Five or six years into a software engineering career, you start to see clearly which experiences actually shaped you versus which were just time served. For me, the biggest variable wasn't the tech stack or the product — it was the people leading the team.
Three team leads stand out. This is a small public thank-you to each of them.
Jamshid Shamansurov
My first serious lead. What he gave me that most early-career engineers don't get is simple but rare: freedom. Freedom to introduce Spring and Hibernate into the stack, to experiment, to make decisions and own them. He didn't micromanage — he trusted, and that trust accelerated my growth more than any tutorial or course. He now runs his own Java products company in Uzbekistan, which makes complete sense.
Michael Pascoe & Trajan Goldsworthy
My first Australian experience, and it set the bar high. They brought me properly into the Spring ecosystem — and specifically Spring JPA, which I still think is one of the most beautifully designed abstractions in the Java world. More than the technology, they modelled what a genuinely collaborative team looks like. Working with them made the transition to Australia feel like a leap forward rather than a step into the unknown.
Maxim Goncharov
Technically brilliant and professionally grounded in equal measure. Maxim ran a team building enterprise retail and hospitality products, and he had a gift for keeping people productive without burning them out — a balance that's surprisingly rare in product companies under pressure. He created genuine learning opportunities, pushed the team technically, and did it in a way that felt energising rather than exhausting.
I've lost touch with some of these people as careers and geographies diverge. But the influence they had on how I think about engineering, and how I now try to lead others, is permanent.
If you're early in your career and you find a lead like any of these — stick around. Learn everything you can. And when your turn comes, pay it forward.