My learnings from teaching 200+ engineers and leads
Teaching has been one of the most fulfilling things that I am doing, here are my learnings!
Intro
I have taught over 200 engineers and leads in the last 9 months.
And a cool thing? I learned a lot from doing this.
I've gotten to know all the different challenges and problems that all of my students are facing and we talked through them in our sessions!
Today, I am sharing my top learnings in this newsletter article.
This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:
- I have taught 8 engineers and leads by hosting a roundtable at the Plato Elevate Conference
- I have taught 50+ engineers and leads hosting a workshop on C3 Conference
- I have taught 150+ engineers and leads in the course Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role
🔒 My personal 3 learnings from teaching 200+ engineers and leads
🔒 1. If you can teach it, you understand it
🔒 2. Sharing personal experience resonates with people
🔒 3. Teaching is very rewarding
🔒 3 main learnings from teaching 200+ engineers and leads
🔒 1. Fear that becoming a manager would mean being less technical
🔒 2. Students really enjoy the career path discussions and planning their next steps
🔒 3. The networking effect of cohort-based learning is underrated
🔒 Last words
Resources mentioned in the article:
Senior Engineer to Lead: Who to promote and how to train them (paid article)
My secret for growing from engineer to CTO (paid article)
Become a great engineering leader in 2025 (paid article)
Let’s get straight into it!
I have taught 8 engineers and leads by hosting a roundtable at the Plato Elevate Conference
This was in June 2024 in San Francisco, CA. The topic of the roundtable was: “Senior Engineer to Lead: Who to promote and how to train them”.
We had a great mix of Senior Engineers and Managers from various companies like Meta, Bloomberg, Google, Lyft to name a few. Which made the discussion very fruitful and there were a LOT of insightful questions asked.
Also had the pleasure of meeting friends
and there!You can read the overview of the whole discussion we had on the roundtable here: Senior Engineer to Lead: Who to promote and how to train them (paid article).
I have taught 50+ engineers and leads hosting a workshop on C3 Conference
This was also in June 2024 and in Amsterdam, NL. It was a 2-hour workshop titled “From Senior to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role”. We covered:
Differences between engineering lead roles.
How to grow toward a lead role.
How to thrive in the role.
I remember how engaged everyone was in the workshop, there were a LOT of interesting questions being asked and everyone seemed eager to learn.
Also had the pleasure of meeting my friend Richard Donovan.
I have taught 150+ engineers and leads in the course Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role
If you are a regular reader, you have probably seen the course being mentioned in previous articles, but for everyone who doesn’t know → I teach a course that is helping (Senior) Software Engineers to become high-performers and grow to lead roles.
Also with the course, I help leads to thrive in lead roles or provide actionable steps that they can use to help their reports to become high-performers and grow to lead roles.
It’s a cohort-based course which means that sessions are live and recorded. I hosted 4 cohorts so far:
Cohort 1 → July 2024
Cohort 2 → September 2024
Cohort 3 → November 2024
Cohort 4 → January 2025
Cohort 5 → March 2025 (currently in progress, we had the first session yesterday)
Cohort 6 → will be in June 2025
We have 4 different sessions across 4 days. So, for 2 weeks every Tuesday and Thursday, we meet for 1.5 hours on a Zoom call and go through prepared topics.
After each session, there is also a special time of 30 minutes dedicated just to Q&A.
The sessions are highly interactive and I encourage everyone to ask questions or share their insights. I believe half of the time in every session we go through the questions and specific cases from the students.
For every cohort, we also have a special dedicated Slack workspace, where we all get to know each other better and I use it for faster feedback loops.
To ensure that the newly acquired knowledge can be applied immediately, we have 10 different optional exercises across the course.