Abhipsa Mishra

Humans have an inherent friction to change, be it city, house, job, role, team—almost anything. Interestingly, in my whole career, I have hardly found anyone who recently joined a team and wholeheartedly appreciates the things the team has done in the past or is currently doing. Most Engineers and PMs have their existing biases towards how things should be done, best practices, etc. They have their anecdotes to prove their points. I do appreciate people from diverse backgrounds, as that helps figure out solutions to tough problems sometimes. However, things become less productive when it results in ego clashes. Especially when interacting with some of the young engineers, they are very enthusiastic about new technologies, programming languages, cool frameworks, tools, and whatnot. They feel disconnected when they find none of these things are that relevant to most organizations doing real business. I know that's not cool, but that's how most businesses are built. Things at well-established businesses can't be changed at the pace at which technologies are evolving. Of course, corrective actions need to be taken at certain intervals. How to solve it: Develop empathy. Context is king, trust that the decisions that a team or company has taken in the past must have had a legit context then. A decision that seems stupid now might have been the best possible decision back then, depending on factors like cost, tech capabilities, resources, time to market, and probably many more. #empathy #context #business

86

1 Comment

Monday Blues: Engineer to Manager Edition 💻📈 As a software engineer, Monday blues meant gearing up for coding sprints and bug fixes. Now, as a manager leading 20+ high-performing (and some needing a nudge 😉) team members, the game has shifted. But here’s the secret: I’ve learned to manage Mondays before they manage me. 🔑 What I do: ✨ Protect weekends: I unplug unless something critical arises—rest fuels resilience. ✨ Sunday catch-up: I spend 30 minutes on Sunday evening mapping out the week. It’s not about working but setting the stage for a smoother Monday. ✨ Weekly clarity: I identify my top three priorities for the week early. Even with operational demands and unexpected fires, this gives me focus and direction. ✨ Team sync: Monday mornings, I set clear goals with my team, aligning individual contributions with big-picture outcomes. Clarity = confidence. ✨ Celebrate small wins: Acknowledging progress from last week boosts momentum and team morale. 💡 Why it works: It helps me support my team better, stay proactive, and show up as the leader they need—focused, calm, and prepared. The truth is, it’s not about hustling harder. It’s about working smarter, planning better, and knowing when to unplug. How do you tackle your Monday blues? Share your tips—I'd love to learn! #Leadership #EngineeringManagement #Productivity #Teamwork #MondayMotivation #ManagerLife #TeamGrowth

3

I resigned from my dream of working in Amazon for a 6 months’ vacation. In the end it will be an intense 11 years and 8 months experience, started as Individual Contributor followed by 8 years as Software Development Manager, in 5 organisations in both SDO and AWS. Adhered to Constantin Brancusi life’s motto “Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god”, being twice promoted vertically and once horizontally, while making it to top 1% tenure in Romania and 1.3% global. Fully embraced all the LPs but loved Learn and Be Curious, Ownership, Develop the Best, and Deliver Results hence became Amazon global Samurai, European Samurai, Quality Samurai Program Owner, Romanian Samurai, and Engineering Excellence Program Contributor. “Samurai-ng” offered the chance to review tens of tech designs, contribute and simultaneously learn from brilliant engineers and (under Raluca Buhaianu guidance) created, delivered, and collaborated at training material for tens of thousands of Amazonians around the world, basically supporting the ramping up of every newcomer engineer or engineering manager. As a manager learned first-hand from the wealth of experience of Executives like Lucian Vornicu, Dennis Suppe, Blair Hotchkies, Wyatt Camp, Reena Agarwal, Claire Ngo, Noopur Vyas, stepping out of the comfort zone with every major release. Reporting directly to you and having weekly 1:1s put my growth on steroids, much obliged! Had the chance to leading charters up to multiple teams and to becoming a second line manager thanks to Raluca Buhaianu, Ciprian Răzvan Hodorogea, Dragos Cojocaru, group owners tailoring Company-wide solutions around talents first. Forever grateful to you, major shareholders of my story! When need and opportunity occurred, learned from formal and informal mentors like Garry Gross, Razvan Udrea, Mihai Diac, Bogdan Ghidireac, Cristi Balcanu, Florin Manolache. You impacted my personal growth and my teams' development, thank you! Received so much but also able to leave the Amazon Development Center Romania world a little better, doubling down on Developing the Best, currently ranking first for vertical and horizontal promotions for software engineers (SDE, SDET, FE Eng, AS, WebDev, Support Eng, SysDev, BIE, TPM, SDM), with the exception of Data Engineers (no.2 if including DEs too, after Andrei-Liviu Dumbrava, a role model Sr. SDM I look up to). Amazonians are knowledgeable, gritty, and resourceful, being a complete privilege partnering on projects ranging from builder tools to text and image extraction and processing, or to Payments, Privacy and Customer Behaviour platforms, making or saving BN$ in CAPEX, GMS or fines. Thank you to each and every engineer I worked with, I was honoured to collaborate with you! Wishing you all the best, ex-colleagues and now friends, yet hoping not to be final and perpetual, the “short word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future” (Steinbeck): good-by!

311

19 Comments

Time to lean on some LinkedIn experts. I've recently taken on line management of a platform engineering team. In the past I have mainly worked in product engineering teams, which naturally means there is a slight difference in the work and mindset of the engineers. As a way to ensure I can be the best manager to them, I'm looking for any materials relating to platform engineering that might make some good reading. Suggestions? P.s. I'm not necessarily looking to become a fully-fledged platform engineer myself, but at least understand the problem domain in enough detail to augment my usefulness to the team. P.p.s I also know that I should also treat the platform as a product, so that's not an issue. It's mainly around any key concepts for platform engineering that might be key to focus on. #softwaredevelopment #platformengineer #azure #aws

11

8 Comments

What I said to AMZN few business tips to make their Alexa business model more robust Instead of selling Alexa as is with high price and no real value to many people. I recommend you adopt more long term global strategy to gain more long term higher value customers. Lower the entry price and make it part of AMZN premium . Offer him a complete IOT kit with IOT hub , smart lamps and Alexa device . Give him time to get used to your home eco-system . Prepare him for long term relationship to buy your robot cleaner smart fridge oven etc . Give him the technology to remotely manage his house then Use Start bringing GenerativeAI when you have enough customers base.., And be patient the money will be flowing because once he is set with AMZN it will be already difficult to switch to another vendor. Nothing genius it is just common sense Business strategy. And told him if you want to move to the next level of business solutions I’m here to help 😉

Still got it. ("it" being the ability to do medium-hard leetcode exercises in a generous amount of time. I got absolutely flattened by one of these a few months ago which threw some much harder problems at me - there is a threshold of difficulty above which I really do need to go away and think about it a bit without the distraction of a ticking clock. When conducting live code test interviews I've often seen people fall on the wrong side of that threshold, sometimes for quite "easy" problems, and it's hard to say whether this is truly indicative of a limit to *ability* as such. It seems to me that there are at least three factors in play: 1. General familiarity with the space of "data structures and algorithms", and the ability to find a good answer using the tools and techniques you have at hand. This is what we generally tell ourselves we're testing for. 2. The ability to pattern-match that knowledge to arbitrary, and often quite whimsically expressed, challenges quickly enough to head off expeditiously down the right path to a solution, by using "fast" (heuristic) rather than "slow" (reasoning) thinking. This can be something a bit more like "muscle memory": people who do a lot of competitive coding challenges will tend to be sharper at it. To some degree this is indicative of accumulated experience and the intensity of someone's recent engagement with hands-on coding, in which we are also interested as interviewers. I've usually been impressed when a candidate's taken one look at the challenge, gone "oh yes, it's one of these", and rattled out a solution almost mechanically. On the other hand, it's not telling me much about how they reason their way through problems that don't yield to their heuristics. 3. The ability to use either kind of thinking under time and social pressure, which varies somewhat. Some people do freeze, and while I've always tried to help them out when interviewing it's not always possible for them to find their way back to the required presence-of-mind. Are the kind of time and social pressure you're artificially creating in your interview typical of your real working environment? Then I guess it's appropriate to penalise candidates who won't thrive in that environment. But it may not be the sort of place where real "slow" thinking gets done very often, and that might be a problem for both you and a thoughtful interviewee. There are lots of candidates, and we have to screen them somehow: the all-day on-site interview process I once went through at TIM, An Acuris Company might be unfeasible for most organisations now. But it was also a good experience and gave a fair picture of my strengths and weaknesses, and from what I saw while working there it brought in good people.)

19

4 Comments

Has anyone done Kafka consumer monitoring using Jmeter ? when I am monitoring, though the messages are flowing in the Kafka topic, but I am getting zero message count for consumer records while polling with 1000 or 100. tried increasing the load as well, but still Kafka consumer message count is Zero. where.as I can see the messages in Kafka lenses. kindly suggest for solutions or any sample JSR22 sampler for Kafka consumer.

2

2 Comments

Side projects: What would a curious person like to work on? Let's get the repetitive work out of the scope first, then also the rigidly structured work. Freedom to explore and scope for new must be there. What will they like to work on then? Those who are intelligent tend to do things faster, better, more. Those who are curious, tend to dwell a lot on "what ifs" - "can we do it this way?" type of thoughts. Most economically productive jobs don't provide that kind of freedom. The freedom to explore, doing things a new way, and move on to the next experiment if the previous one failed, even if the previous one succeeded. Because it isn't a success that satisfies them, but exploration. There should be no deadline, no expectation, no goal, except to explore and have fun. Most people want to work on good stuff. But the definition of "good work" is different for different people. For some good work is "the complex work", for some good work is "what gets them recognition", for some good work is "easy work", for some good work is what helps them "learn" and so on. For the curious, the good work is "free exploration". For them the good work is "play", in which they can test the boundaries and hypotheses. Good work is something they can lose themselves in, without caring about the outcome. Every now and then there's good work in jobs too, mostly in startups in case of programmers. The proof of concept type of work, or those little automation scripts. But in the end, outcome matters. It's no one's fault, these are businesses not research labs. This is the appeal of side projects. Little experiments designed to answer - Can we do it this way?

1

Talking with loads of #ios and #android engineers and leaders since my return from holiday last week. It seems there's still lots of questions around how long will it take the market to pick up! I'm getting asked 'Is it just the iOS market that's slow?' Err no, certainly not. 'Will the Android market pick up this year?' I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have optimism. "It cant stay slow forever!" I reassure them. There will be a bounceback! Let's talk..... When do you think the iOS and Android recruitment market will pick up? Are you already seeing the greenshoots of recovery? Have you got some inspirational words of positive stories to share with your fellow devs? Please let me know when you're commenting whether you're in the UK, Ireland or Europe! #androidengineer #iosengineer #uktechjobs #mobileapps #bounceback

15

4 Comments

🚀 Hands-on coding is essential for engineering managers and tech leads. DX is a critical aspect of a manager's role, and it can only be truly improved by those who actively write code themselves. By staying engaged with the codebase, leaders can better understand the challenges their teams face and develop effective dogfood tools and services that enhance productivity and quality. ⚖️ While a 50/50 split between coding and management may not always be practical, maintaining a strong connection to the code is a step in the right direction for any engineering leader.

4

If you're trying to inspect an element that's removed from the DOM when the element blurs or loses focus, there's a handy little trick that you can use to keep the element focused so that you can inspect the DOM. Here's how to do it: 1. Click the kebab menu in the top right of dev tools. 2. Hover over More Tools and select Rendering. 3. Scroll down to the option that says Emulate a Focused Page and toggle it on. You should now be able to inspect the element without losing focus. See the video if you want to see a demo. #softwaredevelopment #frontend #devtools

14

As a Principal Engineer, I mentor many talented engineers who are new to senior level or have been seniors for a while but are still exploring what that means. They all seek similar guidance on what comes next. I've distilled the key advice I share into this blog post to help you navigate your next steps and continue excelling in your tech career. https://lnkd.in/g8S8r66b

58

Its been 6 months since i started work at Nectar. “How is the Work-Life balance there at Nectar?” Is one of the most common questions i have been asked by people over linkedin who are interested in joining the team. Many of them from old friends wondering if the grass is greener at Nectar. I have started responding that i feel like work-life balance is the wrong way to think about it. When i think of work life balance i rememeber this experience from a past job. I was expected to work and work and work, starting out id work 9-5 and then some more at 8 after kids went to bed. That was until my boss got after me and said it wasnt enough, so i said i would start at 7 so i could still have 2-3 hours with my kids a day. He begrudgingly agreed, but from that time forward i was being watched like a hawk, i would get slack messages at 6:30 am asking if i was working yet for example. I was trying to find time to spend with my family. it was hard to find a good balance and i was miserable. I think what people really need to know is how well integrated work is into their life. You spend 8 or more hours a day doing whatever it is you do at work, and if you consider those 8 hours a day not “life” but something to balance with your life, you’re going to end up feeling bitter towards work. Wondering if you should have stuck with your music degree and never got into programming, and feeling like youre stuck working a job that slowly drains you of your zest for life. If you can find a job and find the right attitude for work, it integrates into and becomes a part of life. Youll look forward to work more often, youll find yourself putting in a couple extra hours here and there because you want to get a project done, just as you would put in crazy hours to finish a diy project on your home or something. A huge part of it too is finding and building the right team, a team with high trust between members. When a team has high trust, people will want to put their best foot forward at work to maintain the trust placed in them. Nectar has shifted how i think about work. Its mission is to help people feel valued and appreciated at work and when i joined i crossed my fingers that they practiced what they preach and i can tell you 100% they do! Dont look to balance work with your life, integrate it into your life! That way you get to live your life 8 more hours a day, instead of putting your life on pause for that time.

33

2 Comments

🚀 Engineering opportunity - .Net, AWS, Angular/REACT Microservices, Lambda, NoSQL, Observability, Security We have a full-stack role. But as we all know it is not possible to be truly full-stack whether it be consciously or subconsciously there is always a preference. With this role, the weighting is on the backend. 🔙 I am looking for an API guru who can confidently lead the organisation through its API re-development, which means moving to a microservice, tackling observability and security. Everything will be built to scale using best practices. 🌟 Do you consider yourself to be an API mastermind? 🌟 Are you across engineering best practices? 🌟 Can you confidently talk about the microservices architecture you have worked on? 🌟 Would you like to help drive an organisation through an API modernisation? If the answer to the above is YES then reach out to David Moore and Chad McMillan #engineering #highavailability #lowlatency #microservices #api #engineer #agile #tdd #continuousintegration #continuousdeployment #lambda

7

One of my managers at Google , had this really lovely habit of leaving handwritten notes on my desk, coffee mug, or laptop—sometimes for special occasions, but often just because she sensed I wasn’t myself that day. No matter what the note said, it always managed to brighten my mood and bring a smile to my face. I still remember one time she surprised the entire team with small souvenirs, and sure enough, there was a note tucked in, this time too! That note has stayed with me. It said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” Those words hit me deeply. From that day on, I’ve tried ( Yes, tried, because I still do have not-so-great days) in every conversation—whether with friends, family, colleagues, or customers—to make sure people feel seen, heard, and valued. It’s something that has changed how I approach not only personal relationships but also professional ones. Whether it’s in sales meetings with customers, networking dinners, or just a one-on-one meeting, I try to bring ease to the table. This doesn’t mean you can’t be strong or assertive—it’s more about being someone who leaves people feeling respected, not diminished. We’re all just trying to figure out this thing called life, and none of us have all the answers. Giving others grace and understanding can make all the difference. One such message by Rashi. Needless to say, even after all these years, she did make me feel good 😊

210

6 Comments

Early Access for the Anti-Food App 😍 Request Early Access: https://lnkd.in/dVfaMjVp Grocery shopping used to be a delightful experience, full of the excitement of discovering new products. But that excitement often turned into frustration when I found myself grappling with confusing ingredient lists and misleading marketing jargon. One afternoon, overwhelmed by the cryptic ingredients on a cereal box, I snapped a photo and sent it to a tech-savvy friend, saying, "I wish there were an app that could decode these ingredients and tell me if they're actually good for me." This simple wish soon turned into a bigger challenge when I found myself in a remote area where the language was unfamiliar. I realized the need for an app that could not only translate ingredients but also simplify marketing jargon into easily understandable keywords in the native language. What’s more, I wanted to address the fact that the same product often has different ingredients and even different tastes in various countries—a unique challenge that sets this app apart from others on the market. Leveraging a handpicked selection of expert examples, I developed a finely tuned AI model and a mobile application that brings this solution to life. The application is designed with simplicity in mind, featuring just two main screens: one to take a photo of the product, and another to view the AI-interpreted results. The app extracts keywords from vague descriptions, translates complex marketing terms, and provides a potential health risk assessment through a clear, color-coded grading system. Join the early access program and be among the first to experience the Anti-Food app. Request Early Access: https://lnkd.in/dVfaMjVp Early Access participants, will receive a full year of fully unlocked Anti-Food app for free. This is limited by time and amount of participants.

5

Steps to for landing an engineering #manager role 1. Start preparing 5-6 months in advance 2. Re-evaluate wether you really want to continue the management role? or should you switch back to #IC role (specially now that they seem to have close if not equal technical bar); More on “Elusive Identity of EM” (TM by me) on a later post. 3. Start preping for coding (Leetcode; 4 easy, 2 medium, and 1 hard, per week) and System Design (will share another post with resources) 4. Create a sheet of your #SBI examples; Stay truthful to your examples, as authenticity, integrity, and trust is key in nailing behavioral questions. The trick is to practices frequently until you are able to narrate your examples as a nice story 5. Take a product led growth approach on your job search and your resume 6. Tap into your network; Not everyone will or can help you but its worth exploring 7. Make every interview count; Sure It is a numbers game but don’t confuse it with meaningless attempts.

16

1 Comment

One of the biggest challenges with feedback is the confusion with critisism and complaint. Feedback is mostly feeding back into a running cycle of human interactions and work, ideally avoiding disruption and ultimately all sides walking away with a high level of motivation, knowing what to do next. Leaders with a strong skill in this deserve admiration, their success confirms them. #feedback

4

1:1s have their own growth trajectory (lifecycle) which starts with 1. Introduction 2. Expectations setting (both ways) 3. Growth/feedback 4. Feeling inspired 5. Exceeding the role expectations 6. Get promoted to next level and repeat step 2-6. I learnt this when few months ago when one of my directs mentioned that they feel motivated/charged to take on more challenges/problems to solve after every 1:1. In my opinion step 4 is most important and often ignored, if an employee does not leave the 1:1 feeling inspired, it would take them longer to think equivalent to the next pay grade and exceed expectations. This is where exceptional leaders can provide sufficient context and opportunities to outgrow their directs with mentoring/coaching. What do you think? Did I miss anything? Image source - https://lnkd.in/dqx4ngdg

4

1 Comment