The Ultimate Builder
What's Next For Leaders Like Me and You
A while ago, I found myself in a situation that is painfully familiar to many in the corporate world. I got promoted. I took on a new role, heavier responsibilities, and the classic promise of a compensation review in the “very next cycle.”
A few months later, that cycle arrived. My reward? Nothing.
It was disappointing. Turbulent times and budget cuts, so that I should just be happy I had stability.
But I couldn’t accept that.
I had done my absolute best to meet expectations and hadn’t hesitated to take responsibility for an organization and scope several times larger than before. So, after a few challenging discussions, I negotiated a different kind of compensation: I would work four days a week instead of five, for the same money.
That decision changed my life. I’ve covered the personal benefits in my yearly summary; here, I want to talk about what this did for my professional career.
Today, my working life operates in two completely different dynamics.
The Day Job: The Engineering Manager
For 4 days a week, I serve as an Engineering Director and Site Leader. I manage dozens of engineers across multiple domains and oversee an entire branch of nearly 100 people.
This is where I implement everything I write about on Practical Engineering Management:
Basics: Career progression frameworks and expectation management.
Center-Out Leadership: I set the direction and navigate with leverage points, but I delegate expertise to highly qualified Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers whose technical depth I couldn’t possibly match at my scale.
Leader-to-Leaders Approach: I expect people to bring clear intent over permission-seeking. My teams must be able to act without my constant involvement.
Data-Driven Focus: I expect to bring rich instrumentation to all we do.
Problem-Solving Focus: Every big project must answer the following questions: what real problem it solves, for which stakeholders, and what metrics we will monitor after delivery.
Strategic Compounding: Every initiative must compound over a 12-to-18-month timeframe, stemming from a solid Engineering Strategy Framework.
More about how I lead my engineering teams can be found here.
I still care deeply about my job and put a lot of energy into it. But the moment I log off on Thursday afternoon, a completely different dynamic begins.
The Weekend: The Ultimate Builder
From Thursday afternoon to Monday morning, I become what I call “The Ultimate Builder.”
At first, this time was just for recovering from corporate burnout. But soon, with a refreshed perspective, I started Practical Engineering Management. Then I wrote a book. And finally, after years of corporate stagnation, I came back to coding.
Then the AI revolution hit.
Suddenly, what used to take me months now takes days. I don’t just build a single app; I build five simultaneously. I bootstrap, iterate, fail, and bounce back faster than ever before. Over a single weekend, I create more tangible output than I do in my day job over several weeks.
In the last four months alone, I’ve built:
A fully integrated side-gig selling 3D-printed terrain for runners (from landing page to Stripe integration). You can see it on RunArt.pl.
The complete custom tooling behind it: GPX parsers, SVG exporters, and 3D processing tools fetching DEM terrain from national geoportals into Three.js.
A complete management system for OCR/Ninja gyms (rankings, challenges, leagues), soon going live to back a national league and multiple official competitions.
Working prototypes of native mobile apps for athletes, I’m about to release in the following weeks.
Writing it out, it’s hard to believe how much tech I could cover: full-stack Next.js, Three.js, Android, 3D rendering, payment gateways, multi-cloud data processing, and more.
Why You Need to Build
I am sharing this because there are other Ultimate Builders out there.
I met them during multiple hackathons organized by local communities. These are Product Designers, PMs, business people or just regular engineers who jumped into the AI revolution and are bringing ideas to life at lightspeed. Today, they single-handedly create beautiful, functional, single-purpose solutions in a week that big organizations cannot deliver over multiple months.
They aren’t superhumans. It is simply easier than ever to build.
But you won’t see this if you are trapped in a cycle of calculating story points and meeting unrealistic deadlines you committed to during quarterly planning six months ago.
Don’t get me wrong—don’t quit your corporate job. It brings stability, scale, and capital you rarely get from a side gig.
But you must carve out a day or two to see the outside world. You need to build freely, bootstrap your own ideas, and slowly establish your independence. So when the time is right—or when the future wave of layoffs hits today’s high performers like you—you will be ready.
With your mindset and the tools available to you, you can be a powerful builder.
What’s Next for Practical Engineering Management?
This brings me to a crossroads, and I need your honest opinion about the content I bring here. Please write it here, via DM or simply on mirek@practicalengineering.management
The traditional boundaries of Engineering Management are blurring. In the age of AI, our leadership skills are no longer limited to managing human teams within a single organization. We are moving from managing people to managing systems, agents, and rapid product lifecycles.
Do you want to keep reading strictly about traditional “Practical Engineering Management,” or are you ready to pivot into the world of the “Ultimate Builder,” where we apply our management frameworks to 10x our individual output?
There has never been a better time to create. Your energy can go into being a 20% better manager or a 10x better builder. (Or, if you play your cards right, both).
What’s your call?