Stefan Hothbuilds successful and happy engineering teams with a focus on psychological safety and developer productivity
The things I care about
About
With over 15 years of experience in engineering, both hands-on and in leadership roles, I've honed my skills across
diverse settings, including product companies, freelancing, and agencies.
My track record includes leading successful strategic initiatives such as build system migrations, frontend transitions, and design system re-platforming.
Additionally, I've significantly impacted the wider engineering organization by co-creating career frameworks and
contributing to DEI initiatives in hiring and people management.
Contact Me
On Engineering Leadership
Writing beind closed doors
If you are an Engineering leader like me there’s a good chance a significant chunk of your week is dedicated to writing: Proposals & RFCs, reviews & evaluations, communication all across the org chart, planning & alignments, etc. We are busy explaining our reasoning, convicing others or documenting certain expectations.
Despite this huge time investment most of our output stays behind corporate firewalls, inaccessible for the wider community. And, in case of switching jobs, even inaccessible to yourself. I’ve experienced this and it sucks.
The solution is straight-forward for anyone in tech:
Just start a blog!
However, you probably know it’s not that easy. You’re faced with an endless list of tools and platforms to chose from, each demanding another set of decisions - and a lot of time. Something that’s rare to find in a busy week.
A dedicated space for writing in public
After seeing substack grow and attract great writers like Gergely Orosz it’s worth a shot to skip a lot of open questions and reduce my own friction for writing more in public. This brings us here.
I have a few topics that are near and dear to my heart, some already published elsewhere, some are still in my head. I’ll aim to both republish existing once here as well as adding new thoughts on a very irregular schedule.
As always, feedback in any form is much appreciated.
After more than 4 years of supporting ResearchGate in making science more open my journey ended in a mass layoff. It’s never pretty to be part of the group that has to leave but ultimately it’s a chance to reevaluate your current life and consider the next step. And this is where we are now.
About me
With over 15 years of experience in engineering, both hands-on and in leadership roles, I’ve honed my skills across diverse settings, including product companies, freelancing, and agencies. My track record includes leading successful strategic initiatives such as build system migrations, frontend transitions, and design system re-platforming. Additionally, I’ve significantly impacted the wider engineering organization by co-creating career frameworks and contributing to DEI initiatives in hiring and people management.
My leadership priorities
Psychological safety
Creating an environment in which people are encouraged and supported to speak up and contribute is a cornerstone for innovation and continous improvements, let alone a pure respectful and fair environment.
Trust in individuals and teams
Reliance on the people who are closest to the problem to find the right solution reduces the risk of bottlenecks and a lack of innovation.
Career development and a culture of feedback
In order to achieve high employee engagement, retention and organizational strength it’s important to provide everyone with a clear growth path and the feedback to help them achieve their goals, at their pace.
(This is a Berlin clone of the original NYC Hack and Tell Meetup Group!) If you’ve ever visited Hacker News, you’ve almost certainly seen the “Show HN” or “Ask HN” posts. Well, it’s time to get off the Internet and tell us about it face to face. We’ll provide you with our honest feedback, you provide us with a great hack, or idea.
We’ll give you 5 minutes to show off your tool, hack, library (did you just write a library to access the Meetup API in Go!?), whatever. We’re language and software/hardware agnostic, so it’s all fair game.
After you present, it’s an open forum. The audience will ask questions and provide feedback. We want to enable as much participation as possible at these meetups, so you’d better be able to take criticism and dish it out (all within reason of course).
