The same person, all day
Engineering leader in Silicon Valley. Fifteen years in tech, seven of them leading teams. Ukrainian immigrant, two kids. I write about what happens when you stop pretending that the person who leads all day and the person who walks into the kitchen at 17:00 are two different people.
Where I started
Huliaipole, in Southeast Ukraine. An unpaved street with a corn field at the end of it. My father never got out of that town, but he knew that people did, and he made sure I knew it too.
At fourteen I won a regional competition and it came with a place at a selective lyceum, an hour and a half from home, living with a host family. My mother didn't tell me what to do. She said it was my call, and that she'd back whatever I decided. I went.
What it cost, and what it took to get back
The lyceum was a humanities school. Going there meant giving up the science track, and by the time I understood what I'd traded away, my math was years behind where it should have been. I wanted it back. That meant making up roughly three years of mathematics, and I made it up in under a year, and then I topped the entrance exam into computer science.
That's the part I'd point to if you asked me what I'm actually good at. Not the winning. The catching up.
How I got here
University, and then Kyiv, and then production code running for millions of people. A business trip to San Francisco showed me a version of the work I hadn't known existed, and I couldn't unsee it. So I asked to be relocated to the United States. It was not on offer, and I asked anyway. Then I packed a whole life into a few boxes and moved.
The job
Seven years leading engineering teams. What that actually looks like: hiring people who will disagree with you, saying the hard thing early enough that it still helps, and deciding with less information than you'd like — then being willing to be wrong about it out loud.
I'm good at that job. I was not good at what came after it. For years I'd close the laptop, walk into the kitchen, and none of it came with me — and I couldn't work out why the skills didn't travel. It turned out they travelled fine. I just wasn't taking them with me.
What I'm building
- 17 to 1 — a memoir. Seventeen rules I learned running engineering teams, and what happened when I stopped leaving them at the office. Being written now.
- Lead at Home — a newsletter. One thing I actually do at work per issue, and where it holds up at home.
- Talks and workshops on engineering leadership and AI, for conferences and internal leadership events.