Week 13-14, 2025 - Anxiety and Excitement

Back after two weeks, thanks for sticking around. These days I’m mostly busy with my first 1:1 training clients, who want to be (better) engineering managers; and thinking about how to organize and display the content I produce that’s scattered around the web under different platforms and names.

Talking about content on other platforms: I published the hardest Engineering Management challenge so far in my Substack series: how to select people to let go during a layoff. I’ll be honest, I struggled with this one because the ask is so absurdly hard, to take something that’s working and cut off parts of it, expecting to avoid disturbance in the output. This fallacy inspired the core of my approach: No, you actually can’t expect the same output; you need to create a new team with a new mission. But this external crisis can also be seen as an opportunity to sit back, challenge, and re-plan why and how the team is doing what it’s doing.

📋 What I learned recently

Seeing a crisis as an opportunity is something I want to talk about a bit deeper. I heard an interesting fact at the Budapest Leadership Lab’s recent workshop about change management: Anxiety and excitement have very similar physiological symptoms. Elevated heart rate, faster breathing, heightened alertness, adrenaline pumping in the veins. The only difference is our perception, the assessment of the situation, the decision if the trigger is a threat or an opportunity.

I find reframing a powerful tool (see my articles about Impostor Syndrome and Celebrating Failure for example), and this tool can be applied to anxiety-inducing situations too. The context of this workshop was “change”, but reframing threat as an opportunity can be used in the day-to-day work of an Engineering Manager too, not just in the context of “change”. Three examples come to mind:

• Public Speaking - Instead of viewing the racing heart and butterflies as signs of fear before giving a presentation, interpret them as your body energizing you to engage with your audience. The physiological response that you tend to perceive as fear is preparing you to be more expressive, passionate, and alert during your talk.
• High-Stakes Technical Interviews - Rather than experiencing nervousness when interviewing senior engineering candidates as anxiety (about making the wrong hiring decision or a symptom of your impostor syndrome about facing a technically more experienced candidate), reframe it as excitement about potentially hiring someone who will solve critical challenges and make the team more successful. The heightened alertness helps you ask better questions and evaluate responses.
• Production Incidents - Instead of feeling anxious and frozen during system outages, reframe the adrenaline surge as your body preparing you for effective and efficient incident response. The heightened focus and energy helps you coordinate your team, prioritize tasks, and maintain clear communication under pressure - exactly what's needed to resolve the situation.

Noticing the symptoms of anxiety and taking control over their interpretation by reframing them as signs of getting prepared for an opportunity can be a leadership superpower.

🤔 Articles that made me think

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

You have probably heard about the “10x Engineer” expression, and if you follow my writing or know me otherwise, you probably know how I dislike the idolization of rockstar developers. Charity Majors (seems like she pops up in every issue of this newsletter recently!) does a great job debunking this myth with two solid points: there is nobody who’s 10x in everything, while engineering tasks can be extremely diverse; and even if there would be, it’s not engineers who own software, it’s engineering teams. So, focus on building great engineering teams that move the business forward while training the next generation of engineers. Do that, and ironically, you’ll create an environment that’s attractive to high-performing (some would even say “10x”) engineers, too.

AI Bots Inflating Hosting Costs

The story of Gergely Orosz (of Pragmatic Engineer fame) discovering his small pet project’s traffic is 90% bots, despite being banned from the site, forcing him to pay well above the normal costs of hosting. If unauthorized training wouldn’t be enough of a problem for content creators, now they have to pay for having their work stolen too.

🕵️‍♀️ Something cool: Git Who

Are you introducing CODEOWNERS in your CI/CD, or just curious about who made the most contributions to a part of a huge git codebase? Maybe you need an expert from a specific area, or understand if a big codebase still has its main authors within the company. Git who is like git blame, but on files instead of lines of code. This article from the author explains it well, illustrating the tool’s usage on the vim codebase.

Here’s an idea: if you’re onboarding to a new organization, check their codebase with this tool, it might give you ideas about who to reach out to first about the historical aspects of the product.

That’s it for this week, look at something scary with excitement during the weekend,

Péter