Taha Hussain

At Microsoft, I once joined a war room at 2 AM. The VP of Azure was sharing his Visual Studio screen. Debugging. Deep in the weeds.

He managed 21,000 engineers and delivered $40B in revenue.

But that night? He wasn’t a VP. He was an engineer.

Here's what I learned:

When things are on fire, great leaders don’t sit back.

They lead from the front.

They get their hands dirty.
They push forward.
They unblock.

But when it’s time to develop products?

They lead from the back.

They empower teams.
They clear blockers.
They let experts be experts.

Most people get this backward.

They micromanage the creative process—then vanish when things break.

But the best leaders are invisible when things go right, present when they go wrong.

Next time your fingers itch to step in, ask yourself:

Are you leading from the front or just getting in the way?

At Microsoft, a junior engineer spent 3 days solving a simple caching issue. Her manager knew he could do it in 10 minutes. But he didn't.

Do the math.

Most leaders would have jumped in. Solved it fast. Moved on.

But fast solutions come at a hidden cost: Growth debt.

Every time you step in, you rob your team of the lessons they need to grow.

Over time, that debt compounds.

Engineers stop thinking for themselves.
The team relies on you to ship.
Growth slows to a crawl.

The best engineering leaders don’t write the best code.

They code the best culture.

Next time your fingers itch to jump in, ask yourself:

Are you fixing the problem or adding to your team’s debt?

Stuff I know at 46, I wish someone warned me at 26:

1. Regret compounds faster than wealth.

Every “I’ll do it later” costs interest.

Regret doesn’t stop growing until you do something about it.

Start now. Before the bill arrives.

2. You can’t hustle your way out of bad health.

Your body keeps score.

Burn the candle at both ends, and you’ll burn through yourself.

Sleep is a strategy. Exercise is an edge. Eating well is insurance.

3. Your circle shrinks, and it should.

Quality beats quantity.

You only have room for a handful of people who truly matter.

The rest? Let them fade. Life isn’t a group project.

4. Chasing perfection creates more failure than progress ever will.

Perfection keeps you stuck. Progress moves you forward.

Focus on the next 1%, not the impossible 100%.

5. Time doesn’t care about your priorities, but it moves fast anyway.

Your career will wait. Your family won’t.

Don’t miss what you can’t get back.

6. The most valuable assets aren’t tangible.

You don’t own your reputation.
You can’t buy trust.
You can’t sell the energy you bring to others.

But these will always be worth more than what’s in your bank account.

7. Reinvention is survival.

Who you were at 26 won’t carry you at 46.

Jobs change. Dreams change. You change.

Don’t hold on to a sinking ship just because it’s familiar.

8. Your kids will copy the worst version of you first.

Not the best. The worst.

The way you argue. The way you quit. The way you avoid.

Fix yourself before you try to fix them.

9. The world doesn’t care about your excuses, but it listens to your results.

Bad breaks happen to everyone.

It’s not fair. But fair doesn’t move you forward.

Stop justifying why you can’t. Start proving why you can.

10. You’ll never do everything. But you can do something amazing.

I still have dreams I’ll never touch. That’s fine.

Pick one. The one that scares you. The one that matters.

And give it everything you’ve got.

11. You’re not late. You’re exactly where you need to be.

People panic when they feel behind.

But behind what? Behind who?

Focus on the race you’re running, not the ones you’re watching.

Here’s to the next 46 years.

The second half of the game is harder.

But you’ve got more tools now.

More scars. More wisdom. More clarity.

Make the next half count.

If this hit home for you:

✅ Follow me for lessons on life, leadership, and staying in the game.
🔄 Share it—someone else might need this wake-up call today.

The best years aren’t behind you. They’re just getting started.

I once had a senior engineer who rarely spoke in meetings. Sharp as hell, but quiet. We assumed he was disengaged. Maybe even checked out.

Then came the production outage.
Multi-region failure.
Chaos.

While we were all scrambling—arguing root cause, arguing each other—he opened his laptop, stared at Grafana, made one change.

Everything came back.

No speech. No swagger. Just uptime.

Later, over coffee, I asked why he never spoke up in those meetings.

He shrugged:

“You all had more to say. I was listening.”

I think about that a lot—how we reward loud confidence, when what we often need is quiet competence.

That’s why I built The Top Engineer Method. It has helped hundreds of engineers transform into senior engineers and higher.

If that sounds like you, start here: https://lnkd.in/gbZHGtfe

One of your engineers hesitates before pushing their code.

They double-check. Then triple-check.
Not because the code is bad...
But because they think 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 might be.

Nobody sees it.

They review everyone else’s pull requests.
They solve problems others can’t.
They get praised in meetings.

And yet, deep down, they’re convinced it’s luck.

So they stay quiet.
They don’t apply for promotions.
They don’t speak up when they should.

You won’t fix this with “You’re doing great.“
They won’t believe you.

Instead:

→ Show them the impossible things they’ve made possible.
→ Let them mentor—proof they know more than they think.
→ Remind them that growth always feels like fraud at first.

Imposter syndrome doesn’t go away with time.
It goes away with evidence.

Give them some.