17 to 1
At 17:00 the laptop closes. It's seventeen steps from my desk to the kitchen, and somewhere in those seventeen steps I was supposed to turn into a different person. I never managed it. This is the book about why I stopped trying.
What it is
A memoir about a manager who came home. I spent seven years learning how to lead engineering teams — how to give someone feedback they don't want, how to run a postmortem where nobody gets blamed, how to hire, how to decide with half the information you want. Then every evening I'd walk into my own kitchen and behave as though none of it had ever happened.
I did that for years. Not because I'd decided to, but because everyone does, and nobody says why. The manager and the mother were never two people. I'd just been trying to fire one of them on the way to dinner.
Where it starts
Huliaipole, Southeast Ukraine. An unpaved street with a corn field at the end of it, and a father who never got out of that town but knew that people did. At fourteen I won a competition, and it came with a place at a school an hour and a half away. My mother didn't tell me to take it. She said it was my call.
The book follows that thread — a lyceum, a university, Kyiv, a country I hadn't planned on — to a kitchen in California at 17:00 on an ordinary evening, with two kids who do not care what I do all day.
The seventeen
Seventeen keeps turning up. It's the hour the workday ends. It's the steps to the kitchen. It's roughly the number of people one person can actually lead before they stop leading well. So the second half of the book is seventeen rules I learned at work and brought home — which is not the same as saying they worked.
- Set the boundaries. Then let go.
- Your way is one way. Not the only way.
- Never quit on a bad day.
- Find your table.
- No one is coming. Move anyway.
Five of seventeen. I break most of them regularly, and the last chapter is about a night I broke several at once, in front of the two people the rules were for.
Who it's for
People who are quietly certain they're better at their job than at the rest of their life, and haven't said so out loud. It is not a parenting book. I'm not qualified to write one and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says they are. It's a book about the skills you already have, and the fact that you leave them at the office.
Where it is
Being written. The first half is drafted and the rules are going in one at a time. The title is a working title and may not survive.