Things break because we come to work
What You Will Find Here
If you are looking for a cheerleader to tell you to “hustle,” “crush it,” or “lean in,” you are in the wrong place.
This is a survival guide for engineers and leaders who want to build great things without losing their minds (or their souls).
Management often feels like a series of illogical constraints. I treat it like a distributed systems problem. Here, we debug the corporate stack:
Tactical Leadership: How to protect your team, manage up, and deliver value without the corporate fluff.
The Cultural Gap: Bridging the divide between direct, “Slavic” engineering honesty and American corporate “niceness.”
The Reality of Scale: Lessons on resilience and scarcity. How to prioritize “Physics” (what actually works) over “Optics” (what looks good).
Why “Grumpy”?
I am not grumpy because I hate my job. I am grumpy because I care about the work.
You might recognize this specific type of grumpiness. It is the feeling you get when you sit in a meeting that could have been an email. It is the frustration of watching a brilliant engineering team slowed down by a bloated process.
I write for the people who believe:
“No” is a complete sentence.
Technical debt is a business risk, not a nuisance.
The person who writes the design doc controls the decision.
If you find yourself nodding at this, we are on the same wavelength.
Who is this guy?
My name is Vladimir Weinstein.
I spent 20 years in Big Tech (mostly Google), transitioning from the guy fixing the code to the guy fixing the teams that write the code. I grew up in hyperinflation-era Yugoslavia, which taught me that “scarcity” is a feature, not a bug.
I have seen every management fad come and go. I survived them by sticking to first principles. Now, I am “technically retired,” which means I have no boss, no performance review, and no reason to lie to you.
Work With Me
I only take on projects that are intellectually interesting.
If you are a technical leader trying to solve a hard organizational problem—or if you need someone to come in and tell your team the hard truths that you can’t say—I work with a select few clients via weivco.com.
Strategic Debugging: Auditing your engineering culture to find where the money (and morale) is leaking.
Leadership Mentoring: Teaching Senior Engineers how to survive the transition to Management without becoming “suits.”
If you want the truth, I am available. If you want reassurance, hire a different consultant.
