Some quick links to reach me:
What matters to me
I would summarize my approach to life and work in three points:
- Values matter.
- Impact matters.
- The journey matters.
Values matter
The most significant value I know is life. Being alive does not mean just a beating heart, but following the beat of that heart. Life is full of passion, patience, contradictions, feelings, openness and respect, including the respect of life itself.
Besides life, I learned to see the value in development. Primarily, personal development. I consider technology a tool to support our values, not a value in itself.
As many think that money has some relationship to value, I want to clarify that I disagree. Money is a very-very poor proxy of value. A simple example to prove the disconnect can be found in the wages of doctors and teachers in Eastern Europe. Everyone claims that health and education have tremendous value; still, it is not reflected in the “price” of working in these areas.
Impact matters
I want to have an impact, a global impact. Preferably on real problems, like sustainability. What do you want?
The journey matters
I believe in the power of teams, continuous learning and hard work. We take actions, see the consequences and learn from them to improve our actions.
As I have only a single life, instead of work-life balance I consider work to be part of life. Work is not a side-project and it is definitely not my life as a whole. Work is an integral part of my life.
Leadership specific approach
- I believe in agreements.
- I love strong visions. I joined GitLab because I bought into its vision of a single Dev(Sec)Ops platform (and I love its strong values).
- I believe that my role as a leader is to enable others to shine in their own role and be a professional role model to follow.
- I believe in planning as Sun Tzu wrote about it, it should serve a goal.
- I don’t care about opinions; I care the least about my own opinion. Instead of opinions, I love facts and numbers. At the same time, I strongly believe in qualitative research if the researcher knows how to put their own opinions aside.
- I believe in hard disciplined work.
- Once I have a plan to research a topic and that research is done, I draw conclusions and come up with a decision very quickly. I like decisions because they allow us to move fast and don’t eat up unnecessary attention.
- It happens that I don’t notice open questions that need a bit of discussion or research. I always appreciate constructive questions.
- At the same time as I come up with decisions or proposals quickly, I often don’t share my thought process. I’m happy to share more if asked.
- I love to explore a topic through questions.
- I love to learn. I always try to form an opinion and say it out hoping that I’ll be proven wrong.
- I prefer to build on reality, instead of imagination. As a result, I expect others to tell me if I’m wrong, and I do the same.
- Related to the previous, I am direct, and I value directness. Many consider my style blunt.
- I don’t ask from others what I would not ask from myself; and I expect others to do the same.
Be prepared
- I like to express myself in surprising ways. I like to say jokes out of context.
- I love games, and I prefer to only take gaming seriously. I try to be able to laugh or cry on everything else.
- Many see me as very competitive. (These people don’t know my brother. He IS competitive. :))
- I am Hungarian, and this is reflected in how I write and speak English.
- Unlike English, Hungarian grammar does not have sexes. This makes no sense to me as there are no sexes in my native language. Sorry, I just can’t get my head around calling you he/she/it/them.
- Unlike in English, in Hungarian, we write the words as we speak them. This results in many typos that sound very similar to what I actually mean. I try to use tools to correct me here. Still, be prepared.
Topics I am always happy to chat about
- Philosophy: especially how can we apply its wisdom in our lives every day. Some examples to think about:
- Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living
- Nietzshe: if you’ve ever read “Thus spoke Zarathustra” and would like to discuss it, I’m happy to
- Kierkagaard: if you’ve ever read “Fear and Trembling” and have an idea about the beauty of faith, let’s chat!
- Balázs Török-Szabó: “Information has 3 layers a physical, a mental and an emotional layer. Experience can be composed into perception, meaning, and feeling. Will is built up of impulse, interest and intent. Experience and will are connected by thinking and act. This makes the cycle of work.” (my own translation)
- The current climate situation and what we can do about it
- Sports and healthy life in general