What does your technical path look like?
I started as a summer intern at Schibsted Tech Polska. Thankfully, I was offered to stay, so I started a regular job as a frontend developer. I worked part-time, as I was still studying back then. Upon graduation, I transitioned to full-time work and became the Tech Lead of a small team. After a couple of months, I stepped in as an Engineering Manager with the challenge of creating a new team from scratch. I led it for 1.5 years, and after one of the reorgs, we became a part of a bigger team, which I’ve been happily managing for almost 3 years now.
What technologies do you use on a daily basis in the project?
We mostly use Node.js and Typescript, sometimes React, and recently, a part of the team had a chance to work in Golang in one of our projects.
How would you describe your usual day at work?
I’d say every day for a manager looks different, I’m primarily focused on people development, and my day depends on their needs. But here is an example of my regular day: as the first thing, I check unread messages on Slack and emails and follow up on them if needed. Then we have a team call where we do a standup and chit-chat afterwards. One of my favourite types of days includes 1:1 meetings, during which I can gather some feedback, give some heads-ups, but also get to know better how the person is doing. Quite often, there are action points for me that I try to resolve just after the meeting. If I don’t have any other meetings or urgent issues, I try to spend some time on my personal development, e.g. by reading articles.
What do you value most about working at Schibsted?
Trust. It is present at the company level towards employees, so we don’t work in an unhealthy controlling atmosphere, but it’s also at the roots of relationships in our team. Eg. I’m just heading to the office to have a group feedback session with my team, where we openly give feedback to each other. It wouldn’t be possible without trust and belief in the best intentions.
What was your biggest technical challenge?
In my current team, we have the autonomy to set the technical direction of a platform that other developers teams use. Of course, this can’t be done in isolation. We need to ensure that we deliver what developers need and want to use, what is attractive from a developer experience perspective but at the same time stable and resilient. In light of the current reorg, we will make more of such decisions, which is quite a technical challenge. One of them would be to pick the most suitable framework. In order to get familiar with the options we have, during summer we performed “lab week” in our team, which aim was to try out different technologies – Astro, Next.js, Svelte – and to create a simple version of our platform in each of them to compare.
What did you want to do as a child?
I had plenty of ideas about what I could do until I picked my university and decided to study Computer Science. My first memory of a dream job was to become an archaeologist or a writer. The first time I got into computers was in primary school, and I wanted to be a hacker :). I also considered acting and art history, but my fondness for science was the strongest one.
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