A Heart-to-Heart with My Branch Manager

Yesterday I had my regular 1-on-1 meeting with our Korean branch manager, and honestly, these conversations are always something special. Unlike typical corporate 1-on-1s that focus on work goals and performance metrics, our chats dive into the deeper stuff - “How should we live life?”, “How’s your relationship with your girlfriend going?”, “Everything okay at home?” It’s refreshingly human.

What I’ve always found amazing about my manager is how genuinely curious he is about what matters to each of us as people. He doesn’t just care about our work deliverables - he wants to understand what drives us, what we value, what makes us tick. There’s something deeply moving about a leader who approaches his team with such authentic humanity.

This time around, we talked about what kinds of work energize me, how I approach problems, and what my natural working style looks like. I honestly thought we’d discuss that internal position change proposal I got from our VP, but instead we ended up having a much more fundamental conversation about who I am as a person.

Finding Common Ground: How We Both Approach Work

My manager shared something really interesting with me. He said that if you want to change positions, you need to make the person who has the power to decide that change naturally feel like it’s necessary. This really resonated with me - it’s exactly how I think about things too.

When I tackle projects, I don’t usually wait until I have everything perfectly planned out. Instead, I like to jump in, figure out what’s actually needed as I go, and then naturally guide the people around me toward the solutions I think will work best. It’s about helping others see the direction I’m thinking and making it feel like their choice to go that way.

Talking it through, we realized we share another trait: we’re both not super detail-oriented people. Most of the software developers I work with are incredibly meticulous (they have to be - details matter a lot when you’re trying to avoid bugs!), but that’s just not how our brains work.

What I’m really good at is “getting things rolling.” I care a lot about customer relationships and try to solve urgent requests as quickly as possible. While some developers get frustrated when customers suddenly change requirements or make last-minute requests, I see it differently.

Take Sebastian, my daily sync partner in Poland - he believes life should be lived with incredibly detailed planning, and he gets really stressed when his plans get disrupted. (The guy even planned his three kids to be born in the same month for scheduling efficiency! 😄)

But I think we’re here to help our customers succeed. I don’t believe projects should only follow predetermined plans. There should always be buffer time, and being able to quickly adapt to customer needs is crucial.

What Actually Gets Me Excited

I’ve been thinking deeply about what really interests me lately. I joined Sonatus as employee #4x, and now we’re a global company with over 300 people across 9 offices worldwide - and we’re still growing incredibly fast. Looking back at why I left a stable job to join this tiny startup, it really came down to my love for new challenges.

I get bored in stable environments where there isn’t much to do. I struggle in situations where I can only do assigned tasks and don’t have the authority to be proactive. In the early days, I went way beyond just being a software engineer - I handled customer support, infrastructure, field systems, container management, you name it.

But as the company has grown and our systems have become more mature, roles have become much more clearly defined. While this makes total sense from a business perspective, I’ve been feeling like I need to find more interesting challenges.

The Field Application Engineer position offers the advantage of working with Korean customers where we already have strong relationships, so I could work with our VP from the BD team to paint bigger pictures. On the flip side, the Customer Service Engineer role would be about building relationships with overseas customers from scratch - mostly POC-stage projects right now, which means pioneering in uncharted territory.

What really gets me excited is breaking new ground in challenging situations. Just like when I first joined Sonatus - we were short-staffed, nobody could predict if the company would succeed, but that uncertainty and challenge made it incredibly interesting and rewarding.

Wrapping Up

Reflecting on today’s conversation, I feel like I have a clearer picture of where I’ve been and where I want to go. My manager’s insights always give me new perspectives to think about. While it’s natural for roles to evolve as organizations grow, I think the key is to keep finding work that genuinely excites you and pursuing those challenges.

Tomorrow I should turn these thoughts into a concrete career plan. Change can be scary, but finding new opportunities within that change has always been one of my strengths.

Writing this down and reflecting on it really helps organize my thoughts. I should definitely keep up this journaling habit.