Mostafa Nageeb

This month marks my 1 year anniversary since I joined Zalando. Last year I took this picture during onboarding and sent it to a friend. She said “Embrace Change”, so I embraced the change and here I am.

People ask me about my experience. Zalando is one of those companies where the experience highly varies by team. When I was joining I asked 6 people working or have worked there. 3 said go, 3 said don’t. It was confusing.

I was concerned when I joined because of the setup. I am part of the team that builds developer tools and infrastructure. I was the first product manager in the department. My biggest concern was having a deeply technical manager who had no experience managing product people.

Because of Zalando’s Dedicated Ownership model, there is no separate product and tech orgs. Both tech and product report to the head of the unit, who can be a product person, a tech person, or something else. This might create friction if the leader is inexperienced as they might be biased towards the discipline from which they are coming. This fragmented setup also makes it harder to find other product people especially those one can learn from.

I was lucky that my manager was open minded, he gave me the freedom and trust to productize our offering and processes. I was also lucky to be in a mature team with mostly collaborative engineers and leads. This makes things easier.

I like it a lot in our department. I am learning a lot about infrastructure topics, I am dealing with strongly opinionated customers (developers). I also changed my perspective on some things like transparency and the role of desires and incentives.

On the flip side, if you worked in big companies before, Zalando sometimes feels like a teenager trying to understand adulthood. It doesn’t act like a big company, and not a small one either. This leads to inefficiencies and sometimes over reinvention of the wheel (every big company has an element of reinventing the wheel).

Of course this post should end on a high note. The high note is there is a strong desire to always make things better. And it is still impressive to have a 6-8 Billion dollars company out of Germany, which is way behind when it comes to tech.

Apparently Google is testing a new design for Calendar Web.

The most obvious changes are the font, using round instead of square corners for calendar entries and buttons, new iconography, and adding week number on any monthly view.

It seems similar to the recent changes in Keep. And it all seems like making it more “Material Design” like.

I wonder what is the metric for such a test. I can’t think of an obvious one. It is an enterprise product, so retention is tricky as the buyer is not the user and in general it is not easy to switch productivity suites.

I like it when people introduce me to new people. And I like introducing people to others.

One thing I learned recently is “mutual consent”. You have to get both people’s consent before you introduce them to each other.

Introductions are powerful thing. They can lead to magic things happening.

Today my thoughts are dry. Mostly due to lack of proper sleep and enough interesting conversations.

I am still going through “The coddling of the American mind”. The book has a good balance of anecdotes, scientific studies, and the author opinion. And I like how they point out to the core issues on the left and the right and the tactics of each. One good thing I realized from reading this book is that I finally understand the American right, left, conservative, liberal, progressive, and libertarian. Those terms were so confusing to me and it is the first time I am reading something and fully understanding it.

Holidays are coming which is leading to quite times. I like it.

I wanted to write about the struggles of being an extrovert. People think it is easier for us to get through life. While I agree being extrovert is a privilege, it introduces some struggles that are not easy to overcome.

Multiple people are questioning whether writing daily has any material value. I want to dedicate a post about this. Short answer: Yes. I just need to show my evidence which I have been sharing only privately. On the non-material side, someone I admire complimented my writings. It made my day. I didn’t expect this person to be reading what I write.

I also realized in the privacy conscious Europe, some people say they don’t want to click on my Zapier links on twitter and LinkedIn. They thought I do this for tracking. I actually don’t care about tracking. I do it out of laziness as I want to automate posting to twitter and LinkedIn.

When I started blogging I wanted to focus on the writing habit and not over optimize. Now that I am this far I want to improve things a little. As I am thinking what I need to do, here is the list I am thinking of, not sorted in any order

• Redirecting to https. I currently have https but I don’t redirect automatically.
• Improve the “who am I” page by adding more details.
• Move the tags cloud into a separate page.
• Move the search to the top, especially for mobile devices where the responsive theme makes it at the very bottom, defeating its purpose.
• Add to the email subscribers a piece of text at the top that they can reply to the email that contains the post, and I will get the reply (not many people know this).
• Maybe add a CV, or a professional page.

This is one of few cases where I am both the product manager and the developer. I am a bad developer and shouldn’t be relied on.

Having lived in both cities I get this question frequently. I don’t like it because the city experience is personal and differs from one person to the other.

There is also an inherent bias towards the city the person is currently living in. This bias can be caused by recency, or our tendency as humans to justify our decisions to not feel inconsistent.

That being said, I will lay out few points in which I compare both cities, or the way I typically answer this question. This way I can save a lot of time by just sending people a link.

Disclaimer

Some information might be wrong. I don’t assume liability of any information provided below. Always check the original sources and consult with experts.

Opportunities

Berlin ranks 2nd or 3rd compared to Paris. London has the biggest tech scene in Europe by any objective measure such as funding or number of startups. London is also the only European city I know of where the big 5 have major development offices.

The biggest company in Amsterdam is booking, the biggest in Berlin is Zalando. And in Berlin there is a 500 people tech office for Amazon where they do machine learning and robotics stuff.

I can argue in terms of jobs both cities are comparable. There are many good companies in the Netherlands nobody hears of. And in Berlin a big segment of the market doesn’t speak English. This makes both relatively equal in my opinion.

Visa, Work Premits, and Residence

Once you have a job offer from a Dutch company, you wait two weeks to get a work permit. Once you get it they notify the embassy in Cairo. You go without appointment and you get your visa. No questions asked. No documents other than your passport is required.

Germany is different. You need to struggle to get an appointment two months in advance (unless you know someone). You have to stamp a stash of documents from every Egyptian and German authority. Then you have to go to the embassy and wait outside for hours under the 40 degrees weather of Cairo to wait for your turn. You will be met with a rude intimidating Egyptian employee working for the embassy who will ask you all sorts of questions as if it is the day of judgement. After this you will wait 6 weeks for a response.

But but but, with Germany you get a blue card. This allows you to stay up to 3 months without a job. You can switch jobs easily. You can pause it and leave the country for a year and come back without issuing a new one. You get permanent residence if you learn German within two years, and without German within 3 years. And it is EU wide. You can use the same blue card to work in other places in EU.

But, Germany probably won’t give you any of this if you don’t have university certificate. This sucks. You can eventually get it but you have to convince the authorities you have the required experience and convince your company to be patient enough to wait for all this. Sadly I know multiple people who got their visa rejected because of lack of university certificate.

In Netherlands you get permanent residence after 5 years and must learn Dutch. I think switching jobs is easy. It is the Netherlands!

Money

I don’t think there are big differences between both. Amsterdam is more expensive but as a foreigner 30% of your income is not taxed for 5-7 years. There are some nuances to this but in general both cities balance out. If you don’t get the 30% exemption then Berlin is cheaper.

Public Transit

Amsterdam sucks. It is slow. It doesn’t come on time. It is full of tourists. Most of the places have one way to get there. And it is not wheelchair accessible.

Berlin is much better. There are multiple options for going anywhere. Most things come on time (except bus number 248).

Housing

Netherlands has one of the highest population densities in the world. It is a tiny country with 15 million inhabitants. This makes housing a nightmare. There aren’t many options and it is highly competitive. And if you are looking for Wheelchair accessible housing, good luck with that.

The situation in Berlin is much better. There are tons of new buildings, and it is affordable to anyone working in tech. Because also Berlin is bigger and more widely spread, you will find neighborhoods for every taste.

Healthcare

Both suck. Berlin sucks less. In Amsterdam doctors speak English with ease. In Berlin it is not the case. It is not easy to find good doctor that also speak English.

In Amsterdam your GP is a gate keeper. You can’t see a specialist without their approval. Even in the most obvious cases.

People

The Amsterdam people are more friendly than the Berliners. And here I wrote the Berliners because Germans tell me it is different outside of Berlin. The Dutch are way more relaxed. No one rushes you in the supermarket.

And it shows even in the driving habits. No one will honk at you for being slow crossing the street. In Berlin this happens all the time.

English is not a problem for the Dutch. Everyone speaks English including the people you expect the least like government employees.

Both are direct and express their opinion in a kind of in your face. But you will get used to it. Although I feel the Dutch are more pragmatic and don’t try to get it right from the first time. This I believe is strongly needed in an industry like ours.

The weather

Berlin weather is cold. Amsterdam is warmer but windy and rainy. Berlin is more predictable. Amsterdam you can have the four seasons in one day.

Wheelchair Accessibility

Berlin. Accessible public transit. More restaurants and cafes with accessible bathrooms. And it is flat. No canal bridges. No hills.

Closing

At the end it all goes down to one question: what are you optimizing for?

Back in the days, switching the lights off was a sign of going to bed. This no longer works. We go to bed and stay awake looking at our phones.

I moved my phone charger outside of the bedroom. I have been successful not bringing it back for months now. However, I still stay on my laptop and don’t go to bed.

So I recently bought this programmable power socket. I sat it to cut the power off my modem at 11pm, and bring it back in the morning. Now I just go to sleep when my internet is off.