Director of Cloud at Namecheap | 🤓 Author of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter about Engineering Management, Leadership, Career Growth and Productivity

I've spent 25+ years diving deep into technology, building businesses, and leading high-performing teams of Engineers. I try to condense all this experience in my newsletter and share it with my 30,000+ subscribers.

My main goal is to help other Engineers and Leaders grow and avoid mistakes I made in my career, through sharing:

🔧 Practical advice on how to grow from Engineer to Engineering Manager or Leader
📚 Personal stories about how I grew from Individual Contributor to Director
🎨 Easily understandable articles enriched with visuals to simplify complex concepts

If all of this makes sense to you, join 20k+ subscribers at: https://hybridhacker.email

Nicola Ballotta

https://strategizeyourcareer.com

I'm a Software Development Engineer at Amazon. 

1:1s with my managers were not enough for me to explore all the career topics I care about. So I decided to start writing.

Francisco Ramírez

The 10-second wait after submitting a prompt is the most dangerous part of your day.

It is too short for a break but long enough to kill your flow.

When the IDE says "Generating..." your brain craves a dopamine hit. You Alt-Tab to Slack.

I caught myself doing this on my personal laptop during Christmas.

I tried to check Slack like at work... but it wasn't even installed. It was just a muscle memory reflex.

You think you are multitasking. You are actually destroying your context.

Focus is like a plane. Taking off takes massive energy. Every time you switch tabs you have to land and take off again.

Francisco Manuel Soto Ramírez

SDE2 @Amazon | Author of 19,000+ subs Newsletter (strategizeyourcareer.com)

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Urgency is often fake.

Some engineers rush because things feel urgent.

They don't have time to solve the hard problems

Productive engineers question deadlines.

They differentiate what's urgent and what's important.

Ship what really helps users, not what looks busy.

Standup update: “I answered tons of DMs yesterday”.

I don't think that looks good.

1. No visibility
2. This may not be your responsibility
3. Can't evaluate if the time spent is justified
4. Tons of distractions, no deep work

Instead, you can build a system to manage your communications.

Stop living in your DMs and start designing that system:


https://lnkd.in/efNQUTDU

Fixed identity is a problem for softare engineers.

Some engineers tie their value to typing code and reject AI or new tools.

They protect pride, not outcomes.

Productive engineers shift identity.

From code writer to system thinker.

Leverage beats effort. Results are the only thing that matters.

Own the system, not the syntax.

Unfinished work leaks mental memory.

Some developers leave tasks half done and carry bugs in their head all night.

Focus drops. Energy drops.

Productive engineers close loops.

End the day with a clear next step written down.

Free your brain to solve one hard problem at a time.

You are not a CPU running at full speed all day.

Productive engineers schedule hard problems in high energy windows, and leave low energy time for reviews and admin work.

Some engineers fight their energy and burn out.

Match work intensity to energy and you ship more with less stress

Two faces of the same problem:

Some engineers see feedback and think “I’m bad at this”, so they hide and waste hours stuck.

Others think “they’re wrong”, so they ignore feedback and stop learning.

Both cost time and team speed.

They are the same problem: A fixed mindset.

Productive engineers treat reviews as a shortcut.

Ask. Clarify. Use tools. Learn fast.

Pride is expensive.

Work expands like gas in a container.

Some engineers give tasks two weeks and fill every day of the second week polishing.

They ship late and call it "quality."

Productive engineers time box hard.

Define done. Cut scope. Ship.

Smaller containers force real progress.

Programming isn’t typing code.

It’s organizing complexity.

That’s the real job of a software engineer.

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The productive engineer does not split work and life.

Some developers only build systems at work.
Then they forget about groceries and bills because they don't use a calendar in their real life.

Run the same systems at home. You have them at work for some reason.

Less noise. More focus for the things that matter in your life

You solve your hardest bugs away from the keyboard.

I used to feel guilty for walking away when I was stuck. I thought staring at the monitor forced a solution. I just got headaches.

Your brain needs to connect unrelated ideas. This happens when you relax. It is why the fix hits you in the shower or while commuting.

But you need a system to make this reliable instead of luck. It is called an anchor.

1. Write down the specific question you cannot answer.
2. Go for a walk or read a blog about a completely different tech stack.
3. Let your brain run in the background.

☝️ Find out here the productivity system to have better ideas:

https://lnkd.in/etdWKjbd

I stopped trusting my memory. I added safe points.

Before switching tasks, I write past, present, future in a scratchpad.

It is my working memory when interruptions hit.

Some engineers rely on recall. Productive engineers dump state and resume fast.

Find out the process in this article: 

https://lnkd.in/e_JeBZJd

Productive engineers move faster than others.

Not because they are smarter, but because they obsess over iteration speed.

They do not wait 12 minutes for a deployment to learn nothing.

They spin up a local server and test a change in under a minute.

Fast feedback beats perfect setups every time.

Stop trying to be the hero who answers every DM.

That's destroying your focus.

I felt important when I answered immediately, but I was actually a bottleneck for my team.

You are hiding important information in private chats.

Instead it's better to create a system that removes the need to have these many DMs

Current software engineers do something else while AI writes their code.

They would return and approve the changes, then submit a PR.

A teammate finds a bug in a logic branch.

They tell them. "My AI did that"

Everyone is mentally detaching from the problem.

Productive engineers keep their focus inside the code.

Some engineers switch tabs and lose their flow.

They'll feel drained after work because of these micro switches.

Better to stay present with the code when:
→ Solving complex logic.
→ Building new features.

And you can do something else only when:
→ Writing routine documentation.
→ Fixing simple typos.

Check the full system: 

https://lnkd.in/dfJs973k

Stop trying to build the next AWS from scratch.

Growing up, I thought great engineers were building everything again from scratch. I was wrong. That would just slow the product development.

Great engineers work in platforms, which are like coral reefs. They support use cases never imagined before.

- The creators of GPS tracked submarines. They never planned for Pokémon GO.
- Twitter did not invent the hashtag. Their users built it on top of the API.

You cannot compete by reinventing the wheel.

1. Build on top of existing cloud and libraries
2. Don't train AI models from scratch. Fine-tune existing checkpoints.
3. Write code that is a platform. Expose APIs so others can build what you did not predict.

That will also make the platforms stronger and more resilient.

Software engineers should get closer to other engineering fields.

Some software engineers think their problems are unique.

Then you watch civil or mechanical engineers ship atoms and steel.

Software is cheap to change.

That is an advantage. Use it.

Stop feeling guilty for browsing the internet.

I used to block every website to force myself to code. I thought focus was the only way to solve problems.

I was wrong. The web is a serendipity engine.

But it only works if you have an anchor.

An anchor is a specific problem you are holding in your mind.

When you have an anchor, your brain actively scans everything you see for a match.

You might read a random marketing blog and suddenly realize how to fix your distributed system.

You are not wasting time by reading blogs. You are widening your inputs.

Next time you are stuck try this:
1. Write your problem on a post-it note.
2. Find some time to relax and read some blogs and newsletters
3. Let your brain make connections.

Turn your relaxed time into brain background processing.

Slack interruptions are not small context switches. They are kill signals.

They force you to drop a half built thought with no save point.

You lose 20 minutes building context, then 20 more rebuilding it later.

Some engineers let their Slack set their priorities. Productive engineers design an attention architecture and decide what can interrupt them.

Every concept you learn is a LEGO piece.

Productive engineers know what each piece can do, so they reuse it to build faster. Some engineers chase new ideas, but progress comes from combining what you already know.

That is how you save time and ship smarter.

Keep learning.

taplio

The Battle

Nicola Ballotta

Francisco Ramírez

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The Battle

Nicola Ballotta

Francisco Ramírez

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Francisco Ramírez's LinkedIn Performance

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