Subscriber AMA: Books, Daily Routine, Career, and the Path to CTO

The first solo AMA: the questions were collected in the Book Cube channel and ranked by likes. The opening block covers work-life balance, a hundred-plus books a year, a home library of several thousand volumes, a summary written a few days after finishing a book, and the Telegram channel as external memory. A separate thread walks through the day hour by hour: a dog walk with conference talks playing, one interview slot, meetings with direct reports, and an hour or an hour and a half in the evening for problems, articles, and chapters of a book in progress.

The second block is about architecture and learning: why papers are now more informative than books and which classic papers to start with, why a CTO still does LeetCode and cloud infrastructure labs, how to prepare for system design, and why the skills grew fastest where he was personally responsible for production. The math that proved useful was not elegant probability theory but mathematical statistics: without a methodology for experiments, data-driven turns into fitting the desired result.

The career block: what led to the CTO role was diligence, curiosity, and luck rather than innate talent; where to grow after CTO; how compensation is built at senior levels and why a golden cage appears; why a staff engineer is defined by experience rather than a list of skills; which track leads to CTO and why a manager without technical grounding loses the engineers' trust.

The closing part is about organization: engineering productivity after the MTS True Tech Day talk moves from surveys to process and DORA metrics, and the topic itself is handed to another leader; SRE in big tech is a mix of dedicated engineers and ownership inside the teams; on a three-to-five-year horizon the plan is not a C-level seat with board politics but books, a PhD, and new episodes.