Most of what I write here is about systems. This one is about a person, because the hardest thing I did in those years wasn’t a network or a migration. It was managing one engineer who was excellent at his job and, to exactly one person in the company, a genuine pain. That person was me.
His name was Andrew. From the start of 2015 to the end of 2018, in Ukraine, I watched him go from student to architect, and I signed off on most of the steps. I’d do it again. I’d also like a word with the version of me who thought it would be relaxing.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Where I found him
The company ran its own training lab. Not a university partnership, a company-run program open to anyone who passed a screening, where people took courses and worked through real tasks. I’d show up near the end of a cohort to run interviews and find the ones worth hiring.
Andrew wasn’t a fresh student in the usual sense. He’d held a job before, he’d chosen to come through the lab, and he was clearly good for his level. Not “good for a trainee” in the polite, graded-on-a-curve way. Good in a way that made you want him on the team before you’d finished the interview. So I hired him.
What made him worth it
Here’s the part that makes the rest of this story a dilemma instead of a complaint: he was the engineer you dream about staffing a project with.
I never had to micromanage him. You handed him a task and it got done. It didn’t matter what kind. Ops, dev, devops, something half-defined that nobody had scoped properly yet, it all came back finished and done well. He didn’t need it broken down, he didn’t need checking up on, he didn’t need anything explained twice. He was independent in the way that actually lets a manager breathe, which is rarer than any specific skill.
He was also genuinely good with the people around him. With his peers he was a strong teammate. With customers he was great. None of the friction I’m about to describe ever leaked sideways or downward. It all pointed in exactly one direction: up, at me.
That’s the whole tension of this post. The qualities that made him a pain to manage sat right next to the qualities that made him worth promoting, and some days I couldn’t tell them apart.
The Friday phone calls
When we weren’t working on the same project, Andrew called me every Friday evening. For hours. To complain.
Nothing actionable, usually. The project, the team, the circumstances, the general unfairness of things. He’d decided I was the person he wanted to tell, and Friday evening was when he told it. My Friday evenings got longer during the stretches when we weren’t working together, which is a sentence I never expected to write about one of my best engineers.
I took the calls. Partly because some of what he said was worth hearing once you filtered it, and partly because venting at me on a Friday was clearly how he reset for the next week. Annoying as it was, it was cheap for me and useful for him, so I let it run.
The mailing list he unsubscribed from
When I promoted him to senior, I told him it was a good time to start participating in hiring: leading interviews, screening candidates, the things seniors do. He said no.
I scoffed, and told him I’d add him to the hiring mailing list anyway, and that the next time an interesting candidate came up for a position he could interview for, he’d be doing it. Overrule the no, move on, assume that was the end of it. I added him to the list.
A month or so later, the exact candidate showed up. I asked Andrew if he’d seen the CV. No. I told him to check his mailbox. He said he didn’t get hiring emails. I said that was impossible, I’d added him to the list myself. He told me, with total composure, that he’d asked support to remove him from it.
He hadn’t opted out of hiring. He’d gone to IT support and had himself quietly taken off the mailing list, so that when this moment arrived he could tell me, truthfully, that no email had reached him. The effort-to-payoff ratio was spectacular. He’d spent real initiative purely to needle me, and he’d kept it in his back pocket for a month. I was annoyed. I was also, somewhere underneath, a little impressed.
The HR conversation that backfired
We were on the same project once when he told me he wanted off it. He was tired of ours and wanted to switch.
I asked if he was sure, because we had plenty of room inside the project, different directions he could move without leaving. He said no, he wanted out. Fine. A transfer like that has a standard procedure, and the first step is HR talking to the person, so I followed it and asked an HR colleague to speak with him.
She called him into a conference room. Fifteen minutes later she came back, flabbergasted, and asked why on earth I’d started a transfer. Andrew, she said, was perfectly happy on his project.
I went to him. What happened. He feigned innocence. I said: HR just asked how you were doing and you told her you were happy. He looked at me and said, “Oh, she was asking about the project. I thought she just wanted to talk.”
I still don’t know whether that was a misunderstanding or a performance, and I’ve stopped being sure it matters. I’d done everything by the book, run the exact process a transfer is supposed to follow, and the book had a gap he fit through perfectly. With him, the standard steps were never quite enough on their own.
The climb, and the committee that needed an architect in Germany
Despite all of it, I kept promoting him, because on every project he earned it. Reliable, independent, technically strong, good with everyone who wasn’t me. Junior, middle, senior, lead. The friction never once showed up in his output, and I wasn’t going to hold a man’s career hostage to the fact that he enjoyed getting under my skin.
By the time architect was in reach, I’d moved to Germany and was no longer his manager. Before I left, I’d put him on the track and set up the path. The promotion went through an assessment committee, the usual panel that decides whether someone’s ready.
When his turn came, Andrew argued to the committee that the panel really ought to include an architect based in Germany. Sound and reasonable on its face. The catch: at that time I was the only architect the company had in Germany. He knew it. He’d engineered, one last time, a situation that put me squarely back in the room with him.
So I joined the committee.
The interview I’d been writing for years
I didn’t test him on architecture. He’d have aced that in his sleep, and anyway it wasn’t the part of the job I had doubts about. I tested his soft skills. I gave him scenarios, the kind where you ask a senior-or-above person how they’d handle a situation with a colleague or a report, and you listen for judgment, empathy, and self-awareness.
The scenarios were his own stories. The Friday calls. The mailing list. The HR conversation. Rewritten just enough to sit in the third person, handed back to him across a committee table: how would you handle this person?
He recognized them instantly. Of course he did. He sat there and sweated through every one, and then he gave good answers. Genuinely good, as good as soft-skills answers get, the kind that satisfied the rest of the committee and that I couldn’t fault even though I knew exactly where each scenario came from.
He passed. He became an architect.
We never acknowledged, not then and not after, that the scenarios were his. It didn’t need saying. I think that unspoken thing was the most honest conversation the two of us ever had.
What it came down to
- The thing that makes someone hard to manage often shares a root with the thing that makes them worth promoting. Andrew’s refusal to just defer upward was the same independence that meant I never had to check his work. You don’t always get to keep one and drop the other.
- Manage for the team’s output, not for your own comfort. Every one of these stories cost me something personally: time, patience, dignity on a Friday evening. None of them cost the team or the customer anything. If I’d staffed and promoted around my own irritation, I’d have robbed good projects of a great engineer to make my week quieter. That’s a bad trade, and I’d have deserved the worse team I got.
- Friction isn’t the same as a problem. The calls, the needling, the engineered committee seat, none of it ever touched his work, his peers, or a customer. Once I stopped treating “he’s exhausting to deal with” as if it were “he’s bad at the job,” promoting him stopped feeling like a contradiction.
- Test the thing you actually doubt. I had real doubts about his soft skills, so I tested them, hard, with the sharpest material I had. He earned the promotion by clearing a bar I set high precisely because I cared about the answer. That’s not revenge. That’s the job.
I don’t have a neat bow for the relationship. It was good, a little more prickly than I’m usually comfortable with, and genuinely productive. He’s an architect now and he earned it, and I was the manager who put him on that track and made him sweat through the last meter of it. Both of those are true, and I’m fine with both.
One day I’ll run into him again, and I suspect the first thing he’ll do is find something to argue with me about. I’d be a little disappointed if he didn’t.