19 Comments
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Gaurav Jain's avatar

What an amazing and inspiring journey. I absolutely love your transparency and your courage to be true to yourself. Thank you for sharing this journey, Anton, and I wish you the very best!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thank you Gaurav, I appreciate it!

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Natasha Jaffe's avatar

Congratulations 🙂. Sounds like it was a very successful career break!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thanks Natasha! Yep, I would see it was quite successful :)

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Petar Ivanov's avatar

Appreciate the transparency, the shared journey and lessons, Anton! This was a great read! 🙏

Good luck in the next adventures!

Btw, I’d love to learn about the course creation. I’m thinking a lot about doing one but still haven’t started it. 😕

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thanks Petar!

It was a great experience. My top tips:

- Do some public speeches to see what resonates and get some experience in public English speaking.

- Write down fully the lessons, and ask for feedback from people you appreciate.

- Do the first cohort for a small amount (just so people will be serious) and collect feedback

That's at least what I tried :)

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Tom Kadwill's avatar

Great to read your thoughts process about your career and manager.dev. All the best in your new job and evangelist role!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thank you Tom, I apprecaite it!

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Daniil Shykhov's avatar

The Emerson quote fits perfectly, not everyone needs to be a founder, and that’s perfectly fine.

Strength is knowing what works for you.

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Yep, and I couldn't have figured this out without taking some time off :)

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William Meller's avatar

Loved the point about writing for the long run, and the part on selling being harder than expected resonated. Thanks for sharing!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thanks William! I hope it'll pay off :)

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Grishma Doshi's avatar

All the best, Anton!!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thank you Grishma!

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Nikolay Diakov's avatar

Thanks for sharing, mate!

I've been through similar ups and downs.

Humans are built for adventure! Keep the upward aim!

Lovely that you've decided to create life, which put you up for some tough decisions.

All the best!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thank you Nikolay! I appreciate the support :)

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Kacper Wojaczek's avatar

Amazing journey Anton!

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Anton Zaides's avatar

Thank you Kacper :)

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Michael's avatar

Fascinating to see the inner workings and the realization that stability is more important to you. Thank you for sharing!

I would push back on the lack of paywalled articles, how else could you possibly make any money writing? But stating your position differently you would have to be an absolute and utter superstar at writing to even approach a fraction of what you make as an EM / Director / VP.

Reading the article makes me think there are not enough roles for coaches without direct people management responsibility. Easy to see why a company would hire you to manage, but for some strange reason harder to have an IC engineering culture role. Maybe that’s not what you want, but curious if you considered doing consulting on EM culture for multiple companies as an in between a steady job and a startup.

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