I’ve been happily working for more than 10 years in the IT industry. Just like how a child accepts the universe around him the way it is, I also accepted many things during my employment as the natural order of how work is done and organized. I did my job naively, unaware of the forces shaping the world around me.
I used to have an hour long shower every morning, that’s where I put together my day, resolve all the issues and figure out everything I’m being paid for. The 8–9 hours after the shower are just formal. During these…
The collaboration between many locations is not easy. Looking back at my early career I still remember the tension between the German project managers and the Hungarian developers. At the very beginning — as a junior Java backend developer — I was quite naive and inexperienced in these things, I simply assumed that we are all Europeans, so our mindset and values are supposed to be exactly the same. Later on I not only learned that I was terribly wrong but I also understood that most of my German managers are also working based on this false assumption.
Language
Language has…
Consider that you are the leader of a company or at least you are the member of the leadership team. You keep missing the company targets for 2–3 years in a row. The situation is not tragical, you are still profitable, but only profitable enough to keep the business afloat. It doesn’t matter how many things you highlight as a success, deep down you know that everybody around you knows that the company is stagnating, and you start to recognize the impatient frustration behind those huge and reassuring executive smiles. The board of directors, the shareholders, the owners want numbers…
A bit more than a month ago I started a new experiment. I think I started to reach my lockdown limits and my home office became more like an office home and the atmosphere started to be a little bit suffocating and claustrophobic. At the end of February, I reached the point where I said that I need more space.
I already mentioned in (This is how 3D printing helped me in being more agile), that a few years ago I realized that the more overcrowded and unorganized my environment is, the more overcrowded and unorganized my thoughts are. I’m…
A few days ago I woke up to a SPAM from Coursera that they launched this super cool Google Certification and they give me a 7 days free trial so that I can check if I wanna make it or I can just cancel my subscription at any time. One thing you need to know about me is that after spending a fortune on subscriptions I just cancelled everything and I started to save an enormous amount of money every month. …
I had a few talks with colleagues and friends in the recent weeks about our careers and how we can grow as professionals and the more I thought about these talks, the more I looked back at my own career and my previous articles — especially the last one— it became clearer to me that after reaching a certain level, your professional knowledge and experience is just not enough. You have to grow as a person too, and it takes time and sometimes painful, hard work.
If you don’t spend time on yourself, don’t invest in your personal development, don’t…
In the recent months I started to see more and more how smart and talented people struggle to move forward in their careers, they struggle to get the respect and salary they deserve. They are hard working, they have clear goals, yet they can’t make it. If they have the talent, the knowledge and the motivation then what’s the problem? How come these people struggle? How come we all struggle sometimes?
When I feel that I just can’t move from A to B, the first thing I automatically do is that I start to blame others. This is our natural…
Despite of spending half of my life alone in a small room with a computer, it seems that I’ve reached my limits too. It was almost exactly a year ago when I last worked in the office and at the beginning of December I also started to experience the lockdown-fatigue like many others. It takes extreme effort for me these days to get out of the bed, to have a shower or to do anything useful (or useless). I don’t feel lonely, I don’t feel sad, I don’t feel depressed. I’m just very very exhausted. …
There are many things which have been considered as taboo and weakness at larger companies, saying sorry is one of them. I’ll discuss this topic in a series of articles because it’s important to understand the reasons why we hurt our colleagues and the reasons why is it important as a leader to learn to apologize.
Why do we hurt people at work? To answer this question we have to go back in time a few millions of years and we need have a look at our reptilian brain. The basal ganglia drives the deepest level of our subconscious, the…
When a company announces a merge or cost cutting program, it usually means that they try to find redundancies in the organization and eliminate them. They merge departments, standardize templates and procedures and they define a new hierarchy. These changes will have an almost immediate and visible effect on the numbers, the company spends less on salaries and on other operational costs, the leadership leans back happily in their chairs that they executed the reorganization successfully and the company’s future is safe.
There is one problem with this. What I’ve learned as a programmer, that the higher the level of…
A Product Owner with a pen
As an IT Business Analyst and Product Owner I want to figure out how can we organize our work and life better.
