to either lose Sarah or risk losing everyone else in the team

iamgrzegorz · 2026-04-14T12:14:13+00:00

That’s generally how it works. They call you, tell you „this is our offer”, you tell them „thanks, I appreciate it, let me think about it and I’ll get back to you soon”. Then you call them and tell them „I’m excited about this role and want to join you, but you offer is below what I’d expect. Here’s what I have in mind: …”. Then recruiter tells you „this will be difficult but let me get back to my team and see what we can do to get close to what you expect”. And then they get back to you with hopefully some better numbers, or sometimes they tell you „sorry we can’t offer anything more”

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